At The Daily Catch, a modest Boston-based fish house on Colorado Boulevard, a clamshell’s throw east of Old Pasadena, they serve many of their dishes in battered, old-school metal pans, right off the stovetop. You grab it by anything other than the handle — the top of the handle at that — and you’ll get an object lesson in how hot that stovetop really is.
Owner Paul Freddura says the reason for bringing the sizzling pan to the table is simple: “We started serving pasta in the pan out of necessity. We had no plates! It’s become who we are, more than food and drink, we are an experience.”
It’s an experience that dates back to 1973, when Paul “The Calamari King” Freddura (“a first-generation Sicilian-American”) opened the first Daily Catch in Boston’s North End — its Little Italy. The family describes that original as a “shoebox storefront.” The signature dish was the fried squid — the calamari — which earned such a rabid following that the storefront grew into a hotspot called the Calamari Café with checkered tablecloths and an open kitchen.
Pasta was served in the pan, as it still is. Anthony, one of the effusive owners, who sounds like a cast member from “Cheers,” told a table of Bostonians who had shown up hungry for a taste of the old country that the squid ink black linguine served in the pan was their creation. You can get it aglio olio (olive oil and garlic with chopped calamari), Alfredo (cream and butter) and puttanesca (mushrooms, peppers, onions, kalamata olives, anchovies). And the fried calamari is still at the top of the menu.
Squid is eaten pretty much everywhere in the world — in Asia, you can even find it shredded and dried and sold in bags like potato chips. But here in the U.S., our relationship with this cousin of octopus has long been … a tad distant. Like the octopus, it’s a member of the cephalopod family — a relatively inexpensive, abundant, high-protein, lean source of food. But some grumble it’s too chewy, even rubbery, and that those tentacles are just weird.
For me, that’s part of the appeal — eating the fried calamari at The Daily Catch is an exercise in interspersing the rings with the tentacles. The rings are indeed chewier. The tentacles are indeed crispier. In the garlic-heavy red sauce at The Daily Catch, it’s all good.
You can get a half order or a full. If you get a half, you’ll wind up wishing you had more. If you don’t finish it, it travels well. Though it will never be as crisp as it is rushed from the open kitchen. Which is a wonder to behold at full-throttle. This is an Italian opera with pans for music, and fish flown in like edible divas several times a week.
The menu makes a point of it. The clams are Littlenecks and Cherrystones. The haddock is from Georges Bank. The swordfish is Atlantic. The sea scallops are New England. There’s no seared ahi or miso marinated black cod. This is food served at the two branches and the takeout window in Boston.
That their first out of town branch is in Pasadena is … unexpected. But I got no complaints. Not after eating the Clams Casino — a dish from my East Coast childhood I don’t think I’ve had since leaving the Bronx way back when.
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Clams Casino is a dish originally from Rhode Island that amazes with its simplicity — and its perfect mix of texture and taste. It’s a chunky Cherrystone clam on the halfshell, topped with a thick helmet of heavily herbed breadcrumbs, then crisped under the broiled. And bang! The clams are both tender and chewy.
The breadcrumbs are so good I scraped the inside of the shell in the hope of one more dot of flavor. The five in the order are both enough — and not nearly enough. Give me another five, and I’d keep eating them. It’s like oysters; can you even really have enough?
But then, a lot of the dishes on the menu at The Daily Catch are like that. There are the (unique to me) calamari meatballs, made with ricotta, served in tomato sauce — and available, as are dishes like the black pasta aglio olio and the calamari salad from the online shop. (“From Boston’s fish pier to your doorstep,” as it says.)
There are the Oysters Rockefeller, a somewhat fancier uptown relative of the Clams Casino, made with romano, spinach and those crispy breadcrumbs. There are the sauce-heavy Mussels Siciliano and Littlenecks Siciliano.
Then, there are the clams and oysters from the Raw Bar. Which includes what many be the most (and perhaps only) modern dish on the menu — the tuna tartar flavored with mangos and shallots.
The presence of mango rattles my sense of history; it just ain’t what we ate back in the day. But whatever … everything else on the menu is. From the calamari, clams, mussels, shrimp and scallops, all tossed (singularly or collectively) with linguine, in a choice of red sauce or white sauce, using black pasta or not. From the monkfish marsala to the swordfish in Sicilian lemon herb sauce. From the fish and chips to the calamari platter with squid four ways, along with fried white fish, french fries, coleslaw and of course tartar sauce.
If you want to live large, go for the Lobster Fra Diavolo, $85 for one, $115 for two, with a pound and a half lobster, Littlenecks, mussels, shrimp and, of course, calamari. Served over linguine.
Wine is by the glass, and by the bottle. There are cocktails and mocktails. The wine list runs to reds from Umbria, Piemonte, Veneto and Sicily. There’s a white from Lombardy. Back in the day, wines were red or white, poured from bottles with no labels.
The pan is still sizzling. The calamari hasn’t lost its crunch. And the Daily Catch is still pure Boston. You can hear it in every direction happily shouted in the kitchen.
Merrill Shindler is a Los Angeles-based freelance dining critic. Email mreats@aol.com.
The Daily Catch
- Rating: 3 stars
- Where: 927 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena
- Information: 626-314-1205; www.thedailycatch.com
- When: Lunch, Wednesday through Sunday; dinner, every day
- Details: Full bar; reservations helpful
- The food: Boston-style seafood, flown in from Beantown several times a week, made and served with a true East Coast Italian love of fish. Served in hot pans fresh from the stove and oven, that should be touched with care.
- How much: About $50 per person
- On the menu: Tuna Tartar ($25), Seafood Platter (for the table; $135), Raw Bar Sampler ($40), 10 Starters ($15-$30), 4 Salads ($11-$20), 4 Entrees ($33-$42), 9 Shellfish & Linguine ($30-$53), 3 Black Pasta Specials ($31), 3 Daily Catch ($30-$37), Lobster Fra Diavolo ($85/$115), 6 Sides ($7-$9)
- Credit cards: MC, V
- What the stars mean: 4 (World class! Worth a trip from anywhere!), 3 (Most excellent, even exceptional. Worth a trip from anywhere in Southern California.), 2 (A good place to go for a meal. Worth a trip from anywhere in the neighborhood.) 1 (If you’re hungry, and it’s nearby, but don’t get stuck in traffic going.) 0 (Honestly, not worth writing about.)