Photos by Caitlin Abrams
P.S. Steak
If anyone has a beef with the evolving menu at P.S. Steak, it ought to be this guy.
I defy anyone who hasn’t lived in the Twin Cities for quite a while to review P.S. Steak. There’s the address, for one thing. The condo building at 510 Groveland—prestigious and grand—has held one or another of our most significant restaurants since the building’s dining spaces first opened to the public in 1978. Most notably there was The 510 Groveland under Austrian chef Klaus Mitterhauser, which birthed a generation of important chefs, including Lucia Watson. Later there was La Belle Vie, the Twin Cities’ leading light for a decade, which birthed another generation, most notably for our purposes, chef Mike DeCamp, who led the day-to-day operations at La Belle Vie until its final year. That’s when he jumped ship to join Jester Concepts, the company which owns and runs Borough, Parlour, Monello, Constantine—and now P.S. Steak.
The “where” of a restaurant is not always significant. But here at P.S. Steak, it’s no exaggeration to say there are families now with four generations of anniversaries, wedding receptions, and first dates that took place beneath the 510’s chandeliers and its crown moldings fit for royalty.
P.S. Steak is, one would think at first glance, a steakhouse. And here in the Twin Cities, steakhouses are everything. The majority of our longest-lived restaurants have been steakhouses: The roll call includes Jax Cafe (b. 1933), the Cherokee Tavern (b. 1933), Murray’s (b. 1946), Mancini’s (b. 1948), and Lindey’s (b. 1956). And let us not forget our chef-driven steakhouses, where not everyone gets a steak, such as Burch Restaurant (b. 2013) and The Lexington (b. 1935, reborn 2017), and of course our longtime category-killer steakhouses like Manny’s (b. 1988) and its elegant St. Paul rival, The St. Paul Grill (b. 1990).
I can’t list every steakhouse, but just let the record show the following: 1. Minneapolis and St. Paul are steakhouse towns; 2. The 510 is Minneapolis’s preeminent restaurant space; 3. We now have P.S. Steak, a steakhouse, in the 510.
So why isn’t this restaurant an immediate, stunning success?
Here are the things I do not like about P.S. Steak, as experienced in the weeks after it opened in early January. The shrimp cocktail is weird: The kitchen serves its version straight-skewered and poached, then coated with dry Japanese furikake seasoning and sesame seeds. This renders the shrimp oddly dry and grainy. The croutons on the celeriac Caesar salad are the size of mini-muffins. They’re a little tangy, sort of like crisp bread pudding lumps—perplexing. The bacon appetizer, that steakhouse staple, comes loaded with too many ingredients, like extra-salty semi-dried tomatoes, and a dill aioli that takes the bacon’s fat and makes it overwhelming.
Some of the cocktails, by Twin Cities bar star Jesse Held (who is beverage director for all of Jester), display a similar weirdness. Take the elaborate shochu sour called “Aren’t You a Little Young for Full Contact?,” in which candied yuzu and green Japanese matcha float on a froth of egg white. This creates a textural effect of sandiness. Not fun.
Here are the things I love about P.S. Steak. The Denver steak, cut from the chuck of the American version of Wagyu cattle, is a melt-in-your-mouth experience. It’s everything you’d ever want in a steak. The hash browns stand up as art: The potatoes—baked, shredded, shaped, and fried—become spoonable like cream on the inside, while the exterior turns crisp as lace. (For those keeping score at home, I think they’re better than those at Manny’s, and before now I thought Manny’s were the world’s best.)
The avocado-and-crab toast comes to the table silky and sea-fresh, with a housemade brioche uniting the dish. I also swooned for the spaghetti with clams, a perfect version with well-seasoned al dente pasta covered with a generous pile of garlicky clams.
The house version of French onion soup is stellar. Here, rye gnocchi floats beneath a lid of wonderfully gooey cheese. Lower a spoon into the brown stock and you find the sort of pure umami that should go in the dictionary under the word “beefy.”
More I loved at P.S. Steak? Try the sour cocktails, like “That Ain’t Lake Minnetonka”: a pretty aquavit-and-lemon number with drops of dill oil floating on the surface—islands of fragrance in a brisk little sea. The baked Alaska delivers a version for the ages. Pastry chef Jo Garrison wraps it in a piped mountain of pliant marshmallowy meringue and fills it with salty caramel ice cream. The server sets it aflame before you with a spiraling fire of green chartreuse. It’s a mountain! It’s a party! There’s nothing a dessert can do that this bit of splurgey fun doesn’t accomplish.
Beyond the tableside flames, service strives toward a very formal solicitousness, and for the most part pulls it off. The free valet parking is a particularly welcome bit of hospitality.
Still, the most striking and memorable part of P.S. Steak may be the way the back dining room has been transformed (with the help of local firm Shea Design). What was previously a museum-like series of big rooms now centers on a see-and-be-seen full bar—a dark and moody renovation that evokes Ravenclaw library. The best restaurant spaces tell you, I am somewhere very special, and that’s the experience here.
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Denver steak at P.S. steak
The Denver steak delivers an American version of Wagyu beef.
Do the bits I adored at P.S. Steak outweigh the bits I recoiled from? Definitely—though largely because I’ve spent time at two other Jester Concepts restaurants, Borough and Monello, that opened exactly like this one. Each debuted with dishes that loaded on 15 to 30 percent too many ingredients, and seemed in their own ways weird and overdone. A year or two later, like a golfer determined to master putting, the kitchen has stopped swinging wide and short, and started tapping elegant shots to the hole.
Talking to chef Mike DeCamp after my third visit, I began to feel that the real problem at P.S. Steak may be that I was feeling all judgy (it’s my job . . .) in the face of kitchen teamwork and a chill vibe.
I asked DeCamp if P.S. Steak was more in his mind a restaurant or a steakhouse. The answer, it appears, would largely depend on how the guests respond.
“It’s hard to know what’s going to happen when you open a restaurant,” DeCamp said.
I asked if this dish or that dish would likely stay on the menu. (It’s helpful to tell readers about dishes they can actually order themselves.) DeCamp, in turn, offered different variations of “nothing’s set in stone.”
I asked, too, about the different menus: one available in the lounge and a different one in the back room. I was told not to take the split too seriously. “Everything’s available everywhere,” he said. “I have a hard time saying no to people if they want something.”
So what can we say, with any confidence, about the future menu at P.S. Steak? Spring will apparently introduce a brunch service. Game birds, such as pheasant and squab, will likely come off the menu, to be replaced by other meats: elk, wild boar, bear.
Bear? Will the kitchen, I asked, get a whole bear to butcher? Or do bears come smaller, like veal calves. Also, bear? DeCamp seemed to consider this meat a normal thing for a steakhouse to serve, as he tries to figure out what customers want.
And that’s when I realized—every Twin Cities generation gets the steakhouse it deserves. For the Greatest Generation: Jax and Murray’s. For boomers: Manny’s and The St. Paul Grill. For Gen X: The Strip Club, which everyone loved, though it shuttered nonetheless, suffering Gen X’s eternal fate. Now the millennials get P.S. Steak, our most feedback-interested, friendly, and collaborative steakhouse.
As DeCamp told me, “Sometimes restaurants open up as they should be, but sometimes they adapt as they go. We’re pretty chill I guess.”
510 Groveland Ave., Mpls., 612-886-1620, psmpls.com
