"Don’t mind me! I’m just in the way. It’s crazy-cray-cray in here,” said a guy with a bluefin tuna tattoo on his arm and a worn-out T-shirt that read BEAT NANTUCKET. He was smiling and laughing while mixing a monster-size tub of tuna salad with two hands in the kitchen behind the fish counter at John’s Fish Market in Vineyard Haven. It was just past 10 a.m. on an overcast summer morning. 

“That’s Tubby,” Glenn Pachico, co-owner of John’s Fish Market and Sandy’s Fish & Chips, said of the tuna mixer, whose nickname did not, in fact, come from making tubs of seafood salad. His real name is David Medeiros, and he’s worked for Glenn longer than he can remember. After Medeiros finished mixing the batch, he packed it into half-pound containers to be sold in a display case up front at the fish counter alongside smoked shrimp and crab dip, jalapeño crab dip, spinach and red onion hummus, smoked tuna pâté, and bluefish pâté.

“Everything here is homemade,” said Glenn. 

“And everything is made from scratch,” his wife and business partner Sheila added. “And we mean everything. All our pâtés, potato salad, pasta salad, coleslaw….” 

It’s always been this way, the Pachicos insisted – “Seventy-five years of this!”

The three-quarters-of-a-century mark is a milestone the business reached earlier this year. John’s Fish Market first opened in 1949 at Five Corners across from a bike shop on Lagoon Pond Road in Vineyard Haven. It was started by Glenn’s grandfather – “the original John,” a.k.a. John Augustus Pachico. A fisherman by trade, he was the son of Manuel G. Pachico, an Azorean immigrant, and his wife, Louise Delphina Texeira. 

After six years in business, a rise in rent and the post office moving in forced the original John to move his business. He arranged to have the building picked up and transported the short distance up State Road to its current location at 5 Martin Road, just a couple blocks from the Tisbury School. Thirteen years later, in 1968, the market was passed down to Glenn’s parents, John Pachico Jr. and his wife, Sandra.

The couple also had a painting business, and when their marriage ended in divorce in the late 1970s, John Jr. took that company while Sandra got the fish market. By then, John’s Fish Market was sorely in need of a new building, so in 1978 Sandra had the original one torn down and a new one built. She also wanted to cater to the pushes and pulls of what many of her customers had been requesting, so she added a takeout-food counter to serve hot food and aptly named it Sandy’s Fish & Chips. Although it was always one business, there were two registers: one for the hot food side, another for the fish market. 

Sandra grew the market for more than forty years before passing it down to Glenn and Sheila in 2015. It was a slow hand off, however. “She had a hard time not showing up for work,” Glenn said. 

Glenn’s oldest son Tyler, thirty-eight, agreed. “When Sandra retired, she was having a hard time adjusting. She had worked all the time, and she worked so hard. [After she was retired], she would come in and make sure everything was how it should be. She would...make sure the coleslaw was made correctly.”

The coleslaw was, of course, always mixed and seasoned correctly, the Pachicos agreed with a laugh, because they had inherited their parents’ and grandparents’ work ethic. Besides, the market’s recipes all come second nature to them. As does their desire to fish and be out on the water.

When you grow up in a family business, you get your feet wet early. In Glenn’s case, he was digging shellfish by the age of ten. As a young boy, he would walk down to the water from the original market when it was on Martin Road to find quahaugs and steamers, which his father would bring to businesses around town. Later, Glenn progressed to catching summer flounder. The fish would either be brought home to feed the family or used to barter with other Islanders – a common practice, and one indicative of when the “old Island” was all about taking care of one another, said Glenn. After school, he would set up in the back room of the market and
fillet boxes of fish.

Boyhood pursuits and family commitments eventually led Glenn down the path of commercial fishing, where he would spend days or even weeks at sea dragging, harpooning, or longlining. Eventually he bought his own boat, a thirty-six-foot H&H Downeast lobster boat named Mirage, that served him well and faithfully. Three years ago, he transferred ownership of the boat to his youngest son, Mitchell, thirty-five, although it is equally run and used for fishing by both sons. 

These days, a typical trip on the Mirage starts at 5 a.m. and ends at 8 p.m., Tyler and Mitchell said. There are no other crew members, although the family does take an annual trip to the Northeast Canyons, a productive fishing area located a little over 100 miles east/southeast of the Island, at the end of the fish market’s season to catch swordfish and tuna. The sons’ commitment to commercial fishing carries forth a family tradition; it also makes John’s Fish Market one of a dwindling number of Island markets who still reel in any of their own product. That serves as a particular source of pride for the family.

“Tyler and Mitchell, they just went out and had a wonderful catch of lobsters; that’s what’s in our case now,” Sheila said. 

“We have customers come in who are like, ‘We want littlenecks,’ and Mitchell will be like, ‘Oh, yeah, I dug the littlenecks,’ or, ‘Oh, yeah, I caught the lobsters,’ and they think he’s shooting the breeze. We just say, ‘Take a look around – there are pictures everywhere,’” said Glenn. Some of those pictures are of John Jr. harpooning swordfish back in the day; others are of Mitchell and Tyler in recent years.

While the family strives to catch as much product as possible, they acknowledge it’s not possible to exclusively meet customer demands this way. Besides, they said, fishing is no longer as easy as it once was. “We have to rely on purveyors more than we used to,” said Glenn. 

“There are so many regulations; it makes it tough,” Sheila added. In an effort to maintain, and in some cases rebuild, sustainable stocks after generations of unregulated fishing, there are specific dates and months and open days that fishermen have to work within, and some species have size limits. There are also different permits for different species and possession limits with specific open seasons that fishermen must follow. 

