Fish Disruption! Octo Fishbar is New, Great, and Surprisingly Beefy

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Photographs by Caitlin Abrams

Octo Fishbar in Market House Collaborative

Do this: Sit down in a chair at Octo, at the pretty new marble bar, or at one of the many new tables that have transformed the steam-engine-era Market House building into a feasting house. Order a drink, like something of the moment that’s taxi-cab orange with gin and turmeric, or a fine glass of sparkling rosé. Then, get up and leave. 

Walk to the connecting fish market, Almanac. Don’t worry, there’s no door, no barrier between restaurant and market; you can see your table and your server can see you. In the market, inspect the fish case. Are those Boston mackerel, is that a bowl of tiny Nantucket scallops, are those razor clams, is that a whole branzino, silver as armor in the pale ice? 

There are labels near every fish, but ask questions anyway. The fishmonger knows so much: what ocean it came from, what day it arrived, how it was caught. Then, in your good clothes, buy raw fish. Especially buy raw fish you’d never dream of cooking yourself: whole crabs, live scallops, unusual salmon. Fish whose names you stumble to pronounce. The fishmonger will take your credit card and hand you paper-wrapped bundles. 

The first time you do this, you will feel very eccentric and likely entirely uncomfortable. Is this like going to the jewelry store for gold wire? Never mind! Carry your packages back to your seat and hand the wrapped fish to your server. He or she will ask if you have any particular requests for the fish. At this point you can make your eyes wide and say: “Are you nuts? I don’t know what to do with a whole uni in its black, prickly, sea-urchin shell—you people are the ones who know that.” Then, for $12 per fishy bundle, plus a $1-per-ounce charge after the first pound for larger orders, the kitchen will take your fish and enact the sort of wizardry top chefs can. 

For me, they took my two Boston mackerel—blue steel fish the size of children’s neckties, retail price $5.81—and served them five ways: 

• as hone-senbei, potato-chip-crisp fried fish bones with a warm soy-touched Japanese dipping sauce. 
• as an aguachile with Mexican peppers and a spray of lemon.
• as a crudo, with fine, buttery Spanish olive oil and wisps of carrot shaved to paper.
• as sashimi, with grated fresh ginger.
• as seared fillets, black and crisp from a hot flame, dancing with lemon zest and onions, and splashed with oil, like they serve it in Spanish beach towns. 

Each bite was an astonishment in possibilities: a hundred worlds in two tiny fish! This will go down as the most marvelous thing that has happened to Boston mackerel in my life, and the best $17.81 I’ve spent to dazzle my guests with a restaurant’s pageant of delights.

Half of all ads these days tout some company that has cut out the middleman and can now offer lower prices. Octo does it in bivalves.

In short, Octo is a remarkable development in fish. I can’t think of another spot that does this. Of course, there are restaurants that take the day’s market catch and do something fresh to it, especially Barcelona’s legendary Cal Pep. But none that I know of allow the customers to go to the market themselves; none have taken demystification and transparency to such extremes. As a California Riesling maker once told me, anyone can walk down the street in a big coat. It’s a lot harder to walk out there in a Speedo. While our best restaurants have always led life with big-coat sauces and preparations, Octo is out there showing it all. 

This must be what happens when an esteemed chef seizes the means of production. That chef is Tim McKee, most recently of the great and lamented La Belle Vie, and seven other restaurants, including tapas megaplex Solera. Octo Fishbar is his eighth restaurant, hence the name, and his first since becoming a partner in fish supplier The Fish Guys, who provision both Almanac Fish and most of the good restaurants in town. Half of all podcast ads these days tout some company or other that has cut out the middleman and can now offer lower prices. Octo does it in bivalves. 

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Seafood soup and Lobster Roll from Octo Fishbar

It does offer a full menu for diners less brave and adventurous. The lobster roll is one for the ages, served in a tall tower of Salty Tart milk bread, which has been butter-griddled until it takes a turn toward divinity. On top of this goes a lush haul of pink meat, the natural sweetness foregrounded by pairing it with miso-touched mayonnaise and a sprinkling of Japanese furikake seasonings. 

Ready for the best fish tacos in town? The grilled hamachi collar tacos deliver a hunk of grilled hamachi, speckled with char and still hot from the grill; a sleeve of foil-wrapped tortillas; and a tray with pickled onions, limes, thinly sliced radishes and jalapeños, and two salsas. You make your own tacos, and it’s just as fresh and honest as any fish tacos anywhere. 

I didn’t love everything I sampled at Octo: The grilled bread with uni butter, for instance, tasted too metallic and fishy. I ended up trying the Buffalo-wing treatment of blowfish tails on nearly every visit—mainly, I admit, because my dinner companions were always so excited about that Simpsons episode where Homer nearly dies after trying blowfish prepared by an incompetent sushi chef, who looks at a diagram and murmurs, “Poison, poison, tasty fish!” In any event, order this version and you get a fun anecdote and fried fish lost in a spicy stickiness.  

I tried a beef skirt steak in a caramelized soy preparation one night, and it was delicious. I never experimented with visiting the attached butcher Peterson Craftsman Meats and sending a package of beef to the kitchen. But one night I did see another table where the parents feasted on a seafood tower and dispatched their older teens to the butcher shop. They paraded back through the dining room with a trophy steak in butcher paper, held high. 

Desserts come from the attached Salty Tart, and the pies on my visits were the same as ever: great. 

It’s a wild success, this concept of bundling a butcher, a fishmonger, a baker, a brewer (next summer), and a fish house under one roof at the Market House Collaborative—if the point is having fun and eating well in the Twin Cities. Yet, is this a level of intimacy we, the dining public, feel ready for? 

Trust, of course, defines every relationship between a diner and a restaurant. We trust restaurants to feed us, to pour the wine listed on the menu. We trust them with our engagement dinners and birthdays and our breakups and our friendships. To make that leap, we hide that there’s any vulnerability at all. White tablecloths and white hats camouflage the fact that these chefs could murder us merely by sending out the rest of the blowfish, and we could murder them by simply staying home.  

Octo Fishbar is a revolution above all in trusting the customer to be adventurous and confident in the matter of unfamiliar fish. It was almost 300 years ago that Jonathan Swift quipped, “He was a bold man, that first ate an oyster.” 

Octo Fishbar allows us to be bold again.

Three "Out There" Bonus Picks to Try

The ocean is a big, strange place—and so is the retail case at Almanac Fish. What to reel in? 

For Bizarre Foods fans 

Barnacles: “The conditions have to be right, they’re not farmed,” explains Octo Fishbar chef-owner Tim McKee. “It’s pretty dangerous to go get them. The ones we have are usually out of Southern California, 2 or 3 inches in diameter.” McKee blanches them, peels them, and serves them chilled. “They have a real abalone/crab flavor.” 

For aspiring elite chefs 

Baby octopus: Throw these diaphanous morsels on your backyard Weber and they’ll slip through the grates. “We have grilled those on a plancha, or with a sort of al pastor marinade, and we’ll squeeze in some extra orange,” reports McKee. 

For the Japanese bar-snacker

Skate cheeks: The French adore these boneless morsels of buttery fish. But McKee says they’re even better in a Japanese karaage treatment, quickly marinated, briefly fried, and served with Japanese mayonnaise and togarishi.