Eat Fresh catches, fresher ice

Ice: It's cold. It's hard. It apparently loves Coco. And now it's being used in pretty fantastic fashion by the guys behind Riffle.

Riffle's seafood-crazed, NY-transplant owners decorated the Pearl joint with refurbished dock wood, can often be found fishing under the Fremont Bridge (don't worry, no nine-eyed sturgeon on the menu), and developed a badass ice program for which the chefs actually freeze 300lb blocks and go all Leatherface on them with chainsaws to create temporary serving trays and coolant for cocktails & oysters. That ice comes in handy on a raw bar where citrus-cured fluke and sea urchin & quail egg shots need to stay cool, and adds panache to dishes like Wahoo Paillard w/ "Green Goodness" dressing, which's transferred from an ice plate to a totally boring non-ice one and served raw side down/hot side up. Things get even more complex with bigger dishes like fava-seared salmon w/ smoked beef tongue, veal skirt w/ poppy seed spaetzle, and a petrale sole with fried bones, which describes pretty much every day for Bizzy, Layzie, Wish, Krayzie, and Flesh-n.

At the bar, craft cocktails like Negronis and the vermouth/Benedictine/absinthe Chrysanthemum are very awesomely served from pressurized taps (just like beer!) and poured over huge chunks of cut-to-spec chainsaw ice, which some crazy dude will surely do in an SVU episode at some point.