Sea Change

More elbow room means more bold flavors at Little Fish's big brother.

by Trey Popp

By: Jessica Kourkounis CRAZY EIGHTS: Mike Stollenwerk, chef/owner of fish, puts out wow-inducing plates like this meaty octopus carpaccio, dressed with citrus and olives.

[ review ]

It's not often you find chicken skin on a fish-house menu. But Mike Stollenwerk isn't your run-of-the-mill seafood chef. And chicken skin, it so happens, was one of the things he wanted to do at his second restaurant that he couldn't pull off at his first.

Stollenwerk has been the chef/owner of Queen Village's Little Fish since 2007. If chefs were graded on the praise they receive per square foot of cooking space, his tenure would have ruined the curve like David Foster Wallace in a college fiction workshop. Were that BYO any tinier, you'd have to toss a sauté pan out the back door every time a wine bottle came in the front. This October he got more room to swing his skillets, opening fish in the old Astral Plane on Lombard Street.

The restaurant is fully liquor-licensed and seats about three times as many people as its diminutive sibling (where Stollenwerk has ceded head kitchen duties to former sous chef Chadd Jenkins), including nine in soft black leather at a dark granite bar in a small front room. Except for the addition of oysters and a few raw-fish options, its menu isn't much longer than Little Fish's: half a dozen appetizers, half a dozen entrées. But the extra elbow room has allowed him to step up his cookery in some unexpected ways.

Like with that chicken skin. It comes in confetti-size crisps atop a salad of roasted beets, adding another layer of fatty crunch to a sprinkling of pistachios. Sculptural tufts of lamb's lettuce placed atop the beets were so exquisitely unblemished that a snapshot would have looked Photoshopped. The idea came from a plate of leftover beet pierogies Stollenwerk brought home from Little Fish one night and cooked up with roasted chicken breast. "I wanted to do it there," he told me over the phone, "but there literally wasn't enough space for chicken skin."

Considering that he doesn't even have to separate it from the bird — there's actually a New York supplier that sells organic chicken skin on its own — those are some constricted quarters.

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Stollenwerk's octopus carpaccio shows the chef at his unconstricted best. He slow-cooks Spanish pulpos in an aromatic broth, and stuffs them into a tube while they're still hot to naturally gel together as they cool. Meanwhile, Kalamata olives spend a day and a half in a dehydrator before joining the plate with sectioned clementines. The result is extraordinary. Sliced thinly but not quite shaved, the octopus had an exquisite meatiness that wet olives would have sentenced to death by oil slick. Instead the Kalamatas burst upon the tongue in pellets of pure flavor, cutting the sweet citrus in a combination that came off like an unconscious expression of Morocco's scorched orange and olive groves — haunted only by a dusting of espelette pepper, as though some Spanish ghost had slipped across the Straight of Gibraltar into the whitewashed kitchen of a fisherman's wife on the other side.

Not everything is so evocative, but Stollenwerk has a talent for imbuing simpler preparations with enough complexity to engage your attention without fragmenting it. A pillowy cake of peekytoe crab, bonded with just enough lemon aioli to barely hold it together, rode atop the autumnal sweetness of delicata squash in a carrot reduction. Creamy West Coast oysters come with a clean cucumber-lemon mignonette; briny East Coast specimens get a richer treatment with Banyuls vinegar. Poaching monkfish in milk coaxed its dense flesh into a texture as delicate as a poached egg blossom floating in clear broth. I found the flavor subtle and dreamy; a companion thought it overly subdued by the dairy. Either way, the rich short-rib ragu it swam in made for a soothing balm against the evening's dark chill.

The only thing that fell flat was a flavorless, flabby shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico that floated in a bowl of creamy grits and okra coins. The supporting cast was fine, but if you can't land good shrimp for the leading role, better to pull the plug on the whole production. This dish might work better in another season, but that's no excuse to serve a lackluster version now. (Nor is there a good excuse to serve skate or monkfish, both currently designated as overfished species — but conscientious choices heavily outnumber ethically problematic ones on Stollenwerk's menu.)

While Stollenwerk is making the most of his expanded freedom in the kitchen, other aspects of the BYO-to-license transition aren't so smooth. For all the tightness of its tables, Little Fish exudes a homey intimacy that fish's sparely decorated dining room lacks. The bar gives your eyes more to rest upon, including a semi-open kitchen, but the most striking sight is the scrum of staff clotting up the room. Why are there two hostesses on a podium platform that's got barely enough space for one? (Evidently, to provide entertainment in the form of collisions and tumbling menus.) You'd think that all those bodies would add up to efficient and knowledgeable service, but they didn't for me.

On the bright side, the wine list extracts a lot of variety from the limited spectrum of fish-friendly quaffs. Whites run the gamut from tart Vinho Verde to dry Muscadet to offbeat varietals like Jacquère and Piquepoul Blanc. Reds are mostly light-bodied, but range from Gamay and Pinot Noir up to lustier Rhone-style blends. Pricing is fair for Philadelphia, mostly coming in below triple retail and sometimes closer to double, which is pretty good considering that some of these vintages had production runs of only a few hundred cases. The bar mixes half a dozen cocktails, but does them ably — homemade ginger ale for the Pimm's Cup is a nice touch — and charges between $7 and $10, less than many downtown peers.

I'm excited to see more of what Stollenwerk can do in this setting. When he's on, he cooks with an eloquence that requires neither a server's explanation nor compensatory décor. Little Fish makes for a more romantic date, no doubt. But there are things a full-fledged marlin can do that a mere guppy can't.

fish | 1708 Lombard St., 215-545-9600, fishphilly.com. Dinner served Sun.-Thu., 5-10 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 5-11 p.m.; late-night menu available Fri. and Sat. till 1 a.m. Reservations recommended.

(t_popp@citypaper.net)