Dining Review: Dune Brothers in Providence

Local oysters and Jonah crab claws. Photo by Angel Tucker

When it first opened as a seafood shack in Providence more than seven years ago, Dune Brothers was a transient memory made permanent — a summer fish fry with no season. Situated on the west end of the Providence River Pedestrian Bridge, the owners settled into a bed of crushed seashells under the shade of downtown office buildings. Ten picnic tables sheltered beneath Narragansett Lager umbrellas, occupied by a spattering of local college students and families with toddlers and canine children in tow. The menu was streamlined, the kitchen speaking to a thin but sentimental slice of American life: eating dinner with your hands in a world that prohibits even the thought of work.

Orange blossom panna cotta. Photo by Angel Tucker

But even a fish fry has to run like a real business and New England dictates indoor dining once October passes. These days, husband-and-wife team Nick and Monica Gillespie run two Dune Brothers shacks in downtown Providence and Riverside, as well as their latest endeavors: a diminutive seafood depot in Fox Point as well as a new outpost inside Providence’s Track 15 food hall. The Fox Point restaurant space is designed to do two things at once: It serves as a market for fresh fish to go, and operates a full kitchen for twenty diners. The menu is equally bifurcated. One half is simple and irreverently portioned — an offshoot of the original beach offerings — while the other half is seasonal and as serious as food gets. 

The dining room isn’t radically larger than the downtown shack itself, but the aesthetic remains more outside than in. With undulating cabinetry by Matthew Soule, ocean-hued tile and floating scup on the glass, the space maintains an airy intimacy for a crowd that’s as eclectic as Ives Street itself. As for the playlist, it’s perennially peppy, categorized by a grad student eating oysters as the “ultimate white girl playlist”: Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, Charlie XCX and Ariana Grande. The tongue-in-cheek attitude is as present here as it is at Dune Brothers’ two shacks, but there’s far more brewing.

Lobster roll. Photo by Angel Tucker

The best way to eat your way through the evolving repertoire is through a study in contrast. Fish sandwiches ($15), french fries ($10), and fish and chips ($21) are so cartoonishly large that even regulars burst into laughter when they come out like a Mardi Gras float. The Dune Brothers’ version of a filet o’fish is coated in potato chips and loaded with sweet slaw, housemade bread-and-butter pickles and a slice of crispy Vermont cheddar cheese. Like a hamburger, it proves that you don’t even know what a perfect version is until it ends up in your mouth and changes your life — even if there  is zero chance that you’ll be able to keep this thing intact and still feed yourself. 

The lobster roll is equally oversized, knee-deep in butter and served with fries cooked in beef fat and doused with Old Bay. There are plenty of other small plates — chowder laden with salt pork, occasional clam cakes, a variety of oysters, and anything that comes up fresh from the ocean that day. The kitchen thrives by doing a dance that is part choregraphed — you will always find fried fish — and part free-form, because the day’s catch ultimately rules the menu. 

The interior of Dune Brothers includes a seafood market. Photo by Angel Tucker

New England clam chowder with a Narragansett. Photo by Angel Tucker

You can rightfully say Dune Brothers is a mom-and-pop shop to the core: It revolves entirely around Rhode Island waters and the community of fishermen whose lives are spent bringing up the daily haul. But the restaurant also has a radically different side to it, one that brings seafood to the plate not with a wink and nod, but with a pronounced and poetic sense of romanticism. 

Salt-and-pepper crabs come out disassembled, piled high like a rock tower coated in herbs ($17). It’s such an odyssey to get at the sweet crab meat that much of it falls into the intense pockets of crispy garlic, pickled Fresno chilis and chopped scallions. This is a dish that eats like a dirty martini: You’ll end up messy and disheveled, but certain that revelation has just coursed through your veins. 

That’s the key to the kitchen’s more refined entrees. Each one places fish in a webwork of vegetables so dense that it feels like a walk through the forest. But rather than feeling encumbered, each dish eats with refined clarity. Skate wing is seared in brown butter with capers and sultanas — a synchronicity of salty and sweet ($29). But the accompanying salad of kohlrabi, cabbage, apple and fennel is like meandering into A Midsummer Night’s Dream, complete with ample mustard seed. If the behemoth fried filets of fish speak to the heat of summer, Nick uses vegetables to place seafood against a spring backdrop, suddenly delicate and dreamy. 

Spicy Caesar salad. Photo by Angel Tucker

Poached cod with turnips, carrots, pearl onions and sprinkles of caviar ($37) is so far removed from the fish and chips as to seem like a different species altogether. But this is the mantra at the newest incarnation of Dune Brothers: Members of this food family are vastly different and unflinchingly proud of their contradictions. 

The final emphatic punctuation comes in the form of dessert — a crock of orange blossom panna cotta ($11) that’s enormous in size but gentle in flavor. It’s topped with a layer of orange juice and olive oil that seeps into the custard as you eat it. Both bright and creamy, it’s a paradox that makes perfect sense in this multifaceted hub. 

There are several seafood restaurants spread out across the state, some of which sit in enviable spots perched directly on the water. But with the possible exception of Matunuck Oyster Bar, none feel quite as in sync with the hurdles and the exultation of fishing itself. It’s disorienting to have such vision coming out of a tiny space on a quirky block that’s nowhere near the ocean. 

But Nick’s love of the trade — and his fascination with the many incarnations of seafood — translates with ease on the plate. It’s true that a lot of people stop in for nothing more than a bowl of chowder and a pile of fries — that’s an essential version of Rhode Island dining, one both familiar and comforting. But there are several paths to explore on this menu, many of which are wild and strange and the truest testament to the ocean.

_______________________

DUNE BROTHERS

170 Ives St., Providence, 249-9650, dunebrothers.com

Open for lunch and dinner Wednesday–Sunday, 11 a.m.–9 p.m.; market 9 a.m.–6 p.m. Wheelchair accessible, but the dining room is tight. Street parking. 

Beans with scallops and razor clams. Photo by Angel Tucker

CUISINE:

Modern blue-collar seafood meets its highbrow cousin. 

CAPACITY:

Twenty (dining room); sixteen (patio).

VIBE:

Shoulder-to-shoulder delight. 

PRICES:

Snacks and appetizers: $3 (per oyster)–$24; entrees: $15–$38; dessert: $11. 

KAREN’S PICKS:

Oysters, spicy Caesar, salt-and-pepper crab, lobster roll, any seasonal fish dish.