Sea Salt cookbook celebrates 20 years at Minnehaha Falls

What to expect: Recipes for fan favorites like crab cakes, ahi burgers and grilled catfish po'boys, along with stories behind the dishes and a look back at Sea Salt's rise as a Twin Cities summer institution.

• "There is no degree of separation between anybody I talk to and this place," Rosenblum, who interviewed founders and regulars, tells Axios. "Everyone has a story, everyone has a connection."

What they're saying: Ziemer-Davis didn't worry about "giving away" secret recipes, because Sea Salt's success is as much about the vibes as it is the food.

• "You can't recreate a day like this, right?" said the longtime Sea Salt employee, who joined Bill and Jon Blood as co-owners in 2023, on a recent sunny afternoon by the falls.

Between the pages: Here are some highlights from the book and our interview with Ziemer-Davis and Rosenbaum, who is Ziemer-Davis' mother-in-law.

🍤 One of the challenges of the project was making Sea Salt's staples accessible for home cooks. Many fried favorites were off the table.

• Other recipes had to be altered to account for different cooking methods — think firing up filets on a grill instead of a flat top — or scaled down to work in smaller batches.

🍽️ For some older specials, "there wasn't even a recipe to go off... it was just kind of coming up with an approximation of how we did it," Ziemer-Davis says.

👩‍🍳 Once they settled on what to include, Ziemer-Davis recruited a crew of current and former employees to help test all the recipes over two days during the winter.

🤐 The owners drew the line at revealing the recipe for Sea Salt's beloved "Cali" sauce.

• "It's just the one thing that people are always like, 'oh, can I get extra of that?'" Ziemer-Davis says.

Yes, but: The "Very Good Sauce" included in the Mushroom po'boy recipe gets close.

🐟 Coastal Seafoods, where Jon Blood got his start, has been its supplier since day one (it's now owned by Chicago-based Fortune Fish & Gourmet).

🤝 Sea Salt is known for its close-knit seasonal staff, with many employees returning year after year.

• In some cases, multiple generations of the same family have spent their summers working the grills and counters.

👋 The owners try to take the off-season off. Jon Blood, for example, spends much of the winter traveling and fishing.

🥪 They also use the time to think up new twists. "The Sandwich Room" window, which debuted in 2024, was a "Bill Blood fever dream" that became reality when they decided to add a separate beer stall.

• More recently, they worked to rearrange the space to make room for more non-alcoholic options.

❌ More locations are off the table for now. "A lot of people would try to get [Jon Blood] to expand, to franchise, [but] this is it for him, and he wants this one glorious place for six months of the year," Rosenblum says.

• "Sea Salt is Sea Salt," Ziemer-Davis agrees. "I think to try and recreate the final form somewhere else just wouldn't make sense."

What's next: At least seven more summers by the falls. Sea Salt's current lease runs through 2033.

• The book, published by University of Minnesota press, drops July 14.

A look back at Sea Salt's start

Sea Salt as we know it came close to never existing at all, Rosenblum writes in the book.

The big lightbulb: Blood had dreamed of opening his own fish shack since his teenage visits to Cape Cod and Maine.

• But it was an oyster po'boy — devoured after a break-up — that inspired the then-29-year-old former Coastal employee to actually give it a go.

Flashback: After exploring lobster boil and oyster bar concepts, Blood and his co-founder Chris Weglinski started looking for a "run-down 3.2-bar to turn into a seafood shack."

During that process, they learned that seafood spot Tin Fish was opening on Bde Maka Ska.

• "S**t," Blood recalls saying in the book. "They got exactly what we want."

🌳 In 2004, they pitched the Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board on leasing the Minnehaha Falls building— which then housed a "little refectory" that sold burgers, sunscreen and stamps — but walked away over the initial revenue-sharing terms.

• The Park Board circled back the next year, with an offer to pilot the seasonal concept.

☔️ That first lease included a clause that Sea Salt wouldn't owe the Park Board anything on rainy weeks.

🍿 The early menu featured popcorn, hot dogs, catfish po'boys and marlin tacos.

• 😬 They fried the fish in a propane turkey fryer on the front steps.

💰Sea Salt made $257,000 in sales that first summer. Within two years, the figure had tripled to $880,000.

• Last summer, it brought in $5.3 million, Park Board data provided to Axios shows.