I made three trips to Steelhead in the month leading up to Blueacre's opening. My last visit was just 10 days before his first scheduled friends-and-family dinner at the new place, the day after the last of the construction cleanup began. And I ordered and reordered, ate dishes straight from his hands, from those of his crew, from Polizzi. I came at prime time. I came at bad times. I did everything I could to trip the place up.
I ate latkes that were terrible on multiple levels—too traditional to be considered modern, too modern to make any claim to authenticity, made too thick, with potatoes that were mealy in the center, served with a side of housemade applesauce that once tasted like apple-flavored whipped cream, another time like candy-apple cake frosting—and both times came burnt, once from a Polizzi-run line, once from right under Davis' nose.
Peter Mumford
Kevin Davis, commanding the line at Steelhead one more time.
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I ate beautiful fish and chips made from true cod jacketed in a batter of Kilt Lifter Scotch ale, cooked so perfectly that the big, golden pieces of fish only steamed once they were broken in half and cracked with a sound like stepping on autumn leaves. I chased that with poutine made with Beecher's cheese from just around the corner and more fried Beecher's cheese curds, done like mutant bowling-alley mozzarella sticks in that tightrope-walking effort to mix Americana diner standards with high-toned New American regional cookery—a trick that Davis seems to pull off with effortless grace most (or at least some) of the time.
Davis serves his fried cheese curds with hot mustard just a couple degrees removed from the stuff you'd get in an Americanized Chinese restaurant. I loved it, thinking to myself, "Jesus, why haven't I ever done this before?" It was simple brilliance: the throwaway juxtaposition that makes a purely pedestrian dish sing. But then, on my first visit—after the poutine, after the cheese curds—I tried to order the pulled-pork sandwich and was told that it was so popular that it'd sold completely out. The kitchen was working on more, but, according to my waitress, it wouldn't be ready for a couple hours yet.
That should've spiked my danger sensor, but because I was hungry, it didn't. A couple hours for pulled pork? The only thing that can be done with good pulled pork in a couple hours is to wish it were 10 hours later when the pork would be done. But later, on another night with Davis fully in command of his line, I had the very popular pork. The burnt ends mixed in with the shredded pig in sweet and tangy Carolina-cum-Kansas barbecue sauce were good. The rest of it was pap—the sauce masking the lack of smoke, the thick, fancy bread dulling the bite of the sauce, the homemade coleslaw adding a nice textural crunch but little else. There is a reason why a pulled-pork sandwich done right is sold straight out of the smoker, across a lunch counter that serves little else, and comes mounted on plain, generic white bread from the Piggly Wiggly down the street and topped with coleslaw made every day by the five-gallon bucket: because it's better that way. Some things only suffer from the loving attention of chefs trying to better them for a collared-shirt crowd. Barbecue is one of them.
Gumbo, apparently, is not. No matter who staffs the line at Steelhead after the change, there is love living deep in that dish. There's a richness there, among the chicken, the andouille and spice, that belies the ingredients, something that comes straight from the Land of a Thousand Grandmas.
Davis moves like I do. He is a man comfortable with change. New Orleans, Napa, Paris, Adelaide, Seattle—his curriculum vitae is more worldly than mine, but the bounce is familiar. And watching him stand in the busy kitchen on my last night at Steelhead, taking his moment, looking across the busy floor and back through three years, I wonder if Davis is worried, happy, frightened, freaked out, excited—or just all of them at once.
"I got on the tiles at 7 a.m. that day," Davis would later tell me. "Saturday—the day before—we'd spent all day cleaning Blueacre. But I'd been in the kitchen [at Steelhead] all day. And it was a busy day, too. That moment...I remember that moment. Around 8:30. It was the first time I'd had a minute. What you were seeing was everything behind me and everything ahead of me. I was just trying to breathe."
From the kitchen come our appetizers. I watch Davis arrange them on the pass as he calls for service: the crab cake for which Steelhead has earned something of a reputation in a city full of crab cakes; more poutine; a plate of pan-roasted broccoli that actually arrives as a plate of pan-roasted asparagus with fried capers, Marcona almonds, and orange zest.
Because nothing can ever go wrong with a plate of cheese, fries, and gravy, the poutine is as good as ever. The crab cake is a big thing, about the size of a hockey puck and made wisely with shredded crab meat of excellent quality pressed over fat pieces of whole crab-claw meat, the entire thing dressed in a crown of fried parsley and a restrained sauce Louis minus the peppers, the green onions, and probably the Worcestershire as well. It's gone almost before it hits the table. The asparagus is a bit of a surprise. I would've normally made fun of it for being a pile of stick-thin asparagus shoots except that, after my first bite, I couldn't stop eating—the asparagus tasting strongly of the nut-and-zest combination that is something like Davis' signature flavor, used generously across several different dishes.
