That year and ever since, the wholesale company has sold to a list of restaurants that reads like a roundup of the local culinary scene's greatest hits, from long-gone places like Theatre Cafe, Mataam Fez, Tante Louise, Normandy, Cliff Young's, Avenue Grill and Solera — in the building where he'd worked years before — to the still-serving Brown Palace, Barolo and Mizuna.
Sorensen agrees."It's a really good product, and it's priced right," he says."There are a lot of shysters in the purveyor business. And it's a hard business — plus you've gotta deal with asshole chefs. But Duffy is one of the most jolly, nice human beings I know. If there was ever a problem, he was one of those purveyors that would fix it right away."
Over his years as Colfax's resident fishmonger, Fanganello's own story has taken many turns. He spent three years in the early ’90s commuting back and forth between Denver and Seattle, where he took fish to Pike Place Market as a commercial fish broker. He once pretended to be a journalist in order to say hello to Governor Roy Romer, his old neighbor and the father of his high school best friend, who was in Seattle with soon-to-be-president Bill Clinton on a campaign stop.
Then Fanganello's businesses, like every other, had to navigate COVID."That's really been a transformative situation," he says."When that happened, I was doing really good with the wholesale business. We were cranking it out, and it just collapsed. It was otherworldly." He couldn't pass up the opportunity, though. So in June,"I got on a plane and flew up," he says."I remember landing in the little airplane on the dirt runway and getting trucked out in the back of the pickup truck. There's a big bulkhead that they've built since I had been there, and I looked over the side, and the tide was low and the boats were like 35 feet down there. 'Here's the ladder. Take the ladder,' they said.
In a mostly empty display case, there's a sign that reads,"Everything on this shelf $2," near a random mishmash of items that includes a can of black beans, two bottles of Heinz 57 and pre-made margarita mix.