Photos by Caitlin Abrams
Plate of food at Pearl and the Thief
What part of a restaurant critic’s life is like astronomy? Identifying the rising stars—and then distinguishing them from the shooting stars that merely shine bright and vanish.
Justin Sutherland, 33, is having as starry a year as a young cook can have. No sooner did the chef of St. Paul’s Handsome Hog announce plans to open his second spot, Pearl and the Thief, than he was whisked away to New York for Iron Chef America.
He took the competition seriously, practicing in the Octo Fishbar kitchen during the days, with his chef de cuisine from Pearl, Brandon Randolph, and his friend (and fellow chef) Donald Gonzales. The trio got their ramen prep time down to a mere nine minutes and strategized prospective menus to accommodate unexpected ingredients. The surprise turned out to be whole lamb, and the bigger surprise was that Sutherland won, which almost never happens. (The defending Iron Chef chefs enjoy a significant home-field advantage, because who cooks like that?)
However, like many top Minnesota chefs, Sutherland has extensive experience in whole-animal butchery: He works with whole hogs at Handsome Hog. Less obvious is Sutherland’s food-television background. In one of his first jobs out of cooking school, he styled food at the Eden Prairie studios of the home shopping network that grew into Evine.
“I loved learning all those tricks, how to make food pretty for live television,” Sutherland says now. “That food and TV mix, I learned a lot.”
After taping, but before Iron Chef America aired, Sutherland jetted back to Stillwater to open Pearl and the Thief, then returned to TV land to tape a season of another prominent food show he’s not yet at liberty to disclose. “I’ve been getting calls nonstop from the Food Network to be a judge on different competitions,” he says. “Not a lot of challengers win, but luckily I’ve fallen into that upper echelon.”
At this point, I’d bet on Sutherland to become Minnesota’s next big-name TV chef, joining Andrew Zimmern. He’s got the skills, and he’s got a biography that fits America in 2018. On one side of his family, he’s descended from Mississippi sharecroppers; on the other side, from a lutefisk-loving Iowa GI who served in Japan, fell in love, and brought home a bride.
Still, no matter how well-grounded you are for a big win, absenting yourself from your brand-new restaurant is not a well-trodden path to success. In the earliest days of Pearl and the Thief, the quality of the food ricocheted between exquisite and atrocious.
Tables at Pearl and the Thief
Exquisite? The Tennessee hot octopus, for which the kitchen sous-vide cooks the tentacles, rendering them pliant, then crisps them with repeated lashings of hot butter, until the octopus becomes lacquered with crisp spice. The kitchen pairs this octopus with half a dozen clever and well-executed accents: a loose squid ink–tinted cornmeal spoon bread; balls of compressed apple; chips of fennel, quick-pickled with turmeric and vinegar; heaps of apple foam; fennel fronds. It all comes together to resemble an amusing avant-garde sculpture about life in tidepools. The flavors are an absolute thrill to explore: earthy, spicy, sweet, garden-mellow, vinegar-bright. It’s one of the dishes of the year, for sure.
Atrocious? A smoked ice cream so heavy-handed it tasted like an ashtray.
On those early visits, in June, the food at Pearl and the Thief reminded me all too uncomfortably of the food at those marquee restaurants of the early 2000s, when coastal chefs including Jean Georges Vongerichten, Wolfgang Puck, and Marcus Samuelsson opened Minneapolis outposts. Each of these was wildly uneven, and each closed: As Napoleon proved on the march to Moscow, there really is such a thing as being spread too thin—whether your empire is based on artichokes and salmon or guns and butter. Can Pearl and the Thief succeed when its chef isn’t on hand to taste the food or train the cooks? With Andrew Zimmern also planning a Twin Cities restaurant, Lucky Cricket, are we entering a moment when the other coast for chefs to set up a beachhead on is television?
The answers seem to be yes and yes. The good news is that over the course of several visits, I found that the ratio of exquisite to atrocious tipped toward the former. A creation of grilled oysters with collard greens delivered another highlight. It reminded me of a Southern take on oysters Rockefeller, lush with plump oysters and made new with whiskey, Cajun butter, and bacon. Sutherland possesses a particular talent for presenting rich flavors and then whisking them into a frame with layers of light acids. For instance, Pearl’s roasted bone marrow is as opulent as food can be, big and beefy. But it’s the topping of pickled ramps and an ingenious salad of micro Tokyo onions that make every bite of the marrow legible, instead of a sensory overload of fattiness.
The first time I tried the pimento burger it was nothing special, just a flabby but good burger. The next time, however, it had been cooked so the exterior revealed a fine layer of deep char. It was spectacular, the tang of the pimento bringing the beef into bold relief.
I particularly loved the way Sutherland brings the traditions of his Mississippi grandmother into the fine cooking present. A lunchtime order of shrimp and grits was better than any I’ve had in Minnesota, with still-translucent Gulf shrimp and okra disks as delicate as garden flowers.
Desserts, by sous-chef Adrian De Los Rios, can be excellent. By my last visits, the smoked ice cream had become appealingly subtle, set off against a charred disk of soft marshmallow and a bit of granola—like a s’mores at the Ritz. A layered blueberry-and-cream dessert looked like a picnic potluck layer bar, but it tasted like a pure distillation of summer blueberries—fantastic.
There’s a certain mismatch between the elegance of some of Sutherland’s dishes and the river-town casual vibe at Pearl, a longtime mainstreet bar given a spiffy update with paint that’s white and Tiffany blue. One baffling night I was eating on the second floor and a pack of bros in sleeveless shirts and swim trunks stampeded in, yelled, taxi-cab whistled, and yahooed their way through a few rounds of shots, before stampeding out.
Pearl has a small-town drinking-strip feeling, and if the pimento burger stays as good as it was on my last visit, it risks turning into a high-volume burger-and-a-shot destination. Simultaneously, the spot also risks turning into a television autograph-hunter’s depot.
Still, the biggest risk of all may be if you miss Sutherland’s smoked crab risotto. That’s the dish that best taps into his unique Minnesota identity. The smoked crab suggests that iodine edge that Sutherland grew to know at lutefisk dinners with his Norwegian grandfather. The chive blossoms and sunchoke chips come from his training in top kitchens, such as St. Paul’s Meritage. And the way the rice looks in the bowl? That’s nothing if not pure TV magic, the moonless midnight of the black rice sparkling with bits of bright white that look for all the world like stars.
Pearl and the Thief, 112 Main St. N., Stillwater, 651-342-0972, pearlandthethief.com
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