In the fourth section of his mega-bestselling memoir Kitchen Confidential, the late author and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain describes a day in his life as a chef at Brasserie Les Halles in New York City. Just after noon, during the thick of the lunch rush, Bourdain receives a call on the kitchen phone. On the other end of the line, an unnamed salesman wants to sell him some caviar.
Bourdain begins the conversation with a pleasant tone, “lulling him into the bear trap,” as the vendor lists off the “other chefs who buy his fine smoked salmon, sturgeon, trout and fish eggs.” When Bourdain has had enough, he cuts the man off, ripping him in a profanity-laden admonishment for calling at peak hours before slamming the phone back onto its cradle.
• • •
When he first read the book, Lewis Shuckman knew who the mystery caller was. “He didn’t mention me by name, but he was talking about me,” said Shuckman with a chuckle.
Shuckman was in the early days of trying to sell restaurants on his newest product: paddlefish caviar. Despite being the third-generation proprietor of Shuckman’s Fish Co. & Smokery in Louisville, he was the first one in his family to market the product. It required hustle to get people to even try his Kentucky caviar. His cold calls went unanswered. When he marched into restaurants to pitch chefs face-to-face, he was shown the door. Good caviar came from overseas, they insisted.
“When I first got into this thing many years ago, they laughed at me,” he remembered. “They thought Kentucky caviar was bean soup in a jar.”
Shuckman caught a break in the early aughts when he was invited to contribute some of his product to a caviar tasting put on at the Seelbach Hotel by Chefs Jim Gerhardt and Mike Cunha. Served alongside high-dollar, imported Belugas, Osetres, and Sevrugas, Shuckman’s freshwater paddlefish roe stole the show.
“It proved to me and everybody in the food business that, ‘Hey, this guy is playing with a full deck,’ ” he said. “That was a big break. It made it a whole lot easier to go to chefs and restaurants and demonstrations.”
A reporter present at the tasting heard that Shuckman was struggling to get his product into kitchens and gave him a scrap of paper on which Bourdain’s phone number was scrawled. This guy might buy your caviar, the journalist told him. Shuckman tried the number soon after. No answer. He tried again. Nothing. Finally, he decided to call when he knew the chef would be in the kitchen: lunch. Bourdain answered. Bourdain, in his way, declined.
The Seelbach event earned Shuckman entrée in several local restaurants. A 2003 writeup in The New York Times and subsequent feature on Good Morning America at the behest of Kentuckian Diane Sawyer solidified Shuckman’s Caviar as a mainstay in the marketplace.
“Just the fact that Diane Sawyer picked up on it, the love for her state … that right there gave me cold chills,” Shuckman said.
• • •
Kentucky’s location gives it an advantage in the production of domestic caviar. Paddlefish—toothless and prehistoric—are native to the Mississippi River watershed and commonly found in surrounding lakes. American caviar has a lower salt content than its imported counterparts, giving the flavor room to shine.
John T. Edge, an author and host of TrueSouth on the SEC Network, first met Shuckman more than two decades ago at the recommendation of mutual acquaintances.
“There’s Lewis in this shop doing things like marinating trout in Julian Van Winkle’s whiskey, back when you could use his whiskey for that sort of thing, and selling caviar before other people realized the splendors of American caviar,” Edge said.
Edge tried the caviar, fell in love with its “clarity,” and has been purchasing it for his annual New Year’s Eve celebrations ever since. He noted that it’s the source and the story, as much as the actual taste, that keep him coming back.
“We have this notion of caviar being something elitist and something foreign, but we have these T-Rex creatures of the depths that are Southern and course Southern waters,” he said. “I was interested in eating caviar that I could get from my backyard.”
Shuckman said he works with a single family that fishes Lakes Barkley and Cumberland for paddlefish. They process the stock for him, extracting the eggs before screening, rinsing, salting, drying and refrigerating them. It’s a comparatively small operation.
• • •
Nearly three hours west of Louisville in Livingston County, David Fields relies on a network of fishermen from the surrounding area for his America’s Best Caviar.
“These fish are native to the Mississippi and its tributary, so anything that Mississippi touches, there’s a high chance that these fish are going to be in there,” Fields said. “These fish travel. They’re a federal fish. Kind of like a duck is a federal bird because they migrate—well, these fish do the same thing. They can tag them in Missouri and then [they] get caught here. They go all the way to North Dakota via the Mississippi River. We’ve actually taken in some fish that have been tagged in South Dakota.”
Fields, a Mayfield native, took a more circuitous route into the caviar business than Shuckman. After years of teaching physical education and coaching high school basketball, he became a public-school administrator in Murray. He enjoyed working with kids but felt called to pursue a new challenge.
“I loved what I did and everything, but I was looking for something just a little bit more … this was right up my alley,” he said.
In 2012, he purchased Lake City Fish Market in Grand Rivers. That the market happened to have its own small caviar business was, initially, an afterthought.
“I really didn’t know that this was out there,” he said of Kentucky caviar. “Had I known, I probably would have started much earlier.”
The caviar arm of the operation turned out to be a perfect fit for Fields. He enjoyed getting to work with the commercial fishermen on the front side, his hands in the middle (Fields processes the roe himself), and restaurants on the back end.
“I like the fact that I’m sitting here making something that chefs use,” Fields said. “It’s something that they use to make their dishes better or more extravagant.”
Among them is James Beard Award nominee Sara Bradley, who uses America’s Best in myriad ways at her popular Paducah restaurant, freight house. A diner might find Fields’ caviar folded into a butter sauce, atop deviled eggs, alongside French onion crème fraiche, or served on its own. Its unique flavor and freshness are unmatched, Bradley said.
“It is the most natural, the most unprocessed process that I’ve seen,” she said. “The fish comes off the boat, [Fields] guts it, takes the eggs inside. He processes them; he packs them away; and that’s it. From the minute the fisherman pulls up with live fish to the time that it goes in the tin, it’s nothing. It’s so quick.”
Like Shuckman, Fields got a boost not only from chefs like Bradley and word of mouth, but from media. NBC Nightly News visited Grand Rivers in 2019, and the retail side of business boomed. In 2022, Fields sold his fish market to focus solely on the caviar business, and while annual production and sales are weather dependent, he estimates that between wholesale and retail orders, he sells more than 10,000 combined pounds of his paddlefish and hackleback sturgeon caviar per year.
All industries face challenges, and at present, Fields worries that the number of young people entering commercial fishing won’t keep pace with the demand. While he was sourcing stock from about 20 fishermen per day at one point, that number has been more than halved (“I’m 52 years old, and, man, I don’t know if there’s anybody younger than me that brings me fish, to be honest,” he said). But for now, there are enough local suppliers to maintain a tight, local focus. Specialization has yielded ardent followings for Shuckman and Fields while vaulting their home state into the domestic caviar vanguard.
“We’re trying to focus on Kentucky and what we have to offer,” Shuckman said. “We’re not trying to be everything to everybody.”