Looking for a shore thing on Black Lake
HAMMOND — Black Lake, St. Lawrence County's largest lake, is a fisherman's paradise that parallels the St. Lawrence River inland between Hammond and Morristown.
Cabins, cottages and campgrounds line the shore one after another, with the occasional mom and pop convenience store that sells necessities like soft drinks and marshmallows and lures and fish bait.
What began as the camp store at McLear's Cottage Colony and Campground many years ago recently expanded to include a modest restaurant called the Fish Bone Café.
The name is catchy and so is the menu. For lunch or dinner you can get the One-Eyed Wiggler Sizzle Steak Sandwich, the Lonesome Bay Buzz Bait Burger or a Boring Ham or Turkey Sandwich along with a host of cleverly captioned seafood selections that we sampled.
Particularly clever, on the breakfast menu, is the Big Island Buzzard Bait Bowl, "Home fries, onion, pepper and ham all slopped together and topped with scrambled eggs and cheese" for $7.49, and the Hangover, "A bowl of chilled chicken fat and a glass of lukewarm water with a little hair of the dog," priced at "$Pre-paid."
The best one was the WARNING notice: "NOT FOR DAINTY, PERSINICKETY, OR PICKY, LIGHT EATERS. If you fall into this category, we suggest you try a nice fancyassed restaurant somewhere else."
Hey, we like 'em fancy and we like 'em basic, as long as the food they serve is good.
Things started off pretty well with a delicious homemade "wedding bell soup" ($1.50 a cup), their take on Italian wedding soup, nicely flavored and loaded with little pieces of chicken and great-tasting miniature meatballs. A bonus was tiny round pasta the size of bbs that we pegged for Israeli couscous, something you'd find in one of those fancy-type restaurants.
We figured the chili would have been great, too, except they were out of it.
You can get nachos and cheese anywhere, but only at the Fish Bone can you get Fish Scales, homemade "tater chips" and cheese.
We intended them as an appetizer — and I think the kitchen knew that — but they arrived along with our main course, cold and soggy, and I'm not sure they'd have been impressive even if they'd been warm. The quarter-inch-thick slices of potato didn't really fall into the "chips" category, and they were covered in some kind of nondescript batter, served with mildly spicy jarred nacho cheese.
The Double Dee ($5.99) is a grilled chicken sandwich, "A supple, voluptuous butterflied chicken breast."
Get it? Took a minute, but we did.
It was nicely marinated, perfectly grilled, still juicy, served on a very nice kaiser roll with mayo and lettuce. Simple and delicious.
Their signature sandwich, the Black Laker ($7.49), consisted of two overly thick pieces of restaurant-baked white bread with overly deep-fried perch in between, fancied up with some kind of special sauce, plus lettuce, tomato and a square of American cheese.
Just too much going on to appreciate the mild, delicate perch.
The Almighty ($7.49) is billed as a hefty fish sandwich, and that it was. Freshly breaded haddock was the hefty fish in this case, similar to the perch in that it was deep-fried way past golden brown to very dark brown, practically destroying any trace of moistness in the fish.
A kaiser roll made it more manageable than the inch-thick white bread, but the mayo, tomato and special sauce made the fish want to squeeze its way out of the bun as you unhinged your jaws to bite into it. Even a few pieces of crisp bacon and a slice of American cheese didn't help hold the Almighty together.
Not sure if the over-fried fish was caused by an overdue oil change in the fryer or an overworked cook who let the fish swim in the hot grease too long.
How could you eat at a fish camp and pass up the Fish Pail Shore Dinner ($10.99)? (They were out of our first choice, Bucket of Fish Balls, bite-sized pieces of fish, deep-fried).
Everything in the shore dinner, which was served in a cute little galvanized bucket, was a deep-fried commercial product: tiny popcorn shrimp, chicken thingies (think Chicken McNuggets), baby crab cakes, butterflied shrimp fried to an unappetizing dark brown, two small onion rings and plenty of fries.
Chicken thingies were the best, especially when enhanced by a yummy plum sauce from a squeeze bottle on the table. Baby crab cakes were the worst, some kind of awful tasting mush, but maybe that's just our persnickety tastes.
A little square of pineapple upside down cake was included as a sweet treat at the end of the meal.
There are nightly specials like pot roast, chicken and biscuits, meat loaf and roast turkey. Thursday is Italian night and there's a Friday night fish fry.
Total tab for four came to $42, and that included a round of self-served bottled sodas. There are no alcoholic beverages available.
If we had been at a fancyassed restaurant, we probably would have complained about the service. Our waitress was friendly enough, but each course came to the table without the previous one being cleared. We had to ask for extra napkins. She brought the check and plopped it down among the dirty dishes (actually, those red plastic baskets).
But we weren't. We were at the Fish Bone Café, a casual, informal campground family eatery.
If I'd been camping and fishing with the family all week long, eating warmed up store-bought stuff and s'mores day after day, I'd probably look forward to a good One-Eyed Wiggler or Buzzard Bait Bowl made by someone else.
You can contact Walter E. Siebel via e-mail: wsiebel@wdt.net.
Fish Bone Café
At McLear's Cottage Colony and Campground
2477 County Route 6
Hammond, NY
375-6508
www.mclears.com/store.html
A family-owned and -operated restaurant open to the public at a private campground on Black Lake. Casual food, comical menu.
HOURS: 7 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. daily through late October
Homemade "wedding bell soup" was great. So was the grilled chicken breast sandwich.
RATING: 2 and one-half forks
