EATING OUR FEELINGS
playground visit is a ritual add- ed for Piper, who is excited and hasn’t yet figured out that after the move she won’t be playing with her friends Riley and Lou- isa every day. (Hopefully she doesn’t read this.) Feldman’s go-to is an every- thing bagel with sable — which, if you don’t live some- where coastal where it’s avail- able fresh, is the deli name for smoked black cod. Piper, on the other hand, gets a plain bagel with cream cheese. She isn’t about to try anything fishy or oniony. She’s not an adventur- ous eater — yet. (As the father of a picky eater, I discuss this with everyone.) “Neither was I,” says Feld- man. “You couldn’t get me to eat anything until my late teens … [but] when I was in college and I was at a restaurant, it was unfathomable to say I didn’t like tomatoes or mushrooms if I wanted to be taken seriously.” For the first 12 years of Feld- man’s life, his father was a waiter. Every birthday was celebrated in a restaurant, and Feldman subsisted on veal cut- lets with butter and lemon. It wasn’t the food that inspired his lifelong connection to hospi- tality, though, but the vibe: the sense that restaurants are spac- es for play, the camaraderie of his dad’s co-workers, a bartend- er named Peanut who fixed him Shirley Temples. His first restaurant job, at 13, was at Bagels And in An- napolis, Maryland. At home, in a non-practising Jewish family where his parents didn’t cook much, bagels with smoked sable were a staple.
The thin, silky slices that both sable and salmon yield are possible because of the fishes’ anatomy.
Historically overfished and now strictly managed through a quota system, black cod is about 40% more expensive than salmon — most people’s go-to smoked fish for sandwiching into a bagel. Lox is only one form of smoked salmon, a category so popular globally that produc- tion is industrialized, making it widely available. But the farther you live from an ocean or a major city, the less likely you are to find the much rarer sable — global production is 18,000 to 30,000 tonnes, unlike salmon, of which we harvest over three million tonnes, most of it farmed. This is a shame because this fish is a true delicacy. Like salmon, sable retains its den- sity after it is smoked, allow- ing eaters to cut slices of any thickness. (The other fish suit- able for smoking that you can find in Canada — including
whitefish, catfish, goldeye, and trout — are smaller species and yield much thinner fillets that tend to flake when removed from the carcass; the same kind of luscious density isn’t possible.) After smoking, the pale white fillet turns a golden-mimosa shade of yellow. Its high fat content (the fish uses oil in its muscles to regulate depth, un- like most fish, which have an air bladder) gives sable a flavour close to yellowtail. If you tasted it, you’d under- stand why Feldman doesn’t gussy up his sandwich with anything but sable and cream cheese. Adding more flavours would be like pouring ketchup on a rib-eye. While Piper is “not in the world of smoked sable yet,” the deli ritual completes the cir- cle, linking meals with his child to the meals of his childhood.
58 AUTUMN 2026
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