Photos by Caitlin Abrams
In Bloom open fire
The medieval, 25-foot-long open fire at In Bloom may remind you of the Ren Fest—but that’s no turkey leg.
I have long held that only two elements in all God’s creation can rivet human attention, hour upon rapturous hour: your own newborn baby and a flickering fire.
Why? Because these are the two absolute requirements for human survival. There’s no future without babies, and hardly one without a cooking hearth. Consider this point from the 2009 book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, by anthropologist Richard Wrangham: Follow a chimp around a jungle, trying to eat what they eat, and you’ll eventually die. Follow them around and cook what they eat, and you’ll get through. In this sense, the name Homo erectus seems like a misnomer. We are Homo gastronomicus. We’ve been cooking food for at least one million years, as archaeologists have discovered while rooting around in African caves.
And we’re going to keep at it, but now in new and terrific ways, because the modern world has never seen a cooking fire like the one at In Bloom!
I mean, maybe some medieval European king, some Aztec emperor put together something like this. But I’ve never even heard of such a thing in the modern era. It’s 25 feet long. It’s a 25-foot-long wood fire! The far northern end features a fully contained wood-fired pizza oven. Next to that, running several yards, wood-fired grills line the hearth, which is tall enough to stand in (although you’d be standing in a fire!). During the day, stockpots the size of mini-fridges bubble on top of the flames, like witches’ cauldrons. In fact, they hold bones and chicken feet, for stock.
The southernmost chunk goes to what the cooks call “the inferno,” a leaping bonfire of roaring, roasting flame. A long steel bar called the trapeze strings over the inferno (and all the open grills). The chefs use steel hooks to dangle whole animals or animal legs over the fire, for roasting or smoking, before they’re grilled. Watch that area through the course of the day and you’ll spy a score of poussin, a brace of venison legs. Ever see 20 poussin on hooks over a roaring fire? If you’re not Henry VIII, I’d guess not.
This absolute dragon’s maw of a ceaseless blaze consumes three or four cords of Minnesota hardwood every week. Green wood for seasoning, hardwood for heat. The restaurant needs to stay open seven days a week, because the fire can’t really ever go out. (The pizza oven would take forever to bring back to cooking temperature.)
In Bloom offers counter-style seating in an arc around the fire so you can really look at this monster. (Don’t go if you’re wearing a wax nose: It will melt.) If you sit there for a while, your mind will likely wander to iron-mongers, and molten metal, and Dante. You may nervously look above the thousand degrees of crackling flame at the sprinkler system. If you do, please know that if something goes wrong, those sprinklers spray chemical fire retardants, not water. Because this fire is much bigger than water.
•••••
In Bloom venison
Venison: The food of European nobility (and now, commoners in St. Paul).
This vast and astonishing hearth turns out to be the creation of chef Thomas Boemer, who is known for Minneapolis’s fine-dining champion Corner Table, and the Revival mini-empire. This operation includes a cult fried-chicken spot in Minneapolis, a large St. Paul restaurant, and now a sister restaurant in Keg and Case, focused on smoked meats.
Boemer told me he dreamed it up the day he started Corner Table, but the execution proved impossible. So he spent years tinkering with outdoor live-fire kitchens for events, held in parking lots and such. When he won the national Grand Cochon pork-cooking competition, part of the prize involved traveling to eat at Extebarri, in Spanish Basque Country. This place, often mentioned as one of the world’s best restaurants, employs its own live-fire cooking line (though it’s far less extreme). It was at Extebarri that Nick Rancone, Boemer’s business partner, declared, We have to do our hearth restaurant. When the Keg and Case market development came calling—that is, when the opportunity arrived to turn an abandoned brick box into the biggest live-fire line in the country, if not the world—Rancone and Boemer did it.
It may be the most awesome restaurant we’ve ever had in Minnesota. Awesome in the sense that the human mind can’t quite fathom 25 feet of fire as a working kitchen. There are no stoves at In Bloom. If a cook here needs something sautéed, all of it happens above embers, coals, or flames. In the one-upmanship of restaurant cooks (and home cooks) around the world, Boemer just slapped down a hand of four aces—hell, make that eight aces!—and ran the table. Awesome.
Get the venison. In Europe, it’s the rare and prized meat of royals only. Boemer found a local farmer to raise venison for him, and guaranteed he’d buy up quite a lot of it. That means there’s a whole venison section of the menu, and it’s all excellent.
The venison tartare is a must-order. Here’s where you experience Boemer’s fine technique, acquired from training with Alain Ducasse. The venison has been hand-cut, hand-cleaned, and attractively minced. It comes to the plate tossed with buttery olive oil, chives, crunchy pistachio, salty bits of preserved lemon, heaps of pickled mustard seeds, and a snowfall of grated and preserved egg yolk. It tastes like the forest meadow, rich and clean.
The roast venison leg—carved off the bone with long knives—reaches your table berry red, gilded minimally with a hunter’s sauce of roast bones and berries, torn leaves, and charred carrots. This venison dish serves four or more, and the composition brings to mind a forest floor. It’s hard to eat, because fire-roasted venison can be tough. But it’s delicious, and it makes you feel like you’re doing something primal and essential in the woods. Which doesn’t often happen when there’s a nice wine list at your side.
The wine list, as it happens, is not just nice but excellent. A frappato here, a catarratto there. A dry-farmed, spontaneously fermented Mendocino carignane. It’s pretty clearly the mature-career wine list of a successful restaurateur, namely Nick Rancone, who is done buying wine for people who need to see a Wine Advocate number next to their bottle. He’s trustworthy in even his most esoteric tastes; I found everything I tried delicious.
Non-venison fire dishes prove equally satisfying. The cockles, an elemental bowl of steamed clams, taste briny and herbal, served with a scattering of foraged greens. Mushroom dumplings are dusky and tender. (Talk about local: They’re sourced from Forest to Fork, the market’s onsite mushroom grower.) Every table seems to order the bowl of hot-roasted olives, grapes, almonds, and caper berries. And you should, too: They ease you into the space of awe with something that tastes familiar, but bold.
While you experience this marvel, crowds will amass on the other side of the white-iron scrollwork that separates the restaurant from the masses out at Keg and Case. They may linger out there, licking ice cream cones, and staring past you to gaze at the fire. They likely don’t see the desserts that the cooks slip into the pizza oven, like the cylinder of marshmallow containing a disk of ice cream, frozen together rock solid. Yet, when exposed to the fire, the outer millimeter of this concoction swells and chars, leaving the ice cream frozen. The chefs whip it from the oven and set it in crushed cookies on a cold plate. Yes, it’s a fancy version of s’mores.
It’s also just what you want after watching a fire for a few hours. It’s about as far from a camping fire ring as you can get, and exactly as close.
In Bloom at the Keg and Case Market, 928 W. 7th St., St. Paul, 651-237-9630
