Fans of Sea Salt can soon savor some of the beloved summertime spot's signature dishes year-round at home.

What's baking: A new cookbook celebrating the popular park restaurant's two-decade history at Minnehaha Falls, by co-owner Kait Ziemer-Davis and retired Star Tribune journalist Gail Rosenblum.

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.

• "Everyone has a story, everyone has a connection," Rosenblum, who interviewed founders and regulars, tells Axios.

What they're saying: Ziemer-Davis — who joined Bill and Jon Blood as a co-owner in 2023 — didn't worry about "giving away" secret recipes, because Sea Salt's success is as much about the vibes as it is the food.

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

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

• For some older specials, "there wasn't even a recipe to go off," 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.

• 🤐 Yes, but: The owners drew the line at revealing the recipe for Sea Salt's beloved "Cali" sauce.

🐟 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. They 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 locations are off the table for now, Ziemer-Davis says: "Sea Salt is Sea Salt."

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

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

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, but walked away over the initial revenue-sharing terms.

• The Park Board circled back the next year.

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

💰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, according to Park Board data provided to Axios.

Tell a fish taco fan

🚉 Metro Transit's Blue Line will shut down for seven weeks to conduct major maintenance starting Monday. Buses will replace the light rail trains until Aug. 19. (Star Tribune)

🏀 Top Timberwolves assistant Micah Nori — known for his colorful halftime interviews — has been hired as head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers. (ESPN)

⚖️ The Ramsey County Attorney's Office will not seek to overturn convictions in six murder cases that involved embattled ex-county medical examiner Michael McGee following an independent audit. (WCCO)

• In a seventh case, prosecutors will let defense attorneys decide whether to challenge the convictions.

🚔 Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey announced a "local and national search" for a new police chief. He pledged to hire a permanent replacement for Brian O'Hara by approximately mid-October. (Fox 9)

💰 The Robbinsdale School Board, which recently made major staffing cuts after an accounting error, will send a $343 million school funding and facilities question to the November ballot. (CCX News)

Eviction filings in the Twin Cities metro are on pace for a record year, tenant advocacy organization HOME Line reports.

Why it matters: The data make it increasingly clear that cracks are appearing in the dam of crowdfunding efforts that kept immigrant families housed — and eviction filings low — early in the year, at the height of Operation Metro Surge.

By the numbers: Through May, year-to-date filings were up 3.6% in the metro compared to last year — the previous record-holding year for evictions — and up 11.5% over the previous three-year average.

State of play: A $40 million infusion of state funding into longstanding, government-run rental assistance programs is on the way. It will arrive at local providers between July and September, MPR News reports.

Go deeper with this joint MPR/N.Y. Times story

Expect large crowds unusually excited to spot window-dwelling cats in the homes of Minneapolis' Lowry Hill East this evening.

• The ninth annual Wedge LIVE Cat Tour — the occasionally imitated, still un-topped feline spectacle of the Twin Cities — begins at 6pm in Mueller Park.

If you go: Register for a free ticket.

Re-live the 2024 tour