Blackfish

Blackfish opened its doors in September 2007 on Truro Center Road in a space that was originally a blacksmith shop, and then the well-loved Blacksmith Shop Restaurant for over 50 years. Chef and restaurateur Eric Jansen’s original idea was to open Blackfish as a gastro pub. Excited by April Bloomfield’s success at the Spotted Pig in New York City, he sought to do something similar in Truro. The name change was part of a conscious rebrand in an effort to reinvent the restaurant as something new, but the concept was adapted and refined to better suit the Cape Cod clientele once they opened.

“You only get one chance with the locals,” Jansen says, and you cannot force a concept, so he found a middle ground with an inventive upscale menu featuring seafood, meat and a selection of burger options, ranging from traditional to topping choices such as a panko fried duck egg and Hudson Valley foie gras torchon.

Even on a Monday night, the parking lot begins to steadily fill just before 5 pm when the restaurant opens, and by 7:30 customers walk up the road from the overflow parking spots. Blackfish is open from the first week of May through the first week of November and they average about 200 customers a night; they always have more requests for reservations than they are able to accommodate. Jansen is quick to give credit to his staff. “This is a family, this restaurant, we hang out together after work and in the off season, and I think that comes across and resonates with customers.” The turnover is low and even the staff that come through the H-2B visa program return each season.

Blackfish has 81 seats, including the front and back dining rooms and the bar, which is first come first serve. The decor is a mix of art that Jansen has collected and old relics from the space’s blacksmith shop past. A brick wall of the dining room showcases an anvil and giant bellows, and open ceilings with exposed beams add to the rustic barn feel while letting light and air into the somewhat dark space. The concrete bar by Derek Oliver hints at two whales with giant glowing eyes. An iron blackfish marks the top of the driveway and the front door is a big metal fish skeleton.

Blackfish prides itself on using fine ingredients and executing their menu well. “We embrace farm to table, but we look at it in more of a concentric circle sort of way,” Jansen explains. “Meaning we try to source locally right here in Truro, then we go out a little bit further and source a little bit more and then we go out a little bit further… so for us farm to table also means Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. As far as protein goes that’s not seafood related, we’re able to source some pork or beef sometimes locally, but for the most part we look to farm co-ops off Cape [to source meat].” He says that even with the recent farming boom on Cape Cod, the prohibitive cost of real estate means the farms are still limited, especially ones that raise livestock. “Another problem,” Jansen says, “which is a great problem to have, is that we’ve gotten so busy. It is hard for us sometimes to get the quantity [of local or foraged ingredients]. We take whatever we can get, but sometimes that only comes out to ten orders.”

These varying farmed and foraged ingredients often make their way into the three to five changing nightly specials and larger, more consistent crops of local produce, such as lettuce from Longnook Meadows Farm, are peppered throughout the seasonally changing menu. An expanding chef’s garden starts at the back of the kitchen and continues down the length of the parking lot and grows strawberries, mint, nasturtiums, blueberries, and other herbs and edibles.

“What we’re really looking for is what we feel is the best,” Jansen says. “If we’re not curing our own bacon, we really like Nueske’s out of Wisconsin. It’s not local and it’s not that close, but it’s really good bacon…super smoky and it’s what we like in bacon!” We includes Kevin Mandeville who has been the chef at Blackfish for six years. He was hired as the sous chef to cover Jansen’s days off, but quickly began to take on more responsibility.

“Kevin is faster than me and he’s better than me, so sometimes you just have to step aside,” Jansen says. Jansen still covers Mandeville’s night off and the two work together on the weekend nights. They also collaborate to test and refine the menu. With Mandeville as the creative force behind most of the food at Blackfish, Jansen is able to keep up with his other endeavors, which include Local 186, his burger restaurant in Provincetown, where he is also the chef some nights of the week; Crush Pad, the 26-foot food cart located at Truro Vineyards that he designed and operates; and a small catering company that he recently started with his two Blackfish business partners. Jansen says the concept and design are some of his favorite aspects of being in the food business and he is already looking around for his next project.

“We’ve tried to create a symbiotic relationship between the farmer and ourselves. We pretty much take whatever they’ll bring us and then we figure out how to use it,” Jansen says. Small quantities that don’t go into specials sometimes go to the food truck and are incorporated into the menu there. Mandeville is excited about a delivery of turnips that just arrived from a half mile up the road, “They’re baby Hakurei Japanese turnips… beautiful little white marbles, they’re so peppery and amazing. I’m going to roast them and figure a side out.”