Is it possible, in our landlocked state, that we can call 2018 the year of the fish?

With Octo Fishbar (289 E. Fifth St., St. Paul; 651-202-3415; octostp.com), the casual, seafood-centric restaurant in the new Market House Collaborative in Lowertown, we’re off to a good start.

The restaurant is the creation of James Beard Award-winner Tim McKee. He christened it “Octo” because it’s the eighth restaurant he’s created.

A few years ago, McKee closed his upscale French restaurant La Belle Vie, which had been considered the pinnacle of fine dining in the Twin Cities. Then about a year ago, McKee quit one of his consulting gigs and partnered with The Fish Guys, a company well-known among restaurateurs for supplying some of the freshest, most diverse fish, but is largely unknown to the general public.

The partnership prompted some head scratching around town, but McKee said he had something like Octo in mind.

“I thought one of the good opportunities for The Fish Guys was to have their own retail outlet, as well as a restaurant that worked in tandem with it,” McKee said. “I don’t know if I envisioned it quite the way it turned out, but I definitely thought about it.”

As for how it turned out, the restaurant is the center of the collaborative, a mini food hall of sorts, which also includes a Fish Guys retail counter, a Peterson Meats retail counter (a first for both purveyors), a Salty Tart bakery and cafe, and eventually, Birch’s on the Lake will open a brewpub in the space, too.

The businesses are symbiotic: Octo gets all its bread, buns and desserts from Salty Tart, and its meat and fish come from Peterson and The Fish Guys. You can also buy seafood or meat from one of the counters, and Octo’s stellar staff, which includes chef Shane Oporto, who was the head chef at La Belle Vie when it closed, will prepare it for you on the spot. You pay the cost of the protein, plus $12 for the first 12 ounces and $1 for each additional ounce.

We had a worth-every-penny dry-aged strip steak this way, which when prepared included a pile of fingerling potatoes and a (frankly superfluous — the meat was that good) sauce.

The rest of the menu at Octo Fishbar, which changes frequently, is very seafood-centric, with unusual items like buffalo-style blowfish tails and hamachi collar tacos sharing the page with ubiquitous favorites like steamed mussels and a lobster roll. Most of the items on the menu are meant for sharing, and servers recommend you order at least two plates per person.

One of our favorite things on the menu is something that’s head-scratchingly hard to find in a Minnesota restaurant: sunfish, lightly breaded and quickly fried. The dish, called Shore Lunch Sunnies ($14), is served with a lemon wedge and tartar sauce, just like at our favorite dive bars in Wisconsin. The fish is crisp outside and tender in, and if you’ve come with a big table of friends, our best advice is this: Order two plates.

Speaking of big tables, that’s something Octo is made for (and the restaurant does take reservations). There are cushy booths that comfortably seat six, and the more people you come with, the bigger the seafood tower you can order. The towers are made up of cold and raw preparations, including some of the tastiest oysters we’ve had in Minnesota. Also peel-and-eat shrimp, plump, cooked mussels, chilled and served back in their shells with a smoky pimenton oil, raw clams and, on some of the bigger towers, crab claws and jellyfish salad.

The raw options don’t end there. You can (and should) order a fantastically fresh and umami tuna poke ($10), crudos, aguachiles and more, depending on what the kitchen has in stock.

Back to cooked dishes, the steamed mussels ($10) at Octo might seem pedestrian compared with the more exotic items on the menu, but they are floating in a wonderfully earthy, slightly spicy guajillo/beer sauce and come with two hunks of buttered and spiced Salty Tart sourdough that make perfect sauce sponges.

Soft scrambled eggs ($12), one of our favorite things in life, are studded with baby squid, delicately spiced with chorizo fat and topped with a swipe of creme fraiche and crispy little fingerling potato chips.

The Octo lobster roll ($21) is nontraditional, in that it uses Japanese flavors like miso and furikake, but even traditionalists might be swayed by its fluffy Salty Tart milk bread, split and griddled until deep golden brown. It’s served with hot, crisp shoestring fries dusted with Old Bay seasoning.

Blowfish tails ($10) are prepared in the style of buffalo wings and served with an addictive nori “ranch” sauce. McKee said the dish has been a decent seller, and that as long as people know how to eat them (the meat runs along a bone in the center of the tail, so you have to eat around that), they enjoy the flavor. We did, too, even if a few people at the table wondered what the tails would taste like without two fairly overpowering sauces.

The tails aren’t the only place where the seafood element of the dish seems to get lost. An (admittedly delicious) octopus bolognese ($16) disappointed my octopus-loving husband, who asked, “Where’s the octopus?” I gamely pointed to a small tentacle used as garnish.

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Game on! Tailgating takeout ideas for game day We had no complaints, though, about the clam bratwurst ($9), in which little clam flavor was apparent (the clam is mixed with pork). The bratwurst, served on a squid-ink-stained roll from Salty Tart and topped with thinly sliced hot peppers and a bit of grainy mustard, features a proper pop and subsequent explosion of juice upon biting into it. It is plainly one of the best we’ve had in Minnesota.

Whatever you eat at Octo, and you should definitely eat there, we suggest you end with a slice of Salty Tart pie, preferably of the key lime variety.