Before the trailer full of buttery scallops, thick halibut steaks and succulent lobsters has even arrived, the devoted are already waiting.
They’ve been here in this parking lot attached to a suburban Halifax hardware store since 10 a.m., eyes hungrily scanning the road for their favourite fish truck.
At 10:10, Gary Nickerson and his colleague Marion Barron appear in a Ford F-150 with a grey trailer hitched to the back containing all manner of creatures pulled from the Atlantic Ocean.
The truck parks in Bayers Lake, an area crowded with big-box stores, hoping to catch shoppers’ eyes.
As customers form a queue, Nickerson drills the price list, scrawled in black marker, to his trailer door: Fresh Haddock $11.00/lb, Rock Crab Claws (Sold in 2 lb bags) $10.00 a bag, Cold Smoked Salmon $20.00/lb. Today, he’s also got mussels, salt cod, salmon portions, Icelandic shrimp and halibut steaks.
Atlantic Canadians know some of the freshest fish in the region can be bought off the back of a truck. Some of those fishmongers on wheels, like Nickerson, have stationed their mobile shops in the same spot for more than a decade. Others are more nomadic and advertise the day’s location on social media. With low overhead, these trucks remain one of the more affordable sources of fresh seafood.
“You guys have lobster today?” a man in line calls out, one hand stuffed deep in the pocket of his cargo pants, the other clutching a phone to his ear, as the person on the other end of the line dictates their order.
Nickerson tells him yes and then broadcasts his answer by placing a sandwich board on the sidewalk: “Fresh Caught Live Lobster $10.50.”
Nickerson, a tall, quiet man with a tuft of gray hair on his chin and a complexion that suggests he spends a lot of time outside, used to have his own fish plant in Clark’s Harbour, the community he grew up in. But the area is home to many lobster fishermen and the market was so saturated that 15 years ago, he couldn’t even turn a profit on lobster he was buying for $3 per pound.
And so he decided to set up a shop on wheels in Bayers Lake, an area crowded with big-box stores, hoping to catch the eye of people picking up groceries at Costco or gardening tools at Kent Building Supplies. The lobsters sold quickly and soon he started selling other crustaceans, mollusks and fish.
His supplier in Digby, in southwestern Nova Scotia, sends shipments of the day’s catch to a transport terminal in Dartmouth every morning where Nickerson receives it.
One of his regulars, five-year-old Brackley Snow (accompanied by his grandfather), jumps the queue and wanders into the trailer to ask for candy. Barron hands him a foil-wrapped chocolate, which he returns to the line to nibble.
When it’s Brackley’s turn to order, he calls out, “One scallop and it’d better be fresh!” triggering laughter from the others in line.
Barron, who sports a royal blue T-shirt that says GARYS FRESH SEAFOODS, is pushing the scallops hard today. “Doesn’t get any fresher than this! Gary likes to eat ‘em raw,” she tells customers.
Barron also shares that the scallops, which are sold in one-pound Ziploc bags for $25, cost $23.50 from the supplier. The margins here are thin. It pains Nickerson to charge what some of the brick-and-mortar fishmongers do, especially since many of his customers are seniors on fixed incomes.
Greg Shephard has been coming to buy seafood here for the last ten years.
In January, February and March, when it costs $15 per pound to procure lobster, Nickerson simply doesn’t sell them. “I don’t bother. It’s too expensive. People can’t afford ‘em,” he says.
But today, at $10.50 per pound, they’re an affordable luxury for retiree Greg Shephard. Shephard has been coming here for more than a decade and always orders a single lobster that he takes home and boils for supper.
“If it’s once a week, it’s once a week. I’m allowed – I’m old,” says the 74-year-old.
For most locals, lobster is more of a special occasion meal. At Christmastime and on New Year’s Eve, customers form snaking queues at 7 a.m. with coolers in tow to buy the meaty crustaceans. Nickerson sometimes sells out before the neighbouring stores have opened for the day.
Dawn Myer, who lives near the airport, will travel about 40 kilometres to pick up fish from Nickerson if she’s trying to impress out-of-towners.
She’s in the neighbourhood today dropping someone off for a medical appointment and decided to buy a few pounds of haddock – some to fry in butter and serve with a cooked vegetable and mashed potatoes, the rest to go in the freezer.
“My husband thinks he likes things better when they’re fresh but I have bought this and froze it and said to him, ‘Okay, let’s check.’ It’s still better frozen than what we’re supposedly buying fresh at our local grocery store,” she says.
Nickerson’s trailer, packed with giant coolers of fish, is remarkably odourless – a testament to the freshness of his product. And he says that’s his advantage over grocery chains, which often get their fish frozen and will store it for weeks before thawing it and selling it. “That’s what turns everybody off,” he says. “If it smells like fish, it’s not fresh.”
Since he started selling seafood from his truck, haddock has been Nickerson’s biggest seller, but as Halifax’s population has soared in the last five years through immigration and interprovincial migration, there has been a shift in what customers want.
Each week when Priyanka Chakraborty and Soumya Ghosh plan their meals, they visit Nickerson’s Facebook page to see what he has on offer. The pair grew up in Kolkata, where hilsa is the most popular fish, and have found halibut to be a good substitute. When they saw Nickerson had halibut steaks this week, Ghosh dreamed up the plan for dinner: marinating the fish in salt and turmeric before frying it in mustard oil and then putting it into a curry made with onions, cumin, coriander, chili, turmeric and cauliflower. As long as it’s not too spicy, it’s a dish their one-year-old daughter Kahon will eat.
Nickerson and Barron have a friendly rapport with all their regulars – they inquire about family members, make small talk about the NHL playoffs and discuss upcoming travel plans.
In anticipation of Nickerson going on vacation from mid-July to Labour Day, Oksana Blackburn has been making bigger-than-usual purchases so she can build up a freezer stash of fish to get her through the summer.
She was one of the first in line when Nickerson opened, and she picked up several bags of scallops and a few pounds of halibut steaks. She disappeared to get more cash and returned to buy five lobsters.
She’ll boil the lobsters in salt water and sear some of the scallops in bacon fat for dinner, prepare blackened halibut on the barbecue the next day, and throw the rest of her haul in the freezer.
Since she learned about Nickerson’s truck from her mother five years ago, her diet has shifted dramatically. She has cut out meat and instead spends about $600 each month at the truck, and has dropped about $1,000 when buying seafood for a party.
Barron furrows her brow in mock suspicion when Blackburn approaches the truck again to buy the lobsters. “What’re you doing? Reselling this stuff?” she asks jokingly.
“I would never do that because it’s too good. I just can’t keep it that long,” Blackburn says. “I just wish I could slow down my fish habit.”
