Joan's in the Park co-owners Susan Dunlop and Joan Schmitt didn't get everything on their wish list when they purchased a former pizzeria in St. Paul's Highland Park neighborhood and converted it into their dream restaurant.
Namely, an efficient kitchen. Theirs came equipped with a double-deck pizza oven and little else. But Dunlop, who runs the kitchen (Schmitt presides over the dining room, beautifully), invested in a few induction burners for boiling water and has otherwise demonstrated a tremendous capacity for creativity by devising a menu that rarely reflects its pizza-oven roots.
That Dunlop and Schmitt know their way around a steak is no surprise; between the two of them they've racked up more than 20 years of experience in the steakhouse business, including tenures at Morton's and the Capital Grille. "We don't want to be thought of as a steakhouse, but with our background it would be embarrassing to not have a good steak on the menu," said Dunlop. "It's what we know."
And how. With no grill at her disposal, Dunlop cranks up the lower half of her pizza oven to 800 degrees and relies upon cast-iron skillets to insert a tasty sear into salt-crusted prime New York strip and filet mignon. They're terrific, and reason enough to visit. Here's another: seafood. Last month, Dunlop was using that upper oven to transform halibut into a thing of beauty, crusting it with crushed pistachios and dressing it with traces of mint and a pretty tomato confit. She's now replaced the halibut with scallops, but on one recent evening, I happened to drop by when she was test-driving cod and, wouldn't you know it, the results might have been her crowning achievement, the fish's moist and gleamingly white flesh juxtaposed against a crisp, golden crust.
It's only natural that Dunlop puts her pizza oven to its intended use, turning out a handful of oval-shaped flatbreads, their pliant crusts dressed with an agreeable array of ingredients. The pick of the litter is one that combines a terrific house-made fennel/pork-shoulder sausage with roasted red peppers and luscious burrata.
In the spirit of the restaurant's modern-day supper-club aura, the side dishes are a definite highlight, from ultra-creamy mashed potatoes to miso-glazed roasted carrots. Salads are perfectly pleasant but little more.
Starters are more impressive. I loved the meatballs, seasoned with golden raisins and thyme and served with a cool, herb-laced yogurt sauce. Ditto the lovely wet-cured salmon, layered on crisp toasts swiped with a bright parsley pesto.
Desserts don't break any new ground, but they get the job done. A fragrant, molten-in-the-center chocolate cake accomplishes all that is required of it, a heaping slab of tiramisu hits all the right spongy-coffee-mocha notes and a moist red velvet cupcake arrives with decadent cream cheese icing.
Would I change anything? Well, yes. Vegetarians have little to order, and nothing in the way of entrees. Some of the menu's ingredients -- white asparagus, anyone? -- are so out of season that they're practically back in season. A more judicious approach would occasionally have an outsized impact.
The words that would most accurately preface the bar's foray into wine cocktails would be "ill-fated." Some prices come with a side of sticker shock.
The cozy if somewhat plain setting tops out at about 50 seats, an intimate, let's-go-out-for-date-night environment that remains too depressingly rare in this Land of 10,000 Mammoth Restaurants. There are expansion plans afoot, however. Dunlop and Schmitt are navigating their way through the approval process to transform an adjacent parking lot into a patio.
"When the weather turns warm, we might want to open for brunch on Sundays," said Dunlop. That possibility -- and the prospect of steak and eggs, Dunlop-style -- had me doing some mental arithmetic: How many more weeks until Memorial Day?
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