14 MAY 18-24, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | LETTERS | CONTENTS | erybody. That’s why it’s so popular, because it’s direct, and that’s refl ected in the cost. I’ve always liked that part of it — that we can give the fi sh to people at an affordable price and have it be direct from the source and so fresh. It’s win-win.” Sorensen agrees. “It’s a really good prod- uct, and it’s priced right,” he says. “There are a lot of shysters in the purveyor business. And it’s a hard business — plus you’ve gotta deal with asshole chefs. But Duffy is one of the most jolly, nice human beings I know. If there was ever a problem, he was one of those purveyors that would fi x it right away.” But while Fanganello’s fi sh company was doing well, Town & Country was struggling. Uncle Leonard, who was an RTD bus driver, hurt his back and was on disability. And busi- ness was dwindling. “The neighborhood was not great,” Fanganello notes, and grocery stores had completely taken over that part of the market’s business. “There was no revenue coming in. He needed to sell.” In 2002, Fanganello bought the store. “I kind of tried to shut it down. You couldn’t go there all winter,” he recalls. “Then the spring came and someone left a note that said, ‘I need collard greens, I’ll be back tomorrow.’’’ So the salmon man reluctantly started learning about plants. “Pretty much, the customers demanded that the market stay open,” he adds. Customers demanded something else, too. “Mom’s book club friends started coming in and saying, ‘We want a half-pound of fi sh,’” Fanganello recalls. “I’m used to selling half a ton of fi sh!” But he couldn’t disappoint his mom’s friends. “Then they told a friend, and they told a friend, and they told a friend...” Soon, the Alaskan Salmon Company at Town & Country became a go-to for a group of neighborhood insiders. “We have a few thousand people that come in here now that are all linked by six degrees of separation or less,” Fanganello notes. Over his years as Colfax’s resident fi sh- monger, Fanganello’s own story has taken many turns. He spent three years in the early ’90s commuting back and forth between Denver and Seattle, where he took fi sh to Pike Place Market as a commercial fi sh broker. He once pretended to be a journalist in order to say hello to Governor Roy Romer, his old neighbor and the father of his high school best friend, who was in Seattle with soon-to- be-president Bill Clinton on a campaign stop. He got married and bought the house directly behind Town & Country. “Always in the village, the house was near the boat. And I wanted the house near the boat,” he says. As a favor to a friend who was trying to get his footing as a stockbroker, Fanganello invested a small amount of his fi sh company profi ts and made enough in the dot.com boom to buy the adjacent corner property. He and his wife had a daughter, Phoebe, “the fi sh princess,” he jokes. At the age of forty, he was diagnosed with lymphoma and underwent two years of chemotherapy. He beat cancer, but got divorced — though his ex still lives in the house across the street, and the two, who shared their fi rst kiss at a Halloween party when she was in seventh grade and he was in sixth (and was dressed up as a Girl Scout), remain close friends. Then Fanganello’s businesses, like every other, had to navigate COVID. “That’s really been a transformative situation,” he says. “When that happened, I was doing really good with the wholesale business. We were cranking it out, and it just collapsed. It was otherworldly.” His daughter came back from college to wait out the pandemic at home. “She was working at the market, and that was a huge change, to have that young, female energy,” he recalls. She implemented some new ideas, like offering pre-made poke bowls, which customers loved. In the midst of the lockdown, one Town & Country regular posted on Next Door, encouraging people to support the strug- gling market. “They heard, and they came in,” Fanganello says. “We had all these new customers. I was tripping out! We had a line. We had a line at Town & Country!” While the line eventually disappeared, the business had been reinvigorated. Although Fanganello’s fi sh adventures began in Alaska, he hadn’t been on a commercial fi shing trip there for three decades when an old friend called last year. “He said, “My son-in-law is going to run my sister ship. Will you go on the boat with him? He hasn’t fi shed a lot. Will you go show him how to fi sh?’” Fanganello recalls. “I was like a veteran greenhorn, and it was scary to think about.” He couldn’t pass up the opportunity, though. So in June, “I got on a plane and fl ew up,” he says. “I remember landing in the little airplane on the dirt runway and getting trucked out in the back of the pickup truck. There’s a big bulkhead that they’ve built since I had been there, and I looked over the side, and the tide was low and the boats were like 35 feet down there. ‘Here’s the ladder. Take the ladder,’ they said. And I was like, ‘Holy fucking shit.’” But he climbed down the old, rusty ladder, “to these little tiny boats in this giant ocean,” he recalls. “I got onto the boat and I met the kid and I saw my friends. We untied the lines, we went out onto the fi shing grounds, and the kid was like, ‘What am I supposed to do?’ I told him, ‘Put the wind on the right side of your cheek and head that way.’ And we went out on the grounds, and I knew what I was doing.” One near-death experience later — on a day so good that the boat was overloaded with fi sh when the weather suddenly turned — he wrapped up the 28-day-long adventure. Fanganello isn’t sure that he’ll ever go fi shing for the season again — “It gets so sketchy sometimes,” he admits — but he’s hooked on Town & Country. “I think it will become world-famous, like Casa Bonita,” he jokes. While some things at the market have changed in the past few years, many haven’t. The plants are out for spring now, and custom- ers stop by, grab plastic trays and load them up with herbs and tomatoes and chiles for their gardens. Inside, scallops and tilapia are stocked in a refrigerator that now also holds ground yak, raised by the father of a customer who started a farm in Crested Butte. There’s also a yellow submarine in the middle of the store — not a reference to the market’s fl eeting Beatles-adjacent moment, but a remnant of the Armory in Greeley. “When the bar went out of business, it was being auctioned off,” Fanganello says. “I was like, ‘This the only chance you’re gonna have to own a submarine.’ It’s been there for fi fteen years, in the way of everything.” These days, it’s covered with his dad’s copies of the New Yorker. “Someday I’ll prob- ably fi nd a way to put it outside, and Town & Country will become the place with the yellow submarine,” he adds. In a mostly empty display case, there’s a sign that reads, “Everything on this shelf $2,” near a random mishmash of items that includes a can of black beans, two bottles of Heinz 57 and pre-made margarita mix. The biggest changes have been in the fi sh business. “I’m pretty aware of the sustain- ability aspect, and that we try to keep the lowest carbon footprint that we can, which means you get the fi sh from as close to you as you can, and you keep it in the ground as much as you can,” Fanganello explains. Sustainable fi shing involves a complex collection of factors, from climate change to over-fi shing to farmed fi sh, and he con- siders them all. “I’m the number-one guy that doesn’t want to lose the fi sh,” he says. “That’s my biz. We need the fi sh. We’re all worried about it.” Today, he adds, “we work with Alaskan fi shers and wild fi sheries in the summer, and then we work with ocean-based fi sh farms in the winter,” all of which are sources he’s built relationships with over the decades. “I think that it’s important to have a knowledgeable fi shmonger who can keep you pointed in the right direction of sustain- ability and wholesomeness,” he says. “Fish that is going to be available next year and the year after and the year after, that is fresh, that you can afford.” He’s been that fi shmonger for so many years, even as other local, independent fi sh companies have been bought out by bigger outfi ts. “They call, but I hide,” Fanganello says. “There were some rough, rough years,” he admits. “Cancer, divorce, the economy. I was ready to quit at times. But it’s all about perseverance. It’s a small miracle for this little place to be able to sustain itself.” And Town & Country is poised to con- tinue into the future, possibly with his daughter, who is graduating from college this spring, at the helm one day. “I feel like I’ve created the foundation. I’ve got the property, I’ve got the adjacent property, I’ve held on to the liquor license,” Fanganello concludes. “I think it’s cool to keep doing what we’re doing. You want some collard greens? We’ve got some collard greens. You want salmon? We’ve got salmon. But it would be cool to add some more, too. Like, you want some beer? We’ve got some beer...” Town & Country Market and Alaskan Salmon Company are located at 4300 East Colfax Avenue and open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. Learn more at alaskansalmon.com. Cafe continued from page 13 Town & Country Market has been serving the neighborhood since at least 1948; Fanganello added retail sales for his mom’s book club friends. EVAN SEMÓN MOLLY MARTIN
