JOE COLEMAN

In 1980 Joe Coleman of Wheeling, West Virginia, went to Boston and set sail on a fishing trawler. “I did every job you could do on that boat,” he says. “I stood watch, I swabbed the deck, I hauled ’em in and stacked them in the hold. I followed the fish from the water to the pier to the auction. Then I rode in the front seat of the truck that carried the fish back to Wheeling. I trimmed it, I breaded it, I fried it, I made a fish sandwich from it, and I ate it.”

The fisherman pictured behind Joe Coleman is his father, who started the business.

You can be sure the sandwich Joe Coleman ate that day was delicious. His seafood shop in the city’s century-old Centre Market House has earned national renown for the simple perfection of its fish sandwich: two pieces of soft white bread holding a cluster of steaming-hot fillets. The golden crust on the fish is cracker meal, thin as parchment. When you break through it, your sense of smell is tickled by a clean ocean perfume, and as the pearl-white meat seeps its luscious flavor, you are tasting a brand-new food, like no other fish sandwich ever created.

Joe is the third generation of Colemans to work in the Wheeling market. His grandfather started selling chickens there prior to World War I. When the chicken business nose-dived in 1914, his grandfather bought a retail/wholesale fish business in the market. He sold oysters from Maryland, lobsters from Maine, and fish from the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean. After World War II, he came up with the idea of selling sandwiches of Lake Erie pickerel. But by the 1960s, lake fish was growing scarce, so Joe’s father, Raymond Coleman, switched to frying North Atlantic pollock. He also invented the term Canadian white fish for a blander alternative to the ocean-sweet pollock that is used in Coleman’s traditional sandwich. “Canadian white fish is really just cod,” Joe Coleman explained to us. “But too many people associate cod with the taste of cod liver oil. When my father renamed it, sales took off!”

Joe Coleman likes to remind people that he runs a fish market, not a restaurant . . . despite its being the most popular eating place in West Virginia’s northern panhandle. Every meal he serves is presented in a bag. Those who want tartar sauce or cocktail sauce must place an order for it, at ten cents or fifteen cents per ounce, respectively, and they must apply it to the fish sandwich themselves. “Charging separately for tartar sauce was my dad’s idea,” Joe told us. “He believed that it wasn’t right for those who don’t want it to carry the cost for those who do. Out-of-towners sometimes ask me, ‘Why isn’t your fish sandwich on a nice bun?’ I will tell you why. I don’t believe in buns any more than I believe in tartar sauce. What I believe in is quality fish.”