“It makes it tough behind the counter explaining that in Rhode Island there’s black bass available, but here our season hasn’t started until July,” Glenn said. 

“But people really love that we can tell them that too,” said Sheila. 

Customers will sometimes even ask if the salmon is local. “They just don’t know,” added Mitchell. So the family educates them: “We get salmon from Faroe Island; we get Pacific king and wild-caught Alaskan sockeye,” he explained. 

That added education pairs well with the variety of offerings behind the counter. The fish market case is regularly stocked with fresh halibut, tuna, swordfish, lobster, haddock, striped bass, cod loin, sole, scallops, squid, shrimp, crabs, sea bass, flounder, monkfish, mahi-mahi, fluke, and salmon. 

There is also a variety of prepared fish, such as pickled herring, and smoked seafood, including bluefish, salmon, lox, and mussels. Not to mention the fish cakes, crab cakes, clam cakes, crab quiches, shrimp tempura, steamed shrimp, shrimp potstickers, lobster meat, and pickled crab meat by the pound. Sides, the family said, are one of the fastest moving case items: spicy Asian noodles, pickled veggies, mango salsa, potato salad, and coleslaw. There’s more too, but it’s hard to keep track.

“You know the other special thing?” said Glenn. “The kids and the ice cream.” At some point, soft-serve ice cream was introduced to the prepared food side of the business, making it the only fish market on the Island to serve soft serve. The Pachicos can’t quite agree on when it was introduced, but it was about twenty years ago. 

“I used to serve ice cream when I was fifteen, so sometime around then,” Mitchell said. 

“It’s just a little something extra we never thought would grow into a thing,” added Glenn. 

And yet it did. Each spring, before school lets out for the year, a trail of school children make their way, backpacks in tow, from the nearby Tisbury School to the ice cream takeout window, where they order up vanilla cones, Oreo milkshakes, and twists in a cup.

Just before 11 a.m., a small crowd of people had already filled the parking lot and were walking in for lunch. Even when the Pachicos are not heading out to sea, work begins early. Glenn arrives at 4:30 a.m. The rest of the family arrives by 9 a.m., when the market opens. (On Sundays, when the takeout side is closed, the market opens at 11 a.m.) 

A few early shoppers might come in first thing for their dinner supplies, but most of the morning work is to prep for the opening of Sandy’s Fish & Chips at 11 a.m. Once that counter opens, the pace at lunch and again at dinner can be not just brisk but breakneck.

As the clock ticked forward on this particular day, Glenn called to his son and future daughter in law. “Michelle and Tyler, can you make the cups?” 

They nodded their heads and went back inside to make the tartar sauce that gets poured inside four-ounce cups to be served with fish and chips. 

“That’s right. Even our tartar sauce is handmade,” said Glenn. “We make everything, and we make as much as we can, from the tartar sauce to the cocktail sauce, stuffies, chowder, clam cakes, shrimp egg rolls, lobster salad…. My mother always said, ‘Everything here is handmade, even the help.’”

Soon every square inch of the grill was dedicated to lobster roll buns, burgers and fresh tuna, and swordfish and salmon sandwiches. There were also onion rings, fried scallops, fried clams, full seafood dinners, and lobster rolls. There were extra-large fried fish burgers called “John’s Giants” for the hungriest of appetites and “Little Tykes” meals for the minnows: chicken tenders, grilled cheese, hot dog, or fried fish with French fries and an apple juice. 

“Our customers make this place what it is,” said Sheila. “We have so many great regulars.” And it’s not just the Tisbury Tigers looking for ice cream, or other year-rounders purchasing soft shell crabs and lobster rolls. “For a lot of people this is their first stop off the boat and their last stop before heading back to the ferry,” said Sheila.

“My parents were always thankful for summer people,” added Glenn. “And we really are too. We appreciate everyone. That’s why I’m here. To give people a taste of the seventies and eighties.”

“We are also very thankful for all our staff: Judith Boyd, David “Tubby” Medeiros, Fabian Watson, Cal Murray,” said Sheila. And, of course, their two sons and their future wives, both of whom have joined the business. Mitchell’s fiancée, Hailee McCarthy, works full-time on the Sandy’s side, and Tyler’s fiancée, Michelle Katz, works full-time on the market side. 

There was never a question that Mitchell and Tyler would one day take over John’s and be the fourth generation of Pachicos to run the Vineyard Haven fish market.

“You started working behind the counter at twelve years old, as soon as you could see over the top of the counter,” Glenn said to Mitchell. 

“Tyler, too,” he added.

“But if you go way back, when I was pregnant with both of them, I worked here,” Sheila said. “I worked at the fish market when they were babies. When they were little, they were worn on my stomach in a pouch. And then when they got bigger, they were in the backpack.” 

“I just never got paid for that,” Mitchell said, and everyone laughed. 

“We are going to start weaning shares over to them this year,” Glenn said of his upcoming retirement, although Tyler was quick to say he thinks Glenn will be like his mother, Sandra, and hang around the market cleaning fish and prepping food.

“I don’t think he’ll retire until he can’t walk,” said Tyler. 

“I just want to eventually get to a point where I only work forty hours a week,” Glenn said laughing. 

Both future daughters in law let out a laugh. “We want that for you too,” said Katz.

As September comes to an end, each year the family closes up shop. But they don’t stray too far from their chosen line of work. Asked how they spend their off-season, they answer in unison: “We fish.”

“We go conching, lobstering until the end of December,” explained Glenn. 

“We squid in the spring,” added Mitchell.