Smoke on the Waterfront

A cultural icon of Lake Superior cuisine shares its story, recipes, and techniques. A port city where shipping, the fur trade, hunting, and fishing—and infamously long, cold winters—have made the preserving and preparing of meat a singular art, Duluth, Minnesota, was uniquely well suited for the Northern Waters Smokehaus when Eric Goerdt launched it in 1998. Fresh off a stint in Sitka, Alaska, where he’d learned a method of smoking fish called kippering, Goerdt set up shop, and soon what had started as a small sandwich counter expanded into a downtown mainstay with a worldwide trade in its signature offerings, all manner of meat and fish smoked and cured on site. A celebration of the Smokehaus’s singular contribution to the region’s cuisine, Smoke on the Waterfront brings two decades of experience to the table, laying out for food-smoking devotees and for home cooks the stories, recipes, and techniques that have made the establishment a beloved fixture of Third Coast culture.