On Sunday, the floor at Kevin and Teresa Davis' new restaurant, Blueacre Seafood, is a calm sea of chair backs and flat, empty tables perfectly aligned, with an almost martial quality to them—a rigidity like a parade with everything in its proper place. Blueacre is a big space. Huge even, with a main dining floor slightly elevated, wings of private dining rooms and overflow space, bar seating and lounge tables, and unused acreage in the front that covers as much square footage as some entire restaurants. A few tables on a Sunday evening can be completely lost in that room, but to make the place look busier from the outside, the hostess has seated every table against the windows: a picket line of fish-eaters surrounding empty space for hundreds.
Joshua Huston
For Kevin Davis (foreground), the "new" restaurant on Seventh Avenue feels as familiar as an old sweater.
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My menu is just out of the printer—the big copier in a walled-off section near the hostess station—and it, like the space, is big, the options overwhelming: fish, oysters, lobsters and crab, soups and salads, sandwiches, steaks, and chicken, and an entire section devoted to nothing but well-conceived sides. I want to know if the floor staff can possibly have a handle on the extraordinary breadth of this menu, just released into my hands—a menu that changes significantly every day.
"What are 'Potatoes Minneapolis'?" I ask, choosing something from the list of sides that is not described at all by any attendant text.
"Potatoes Minneapolis," repeats my server. "That's shredded potatoes, mixed with a little bacon fat and bacon, then fried"—he does a thing with his hands, holding one out, palm up, laying the other on top, and flipping them over—"and turned over so it's crispy on the outside and soft inside. Kind of like a giant order of hash browns."
I purse my lips and nod as though considering—as though any consideration had been necessary after he'd mentioned potatoes with bacon fat.
Potatoes Minneapolis, the greatest thing on the menu at Blueacre Seafood, has no seafood in it. The greatest thing laid on the board by Kevin Davis—a fish expert if there ever was one—and cooked by a crew who spend their days tending to the delicate flesh of sea critters from all over the world, is nothing more than potatoes, butter, bacon, and salt. It's an oddity, a white-trash one-off on a menu that focuses with incredible precision on the super-high end of the gastronomic spectrum—where nearly every ingredient has a source and a provenance and a chorus of gourmet bits and pieces to attend it. But Potatoes Minneapolis is so good you might want to order it alone—to wallow in its comfort and greasy luxury with no distractions.
My server's description had been dead-on. It really is like a giant order of hash browns. Except that when it arrives at my table, "giant" doesn't really do it justice; if all hash browns at all the diners in the land were made this way, I would eat nothing but hash browns and be so fat that the Discovery Channel would have to do a special about me: Lamentations of the Thousand-Pound Man.
Imagine a standard sauté pan completely filled with shredded potatoes. That is how big a portion of Potatoes Minneapolis is—easily enough for three really hungry people. Now imagine that pan filled not solely with shredded potatoes, but with shredded potatoes soaked with bacon grease and butter, studded with tiny little chunks of bacon, then fried so that the parts touching metal crisp up all nice and brown and those in the middle stay steamy, soft, and white.
For service, the panful of potatoes is flipped over like an upside-down cake, so that it appears like a golden-brown dome of crisp potatoes hiding bacon inside. The first bite is like being hit in the mouth with a salted brick wrapped in bacon. By the second, you know without a doubt that you have found true love—that a hole in your life you didn't even know was there has been filled by fried potatoes and bacon grease.
Like an idiot, I eat maybe half the plate of Potatoes Minneapolis. I just can't help myself. And when I'm done, I have no room left for anything else. I make a run at my crab cake, sure, and it's good—called "The Ultimate" crab cake on Davis' menu, it's thick with big chunks of Dungeness crab meat, set on the plate in a tarn of lime and mustard sauce, and topped with a straight-out-of-NOLA salad made of shredded mirliton (also known as chayote or chuchu, depending on where you come from) dressed in vinegar and red chile. And I try to get through at least half my plate of king salmon, perfectly seared in the pan and served with split bing cherries, smoked almonds, and a simple wash of brown butter.
But these are losing propositions. After the Potatoes Minneapolis, I'm ruined for all other flavors, so I leave and vow to come back again.
