Giving up meat is no problem at Fish and Fancy

VILLAS – The Lenten season is a good time to be a fish monger. As Christians abstain from eating meat on Ash Wednesday and all the Fridays of the 40-day sacrifice to honor Christ, fish becomes more than an occasional option and seafood restaurants experience a significant bump in business.
“Business increases significantly during the Lenten season,” said Bill Damiana, who owns Fish and Fancy, a seafood takeout in Lower Township that is in its 17th season. “Fridays, for example, we see a 100 percent increase in sales during Lent. We see a wide range of everything increasing in sales. Not just the basics like steamed shrimp and scallops, but the upscale meals that our chefs prepare.”
Head chef Mary Cluff and assistant head chef Kat Hill create weekly specials that have customers checking in regularly to see what they’ve come up with.
“Our two chefs create very interesting dishes week in and week out,” said Damiana, a Cold Spring resident who teaches special education at Lower Cape May Regional High School. “They also offer a variety of seafood pasta dishes with penne and linguini that you would not find at traditional seafood takeouts. And they come up with red and white sauces to please everyone’s palate.”
Damiana mentioned the baked stuffed grouper, a pan-seared sesame encrusted tuna in ginger teriyaki sauce, and a pan-seared pistachio encrusted mahi mahi topped with fruit salsa.
“You’re not going to walk into a seafood takeout and get that. When they brought me the mahi mahi, topped with mango, papaya and pineapple, it was just unbelievable how delicious it was,” he said.
Damiana, along with business partner Lisa Swecker, has steadily evolved the business from your basic shrimp cocktail and fried flounder takeout.
“What we want people to understand is that we’re more than just scallops, shrimp and crab cakes,” he said. “We have so many specials every week, and we get so many comments from people -- like they look forward every week to see what (Cluff and Hill) came up with, and it’s all in the $10 to $12 range. That’s what I get a kick out of.”
Those who don’t get a kick out of Lent are kids, who for the most part, aren’t necessarily thrilled about giving up popcorn chicken, burgers or pepperoni pizza during the 40-day fast.

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“When I was a kid, it was a combo thing. One week we’d have seafood, another week it was plain cheese pizza or pasta and a salad, but more often than not it was seafood,” said Damiana, who with his wife Kelli, have three children in area schools. “And I have to admit, when I was little, I was not a seafood eater. Boy has that changed. By how much, I can’t imagine, but we’ve added things to the menu for the younger crowd as well as the non-seafood eaters. For the kids we have popcorn shrimp and clam strips, which we sell a lot of, and eggplant parmigiana for some of the adults who don’t necessarily want seafood.”
Whatever is being caught locally – mostly scallops, flounder and clams right now – is sold at Fish and Fancy, and crabs, seabass, billfish, drumfish and bluefish, among others, will be added in summer. Shrimp, oysters and grouper are imported from their traditional waters.
Other than the obviously busy summer season, Damiana said Christmas is the only other dramatic increase in business in the offseason when Christians, mostly Italian, celebrate a traditional fish meal.
“The feast of the seven fishes is real popular and that keeps business up, but Lent is better, and it’s a good warm-up for spring. As we get to Easter, that’s when the second-homeowners start coming down more regularly to get their home ready for summer,” he said, “and then we’re really cooking.
“We are very excited about the business. We want to keep it going. We have a bond with our customers where they look forward to us being here. It’s almost like we have a responsibility to our part-time and our full-time residents to be there for them. That’s how seriously we look at this, we feel we have to be here for them,” Damiana said.
“We could have closed the doors and walked away anytime, but it’s hard to do when you enjoy your work and you have that bond with your customers. If you don’t care about the public, you don’t care about the product. We care about both.”

FISH AND FANCY
2406 Bayshore Road
Villas
886-8760
www.fishandfancy.com

Hours: Thursday and Sunday, 3 p.m. to 7 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. Hours will begin to expand in spring.

Customer’s Favorites: Best-sellers include the Baltimore-style crab cakes ($5.25), extra large fried shrimp (plain, $15.95/lb., or stuffed with lump crabmeat, $4.25), fried flounder ($9.95/lb.), crab imperial ($10.95 each), and the Seafood Sauté (extra large shrimp and scallops, lump crab, sautéed in a white wine garlic sauce, served over linguini, $11.95). Soups include white and red clam chowder, cream of crab, and Maryland red crab. Top-three-selling side dishes are the fried tomatoes, fried eggplant and sweet corn fritters.

Credit Cards: Visa/MasterCard, debit and credit.

Rob Seitzinger can be e-mailed at gazette@catamaranmedia.com or you can comment on this story by calling 609-624-8900, ext. 250.

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