Have you been following the evolution of smoked salmon snobbery? It's a fascinating story. First about ethnic deracination and then, following that, foodie fetishism that transcends ethnicity for some imagined posh/poshlost realm of anglophile purity. Some realm that rivals wine snobbery. It's become the Downton Abbey of smoked fish.



In doing so, in its rise from humble "lox", something strange has happened. Unlike wine, which at least one must concede has strong flavors, however ludicrously they are often described, in the new realm of super upscale smoked salmon the less actual taste, the better. Indeed it has taken us into a metaphysical realm in which the whole notion of “taste” is interrogated (as the postmodernists like to say) by its absence, which then becomes (as the postmodernists like to say) a kind of presence. The taste of “tastelessness.” The flavor equivalent of the sound of one hand clapping.



There is a phrase some may be unfamiliar with (since its day has largely passed): "Think Yiddish, dress British", which was the unspoken watchword of the academics and critics of the Trilling generation who wished to downplay their ethnic origin or appearance. In case you did miss the Yiddish/British period of smoked salmon getnrification, it began with the humble Jewish deli lox, or “belly lox” as it was once called (like it came from someplace else?). It could be found in Jewish “appetizing stores” or smoked fish emporia and it was markedly ethnic and down-to-earth, if not down-market, glowing neon orange in refrigerated cases and tasting crazy salty.

Back then humble deli belly lox was the butt of misogynistic Woody Allen-type jokes. Of a woman said to be relatively unanimated in bed: "She lay there like a lox."



But then (was it sometime in the mid-eighties?) smoked salmon un-loxed itself from the ethnic food ghetto and graduated from the deli belly to “nova”, or “novi” as the Old School waiters called it at the Second Avenue Deli (now an ever-beckoning block from me). Dressed British. Unsalty with a gentler (genteel? gentile?) more subtle flavor. Still there’s a difference between subtle and nonexistent, right? And nova at least came without pretensions, even if it didn't always come from Nova Scotia.

But then, alas, as we all know, came the tragic invention of brunch and the salmon snobbery derby was on. I don’t think this was an accident; I believe that the faux-civility one-upsmanship of brunch encouraged a parallel race to deracinate lox.



Nova soon took on airs and became "sourced" and "artisanal." Smoked salmon made the great leap backward from North America, across the ocean. Talk about salmon swimming upstream, our nova leapt back over the Atlantic to source itself as Norway salmon, "wild Irish salmon," even antipodal New Zealand salmon. The kind of thing one boasts of at brunch, like vintages of Bordeaux. Often vacuum-sealed like it was plutonium, or flown over in the first class cabin (fact checker please don’t check this), frozen or packed in dry ice and guarded by Navy Seals so it could be sliced “fresh”. (Okay I made that up about the Navy Seals. Just thinking about the movie rights.)



And then—don’t worry, foodies, I haven’t forgotten—in the hierarchy of gentrified smoked salmon there is the Brooks Brothers of smoked salmon, the ultimate in gentrification: Scottish salmon. Not any Scottish salmon, of course. Like Harris tweed “heather lovat” wool is not just any worsted. My head is still spinning from trying to keep straight the salmon snob distinctions between Scottish Smoked Scottish salmon, Smoked Scottish salmon (could be smoked in Uzbekistan for all you know), salmon “smoked in Scotland” (flown in from Uzbekistan for the special Hebridien finishing touch). And the shun-like-a-leper “Scottish style salmon” which fools nobody. Hide the label when you bring it to brunch.



And finally we come to what might be the J. Press to the Brooks Brothers of salmon gentrification. The ne plus ultra for hard-core types, the H. Forman “London cure” smoked salmon. I first encountered H. Forman’s at the new Fairway mega-market that opened a block from me (these places are closing in), which features a velvet rope smoked fish bar. Okay the ropes are not real velvet, but the vibe is. They’re meant to set this apart as the still-beating Upper West Side heart of the now regionally expanding Fairway chain.



A word about Fairway. Once it was known as the crazed Jewish madhouse rival to more sedate Zabar’s and apparently if you lived on the Upper West Side (I never did), you were expected to have as forceful an opinion about the superiority of one or the other, the way they used to argue about the Schactmaites and the Eastmanites and other Marxist splinter groups in the Partisan Review.

I never could understand the narcissism of small differences involved in the Zabars /Fairway wars and anyway would refuse to eat smoked fish at any place else on the UWS but that ramshackle palace of pleasure, Barney Greengrass, the legendary deli-restaurant that Philip Roth readers will recognize as the setting for the final chapter of one of his (my opinion) very best novels, Operation Shylock.



But meanwhile some venture capitalist bought an ownership stake in Fairway and has been extending the brand like mad into the brunch-crazed suburbs as well as Manhattan, opening its “Olive Oil bars” with tasting taps that offer olive oil unfiltered so that it is "not robbed of the soul of its rusticity" ("Officer! My rusticity has been robbed!") and getting into the whole artisanal family-farm-sourced, even vegan, realms. But still offering a vast spectrum of gentrified smoked salmon. Yes, you can get lox, but the action is in the array of the anglophile varieties.



Which brings us to H. Forman, which Fairway’s hand-lettered sign assures us is the peak of smoked salmon pleasure. Here is a literal rendition of the hand-lettered (artisanally sourced?) sign about H. Forman salmon on the Fairway refrigerated salmon display:



It is flown to us weekly from London where Lance Forman personally cures these gorgeous fish. H. Forman, Lance’s granddad is the pride of England and their East End smokehouse is serious architecture, famous throughout London. This [the salmon] gets plenty of artisanal, hands-on, eyeballs-on attention which is obvious as this stuff is DELECIOUS.

(Copy editor, please stet the capped “DELECIOUS.” Also please stet this request to stet.)