Dining Review: Thick Neck in Providence

Dishes at Thick Neck, including kale salad, grilled mussels and swordfish belly skewers and spaghetti squash. Photography by Angel Tucker

Thick Neck can very easily catch a diner off guard. With its evocative name and bicep-baring logo with a burly arm reaching out of a clamshell, it initially appears aggressively self-satisfied. Walk into the restaurant tucked inside the Dean Hotel — which formerly housed Faust way back when and, more recently, the now-shuttered north — and you’ll see the space’s familiar layout and quirky aesthetic. There’s room for thirty-odd people with decor that still feels like a German beer hall that operates during Prohibition. 

Some of this is intentional: Tile patterns meander off into wood floors and various plants and candles pop up irreverently on the bar. A wooden screen hides the kitchen from almost no one. If there is an effective cloak, it’s actually the menu itself, which offers only the smallest glimpse — and often serves as a decoy — into the philosophy of Thick Neck’s chef and owner, Eric Brown. 

Brown has compiled a substantive resume, working in notable kitchens in Chicago. But much of what his menu will tell you is, simply, that you cannot know this restaurant until you eat in it. Maybe he doesn’t want to show his cards — or maybe he’s betting on diners who love a dare. But one thing’s for certain: This place has secrets waiting to be unveiled. The staff is young, exuberant and appropriately irreverent: “I’m not sure what he’s got going in that one,” says one server, about a cryptically described dish. “But I’ll eat that shit every damn day.” (Fully agree.)

Thick Neck chef Eric Brown. Photography by Angel Tucker

Most of the menu is a series of small plates that runs for $20 or less. There are usually two entrees that can occasionally inch up around $45 and while they’re always worth the investment, the goal should always be to try as many things as possible. Unlike Providence’s culinary kingpins — Persimmon and Oberlin jump to mind — Thick Neck will not immediately promise you the world and deliver. Instead, it offers very little and often leaves you breathless with bafflement. 

“I might be able to count on two hands the number of times I’ve been genuinely startled by a meal — and by that I mean bewilderment and joy in equal measure.”

“Caramelized fennel breads, our butter” says next to nothing. Is it a roll? A wedge of crusty bread? Neither. It’s a trio of dough disks that taste like cast-iron crumpets dotted with sweet fennel and served with a quenelle of herbed butter that is churned, cultured and salted by the team in house. The top half of the bread is just barely cooked while the lower half tastes like an open fire on the range. It’s unnerving and delightful how dichotomous this single bite is but it manifests everything that Brown’s food is: all things at once, and often contradictory. 

Littleneck clams. Photography by Angel Tucker

Perhaps the paradox he manages to pull off most often is just how sublime simplicity can be. Take, for instance, the Block Island swordfish belly skewers. Each $5 order is two bites of locally sourced fish harvested at its peak before swimming to warmer waters. And in each one is a fully charred exterior that gives way to the softest part of the fish, one that seems more oil than solid and heavenly as it dissolves on the tongue. 

Or let’s talk about the spaghetti squash with burnt seeds and parsley. Huh? Is this another faux noodle dish in herb sauce? Not even in the ballpark. It’s a lightly roasted, nearly raw swirl of squash dressed with burnt pumpkin seed vinaigrette, topped with pepitas and sprinkled with a dehydrated parsley powder that tastes like a slaw born out of the deep forest. Crunchy vegetables have always been fully in my wheelhouse and yet every bite of this was novel. Texture rules the plate but the flavor — three steps into umami — is good enough to drag your fingers through the remaining green ash. 

Equally elusive is the bluefish confit with potato crackers, which appears as a bowl of dip sprinkled with herb oil and doused with what looks like cream — though served just warmer than room temp. I could not figure it out, even as I ravaged it. It took several attempts at charming (unsuccessful) and one more at desperation to finally get the kitchen to crack and tell me it was a whipped puree of potato that soaked the fish, a medley that eats like the most luscious rillettes you could find in some hidden corner of France. 

Spaghetti squash. Photography by Angel Tucker

Perhaps it’s just egotistical to stew in my own surprise. I have thrown my whole heart into food for thirty years; everyone who knows me knows this. But I might be able to count on two hands the number of times I’ve been genuinely startled by a meal — and by that I mean bewilderment and joy in equal measure. It’s a bit like eating blindfolded, even though you can technically see. 

Word of advice: If your goal is to place all your attention on the people at your table, choose another restaurant. Brown’s food dominates the senses to the exclusion of all else. Scallop crudo isn’t an uncommon dish, not even in a mile radius from Thick Neck. But served with chopped almonds and raw, thinly shaved matsutake mushrooms foraged on Cape Cod, it becomes a combination that’s all about warring consistency: the silkiness of the scallop juxtaposed with a mushroom that suddenly tastes fibrous and is quickly overshadowed by the aggressive crunch of the almonds. 

Maybe the gnocchi with razor clams will be straightforward enough to actually talk to those around me? Nope. Sitting in a ’nduja butter that is both rich and sharp, the clams become so meaty that you can’t help but pick them out like prized medallions. Maybe the maitake and raclette lasagna was just a kitchen misstep, with nothing to cut through the monotony of mushroom? Wrong again. It’s a vegetarian extravaganza, cut into a slab held together by the thinnest sheets of pasta and the sheer will of cheese. 

A table filled with favorite dishes, including the kale salad with roasted ricotta apple agrodolce; littleneck clams with grilled pumpkin pimenton; spaghetti squash with sunchoke and taleggio cream; grilled Pemaquid mussels and Block Island swordfish belly skewers. Photography by Angel Tucker

There isn’t any common cultural thread that holds the menu together; nor is there any approach or technique that dominates. If the crudo is a study in restraint, then the donut cheese en croute is an elevated version of holiday party brie. It does, however, give bitter greens a reason for living and preserved strawberries the opportunity to thumb their noses at simple jam. 

There’s not really any rhyme or reason to Brown’s unadorned kitchen or the somewhat spartan space. And though there are some really compelling cocktails, they come in glasses small enough to conjure a fruity shot. So drinking isn’t the reason people are gathering around the two bars. The draw is the game Brown is playing with his customers: to confuse, to reveal and to reward. If only we were always young enough to discover food for the first time. If the opportunity arises that you can do so again — as it does here — grab it. It has nothing to do with pretension and everything to do with the pure pleasure of discovery. 

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Thick Neck

122 Fountain St., Providence, @eat_thickneck 

Open for dinner on Thursday, Friday and Saturday; brunch on Sunday. 

Wheelchair accessibility is easier through the hotel. Street parking. 

CUISINE: Modern. 

CAPACITY: Thirty-five. 

VIBE: An invite-only pop-up that you pray someone gets you into. 

PRICES: Small plates: $5–$25; entrees: $26–$46. 

KAREN’S PICKS: Anything. Seriously. 

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Eric Brown and Sarah Watts will be opening Frank & Laurie’s at 110 Doyle St. in Providence sometime in spring 2024. The new restaurant aspires to be a neighborhood retreat providing a wide range of daytime offerings centered around the cooking practices Brown has adopted over a decade of working in fine dining establishments and working closely with local farms.