Best New Seafood Restaurant Spawned by a Bagel Shop

Earlier this year Highland Park’s Once Upon a Bagel bakery and deli—source of the quintessential egg bagel, the chocolate-chip bagel ball, and a mish-mosh soup that’ll cure just about anything—ventured into something a whole lot less kosher. A mile or so to the north, in the same Highwood strip mall that houses its hot dog outpost, the Mean Weiner, Once Upon opened a seafood diner, Lucky Fish Deli. The two small dining rooms, furnished with wood and Formica kitchen tables and comfy vinyl chairs, are separated from an open kitchen by a glass case that shows off scrupulously fresh denizens of the deep blue: oysters, lobster, shrimp, mussels, and clams, along with less trayf offerings like delicate lake perch (by the pound or half pound), which you can order fried, though I recommend it lightly blackened from the grill; either way, get it with the warm kettle chips or crunchy broccoli slaw. Lucky Fish also offers wine, beer, and a rum-laced bananas Foster that would stand up to the Brennan’s of old. Service is cheerful, if (at this point) variably efficient. Prices—and this is so rare around here for seafood—are as reasonable as the food is good.