Founded on hard work and family prayers on a Christmas night in the midst of the Great Depression, the Hot Fish Shop kept Winona on the culinary map for more than half of a century.
Henry and Helen Kowalewski opended the first Hot Fish Shop on Wabasha Street and Mankato Avenue. Kowalewski’s mother, Anastasia, was struggling to hang on to the building, which housed a pool hall, saloon, barbershop and small café. Anastasia Kowalewski’s husband, Joseph, died not long after the stock market crash of 1929. Her son, Henry, a former commercial fisherman, who once played bit parts in Hollywood, hit upon an idea to save the property.
He opened a restaurant specializing in the fish he knew so well.
The first Hot Fish shop meal was served on Christmas night of 1931. The Kowalewskis took in $8. The first menu offered shrimp salad, two pike fillets, “cabbage salad” and French fries for 35 cents.
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Word of good food spread quickly on Winona’s East End. A week later the shop made $108, staying open through New Year’s Eve and until 10 a.m. New Year’s Day.
Joseph Kowalewski had already begun buying land near what would be the intersection of Minnesota Highway 43 and U.S. Highways 14/61. When the Winona School Board bought the original restaurant site to build Washington Kosciusko Grad School, Henry and the rest of the family moved the business to the highway intersection and added agas station to the enterprise, prompting the joke that you could always stop at the “Kowelewskis” to “have your fill and get your fill.”
The new restaurant was built on “depression credit.” Contractors who were friends of the family built the basic structure and said, “Pay us back when you make a buck.” The pay back came quickly as word spread about the consistently delicious fish.
Like many European restaurateurs, the Kowalewskis supplied a lot of their own produce, grown in a five-acre family garden known as Justamere Place, a name that reflected the family’s sense of humor and pride in its working-class origins. The family also raised its own geese, ducks and chickens for customers who preferred to order fowl. Fish, including rough fish for smoking, were raised in three ponds on riverfront land near La Moille. A fish market was part of the business for many decades, allowing area residents to buy fresh fish for their own kitchens.
Henry’s son, Lambert Kowalewski, said that the family stopped using the rearing ponds when Mississippi River pollution began increasing markedly. From then on, all of the restaurant’s fish were purchased.
The business grew through the 1930s, a fish dinner still costing a little less than a buck just before the start of World War II. The business closed for about one year during the war because all of the cooks joined the military service – where they worked as cooks.
By the late 1950s and early 1960s, pike was being shipped in at the rate of about 1,000 pounds a week, and it was common for the staff to whip up 75 gallons of tartar sauce in one week, always using the seven ingredients in the family’s registered recipe. The family frequently attributed much of its success to having spent the time to research recipes and then developing formulas for fish batter, tartar sauce and coleslaw. The recipes never changed, Lambert said in a newspaper interview.
New recipes were added, but only after careful study and experimentation. According to thousands of customers, the food only became better. And throughout most of the restaurant’s history, batter-fried walleye was far and away the most popular entrée.
The Hot Fish Shop continued to expand through three major additions. The complex eventually included a bar and entertainment room known as Fisherman’s Lounge. By the late 1970s, the restaurant accommodated up to 300 people, while 180 could be seated in the lounge.
The most colorful room in the restaurant was the one where the Kowalewskis displayed memorabilia brought back from trips to Poland, along with art, wall plaques and photographs.
For more than five decades, the Hot Fish Shop was the place for special family celebrations. Graduations, baptisms, and other family events were celebrated there. Marriage proposals were made after diner. Before succumbing to the costs and stress of running a family owned restaurant anc competition from a proliferation of chain restaurant franchises, the Hot Fish Shop served millions of meals.
The landmark dining place also served up hundreds of thousands of memories, drawing a final crowd on Oct. 30, 2000, when the restaurant’s memorabilia went on the auction block.
After two generations on the “must visit” list of Duncan Hines, McCall’s magazine and innumerable tourism and restaurant guides, the last traces of the Hot Fish Shop vanished beneath the bulldozers early in 2001.
