Karla Steinhauser, Rockaway Beach's legendary smokehouse cook, shares her recipes and her story (2024)

ROCKAWAY BEACH – It's a Saturday afternoon at

. The black refrigerator-sized smoker is rumbling, its heat transforming trays of raw seafood into glazed, brown morsels.

Folks around town have gotten wind that Karla's delicacies are ready, and have begun lining up to stake their claim.

One customer motions to another that she is next.

Go ahead, says Nancy Zimmer , of Portland. "I'm waiting on the oysters." Then, she confides, "I came here yesterday. She was sold out already."

Soon, 74-year-old Karla Steinhauser appears, carrying a tray of smoky brown oysters. She is slightly stooped and showing the toll of a morning spent over 12 sockeye salmon, four tuna and two gallons of oysters. Still, she pauses to wave to customers, offering a shy smile.

Zimmer calls to her, "When we get the oysters, we're getting a book and we'd like you to autograph it for us."

Steinhauser nods, hands off the tray to her employee, and picks up the black marker kept handy for such requests. She flips back the slick cover of the book, "

," that is her life, her art and her expertise, and signs, "Thanks Karla."

After 46 years in the low-slung cottage at

, Steinhauser is offering up all the secrets that have made her something of an institution in this unassuming beachfront town.

"I'm willing to teach everything I know because I won't sell my name," says Steinhauser. "I know what would happen. They'd back up with trucks and computer ovens and my name would be in the gutter. You have to do things the old-fashioned way to make them taste good. I'll sell the property at some point if I get too old and crippled up, but I won't sell my name."

Steinhauser was 27 years old with a degree in art from Lewis & Clark College in Portland when she spotted the "For Sale" sign on the crab stand at the north end of town. She was "restless, not working ... and doing a lot of beer and booze," by her own account.

But that sign stopped her. Raised by her grandmother, she'd spent a good part of her life in Rockaway Beach. She'd been fishing since she was a kid, and came from a family of good cooks. Surely, this was meant to be. Her dad, who she admits spoiled her rotten, paid $3,000 for the shop for his only child, and on June 27, 1964, Steinhauser opened for business.

In the early years, she smoked in an old refrigerator fueled by propane. She crafted her curing recipe through conversations with state agricultural inspectors, and learned smoking times largely by trial and error. She bought salmon and crab off the boat, when crab sold three for a $1 and salmon fetched 70 cents a pound.

"You could afford to buy a whole cooler full of fresh and smoked meats for $35 to $45," she says.

Business was a success; her personal life not so much. The original crab stand was gutted by fire in 1972, the result of bad wiring. Her father died that same year at the age of 74, and her uncle within a year. Never close to her mother, who she describes as a lovely lady who didn't want children, Steinhauser found herself surrounded by the users and takers of the world, and falling prey to alcoholism, which had claimed her father.

"I met so many people who took me to the cleaners," she says. "I lost everything I had. My dad tried to warn me. My aunt tried to warn me. It's really kind of a tragic life."

In 1975, she rebuilt the shop, recruiting a local man to make the custom smoker with its eight 20-inch by 40-inch racks she uses to this day. In 1981, she took her last drink, and three years later entered into a partnership with a woman who saw a grand future for what was then known as Karla's Crabs.

But the future didn't turn out all that grand. The two couldn't agree on much. Karla wanted to keep things small; her partner wanted "a big cosmopolitan place." Suffice to say that by the time the partnership dissolved in 1995, Karla had lost her house, was $74,000 in the hole and living in the backroom of the Smokehouse. Today, she's still paying things off, and hopes her books will help erase the debt once and for all.

View full sizeKarla SteinhauserKarla Steinhauser helped illustrate her book with her cartoon drawings.

Still, as hard as life has sometimes been, Steinhauser believes she is where she was meant to be. Her smoked goods have been sampled by Pavarotti and U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass. Carol Channing's been in the shop several times, and Ryan O'Neal once stopped in one summer with his daughter, Tatum, Steinhauser says.

She gets help from employee Leonard Cecil, a former butcher who contributes a few of his own recipes. She still smokes the old fashioned-way, the huge blackened smoker fueled by vine maple limbs and wood chips from the local mill, and she's perfectly capable of stocking the smoker and urging it to full growling heat.

"This is really old fashioned, about as primitive as you get and still be in business, you know," she says, sliding in a 40-pound tray of salmon. "The only control on this thing is me."

Since its debut in December, "I am Karla's Smokehouse, Vol. II" (Volume I was a smaller, black and white book published nine years ago.) has sold about 1,000 books. It is part a biography, part history and a bit of cookbook with detailed and illustrated instructions on filleting fish and preparing all sorts of seafood for smoking. It includes Steinhauser's artwork and photos by local professional photographer Don Best, who helped Steinhauser design the book. Presales alone totaled close to 450.

"The biggest compliment we get is people will come in to buy one and will leave with two or three," says Best. "I was in here helping her a couple of weeks ago, for two hours straight we had people three deep in here."

It's all those people that have kept Steinhauser going, even through the toughest times.

"I've been here so long, people know I'm here and they know I do good work," she says. "I don't have children or brothers and sisters, and I never married. But I have a wonderful rapport with customers. I have a purpose in life. You have to have people in your life."

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