13 MAY 18-24, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | The Salmon Man THERE’S SOMETHING FISHY ABOUT DUFFY FANGANELLO’S TOWN & COUNTRY MARKET. BY MOLLY MARTIN Colfax Avenue is fi lled with characters of all kinds, and Duffy Fanganello is one of the good ones. “He’s just a sweetheart of a guy,” says chef Goose Sorensen, who ran Solera, a fi ne-dining restaurant, on Colfax for sixteen years. “He’s like a Muppet. He’s always got a goofy grin, and it always makes my day when I go in and talk with him.” Sorensen is one of the regulars at Town & Country Market, a store that’s been at the corner of East Colfax and Bellaire Street since at least 1948. Its history runs deep, and is fi lled with kegs of 3.2 beer, collard green plant starters and commercial fi shing trips in Alaska. And Fanganello is the man who ties them all together. For Solera’s entire run, and during So- rensen’s time at the long-gone Mel’s and Starfi sh in Cherry Creek before that, he purchased salmon for the restaurants from Fanganello’s two-in-one business. “It’s kind of a weird spot,” admits Sorensen, an avid fi sherman himself. “But you’re supporting a local guy who has been doing this for years, and it’s really great fi sh.” The Fanganello family has deep roots in Denver, too. Duffy’s great-grandparents left Italy and settled here in the early 1900s. His father, Joseph, was raised in the Northside. “He grew up very poor and, through a mir- acle, made it through all of the trials of life, went to Regis University and the University of Colorado for law school, and became an attorney,” Fanganello says. His mother, JoAnne, was originally from Kansas City and came to Colorado to attend Loretto Heights College. “All the Regis boys dated the Loretto Heights girls,” Fanganello says. Technically, he was born in his mother’s hometown, but was there “just for a couple of days,” he jokes. “But I can make great barbecue. It’s in the DNA.” Also in his DNA is a love of food. “My father was always cooking things like fruitti de mar. He just always had a lot of interest in making good food for people,” Fanganello recalls. He also remembers being taken out to dinner by his grandfather as a kid, when he was introduced to fi ne dining at Lafi tte’s in Larimer Square, in the spot now occupied by Tamayo. “He’d take me out and say, ‘Get whatever you want.’ And I’d say, ‘I’ll take the steak and lobster and escargot and frog legs.’ I was never shy about seafood and always loved seafood,” Fanganello says. “I enjoyed food so much, and knew I was going to be a foodie in some capacity. I just didn’t know what it was.” He spent his childhood and teen years traversing a Colfax that looked very differ- ent from the way it appears today. His fi rst restaurant job was at the Firefl y Cafe, in the building that would later become Solera and was most recently home to Street Feud for just under a year. The nearby space that is now the Abbey was a fl ower shop where he bought his prom corsage; the building across from the Owl Saloon was a photography studio where he got his senior portrait taken; the Green Dragon dispensary was a Dolly Madison ice cream shop. He was also a regular at Town & Country. His uncle Leonard had been a soda delivery man in the early ’70s. The store was on his route, and when the owners decided to sell in 1972, Uncle Leonard bought the place. “I would work there as a child, and I would also go there with all of my friends on our bikes and get candy and ice cream and peanuts,” Fan- ganello recalls, describing the shop as a kind of dollar store that catered to the community. For decades, Town & Country’s biggest seller was kegs of 3.2 percent ABV beer — at the time, the only booze that could be sold in convenience stores and on Sundays, when liquor stores were closed. “It was big for eighteen- to twenty-year-olds,” Fanganello adds. It was also the only alcohol permitted in nearby City Park. Plants and fl owers have been a longtime staple of Town & Country’s business, too. “City Floral has been around just as long, but that was for the rich white people. Town & Country was for everyone else,” Fanganello says, noting that it became known in the Black community as the place to get collard green starters and among Greek families as the spot to get onion sets. Town & Country even made an appearance in a video shot on 8mm fi lm by Paul McCart- ney during a visit to Denver in 1967. In it, the sign out front advertises peat moss for sale. “Maybe Paul ordered it,” Fanganello muses. In 1985, during summer break between his junior and senior year at East High School, Fanganello and some friends decided to go on an adventure that would change his future, as well as the future of Town & Country. The group of teens hopped in one of their parents’ cars and headed to Alaska. “When we got into Anchorage, I was able to get a job as a commercial fi shing boat crew member on a boat that was in a native Alaskan village of 97 people,” Fanganello recalls. “I went onto a boat that was run by, like, the godfather of the village. He was an elder. He’d fi shed since his childhood, and he taught me a lot. I was really lucky to be on his boat and to learn so much about the fi shing process. And I was a really good fi sherman, too. I was young and strong.” He’d never fi shed while growing up in Denver, but “when I got the chance to go to Alaska, it fell into my lap — this opportunity, the most delicious thing I’d eaten in my life,” he says. “Also, this interest in the sea and water and the ocean and fi sh. I like fi sh.” And so he went back to Alaska to fi sh the summer after his senior year. And the next, and the next. “It was kind of like a summer camp,” Fanganello describes. “Fly to Alaska, go to the same village, hang out with the same young kids, and fi sh. And every year I would bring some fi sh back and we would have a big barbecue in the fall. All my friends and family would come over, and we’d have a big celebration, a homecoming, and everyone would say, ‘This is the most incredible King salmon that I’ve ever had.” One year, he decided to ship 500 pounds of fi sh back to Denver, where he sold it to Wild Oats, a new grocery store in Boulder. The next year, “it was a bunker fi shing season,” he recalls. “The bounty of the sea.” So he used the money he’d made to buy boxes and gel packs and, with a go-ahead from the elders in the village, arranged to send even more fi sh directly to Colorado — 26,000 pounds of it. “That’s also when I started setting up my uncle’s Town & Country as the place for my guys to receive the fi sh and have a place to handle it,” he says. “And that was the begin- ning of Alaskan Salmon Company.” That year and ever since, the wholesale company has sold to a list of restaurants that reads like a roundup of the local culinary scene’s greatest hits, from long-gone places like Theatre Cafe, Mataam Fez, Tante Louise, Normandy, Cliff Young’s, Avenue Grill and Solera — in the building where he’d worked years before — to the still-serving Brown Palace, Barolo and Mizuna. “What a community you start when you’re just the guys that have fi sh. We ex- posed Denver to the wild fresh salmon in- dustry. We were in our early twenties. We didn’t know exactly what we were doing. We didn’t even have scales,” he admits. “We were like, how much do you think it weighs? How much do you want to pay for it? We were pulling it out of the back of a VW Rab- bit” — one of many ragtag delivery vehicles that Fanganello has used over the years. “He’d show up to Mel’s in a Toyota pickup.” Sorensen recalls. “The thing barely ran, but he’d show up with a cooler with fi sh in it.” Eventually, “we matured,” Fanganello says, and the business did, too, gaining a lot of loyal wholesale customers along the way. “When you have that much coming in and you’ve eliminated the middle man, your price point is so attractive to ev- CAFE continued on page 14 FIND MORE FOOD & DRINK COVERAGE AT WESTWORD.COM/RESTAURANTS Duffy Fanganello went on his fi rst salmon fi shing trip in Alaska in 1985. EVAN SEMÓN
