The Rake Magazine

Month: October 2007

  • California Dreaming

    Last spring brought a nasty shock. I was walking down a leafy side street off Como Avenue, hoping to admire in passing the jolly gingerbread woodwork around the eaves of the tumbledown duplex where my POSSLQ and I shared our first Minnesota home. The place was in pretty poor nick when we rented it twenty years ago; the waste pipe for the kitchen sink (located for some reason on the landing) was held together by duct tape, squirrels nested noisily in the roofing felt. But in happier times it had been a boyhood home of Governor Floyd B. Olson. Indeed, a previous tenant had tried to have it listed on the National Register of Historic Places, but apparently there was no enthusiasm in official circles for starting a Floyd B. Olson Boyhood Home Tour—the future governor’s family had moved house rather often. No doubt the authorities thought he was better remembered by half of Highway 55 and one of the world’s biggest bronze double-breasted suits.

    Anyway, as I rounded the corner I saw not crumbling timber but a large brown hole. This dust inbreathèd was the house, the wall, the wainscot, and the mouse (no shortage of mice). Above the hole, memories swam suspended in a patch of sky: Roses are red/ Violets are blue/ Please will you be/ My POSSLQ. This empty air was where we opened the sherry which had been a parting gift from my previous employer; it was where we survived on short commons till the first paycheck came in, a month after our arrival.

    I recall tearing into the envelope and announcing—as any Englishman might—that we should celebrate by going out for curry. Except, of course, in those days there were no curry houses in the Twin Cities. We compromised on an Afghan place, where we chose to sit on the floor cushions, feeling full of Eastern promise—the POSSLQ, fortunately, is better upholstered than I am.

    Today we would have plenty of choice. The proliferation of curry houses is one of the best things to happen in the Twin Cities during the past ten years. Not that they form an oenological opportunity. I have met wines that will stand up to curry but none yet that forms as happy a marriage with it as IPA, the India Pale Ale brewed by Victorian box-wallahs for precisely that purpose.

    This happy marriage is no more than you might expect. The standard curry-house menu derives, like IPA, from the long symbiosis between the peoples of the British Isles and those of the Indian subcontinent; it is not “authentically” Indian. Chicken tikka masala, now (“studies have shown”) England’s favorite national dish, was probably invented in Birmingham, not in Bombay; the balti certainly was.

    The Indian restaurant menu, in fact, is the latest stage in a long relationship that is at least as much cultural as culinary. In the University Church in Oxford is a marble memorial engraved in Latin. On one side of the plaque stands a conventional Roman-style Mourning Victory, but on the other is a gent with a Yul Brynner haircut holding a writing tablet inscribed in Sanskrit. In the pediment is a Brahminic bull. The Latin commemorates Sir William Jones, an English judge in Calcutta in the eighteenth century, who, without losing his own, absorbed so much of the local civilization that he discovered the links between the Indo-European languages.

    And there are older culinary links as well. You might not take to mulligatawny soup, but kedgeree is a pleasure; originally khitchri, an Indian confection of rice and beans, it became in the hands of Anglo-Indian cooks a mixture of rice, flaky fish (usually smoked haddock), sliced hard-boiled eggs, and cayenne pepper (with parsley to taste). Try it at home.

    And with it try Kendall-Jackson’s Vintner’s Reserve Chardonnay, a bright, refreshing white wine with a smoky center, from the Sonoma Valley of California, available in Minnesota at around fifteen dollars. Kendall-Jackson are the New Critics of the wine world. They seem to think their product should speak for itself, and so tell you little about its history or terroir, for that is what I gather advertising folk call “backstory” and the rest of us information that might lead to a rounded appreciation (those who are ignorant of history, after all, are condemned to repeat it). Though, come to think, it is perhaps this deliberate, fresh-eyed innocence that is itself the backstory of California. Anyway, if this wine speaks for itself, what it says is “Hi.” And the kedgeree has enough history for both. They make a marriage a good deal more pleasing than the concrete confection I fear is about to rise on the site of Château Floyd B. Olson. Eheu fugaces …

  • Frontline & "Cheney's Law": A review.

    Tonight. 9 PM, TPT. Ch.2 (Tomorrow, 9 p.m. ch. 17)

    Once whoever comes next and historians begin clearing rubble from the administration of George W. Bush and trying to explain how this disaster happened the smart ones will start by boring into Dick Cheney’s bunker. If there’s any doubt left that Cheney is the ideological and tactical tent pole of the W* circus, tonight’s episode of “Frontline”, called “Cheney’s Law”, strips away another thin layer uncertainty.

    The essence of “Cheney’s Law” is the vice-president’s breathtaking disregard for Constitutional niceties and his aggressive pursuit of highly-parsed, highly self-serving legal opinions. Opinions supporting a broad expansion of executive power in favor of the current administration, with little or none of the required congressional oversight.

    This expansion, steeped in secrecy so strict key players like the Secretary of State (Colin Powell) and National Security Advisor (Condoleeza Rice) were kept out of the loop on the most provocative decisions, extends from Bush’s notorious “signing orders”, vividly detailed in a Pulitzer-winning article by the Boston Globe’s Charlie Savage, coercion of the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith, (with regards to Bush-Cheney’s interpretation laws concerning extraordinary rendition and torture) and a smattering of the squeeze put on the now infamous nine U.S. attorneys shown the door for being insufficiently loyal/acquiescent to the Bush team.

    To the well-informed, little here is new. But the less-than acutely aware will be stunned. It is still astonishing-to-appalling to hear a first-person description of the famous hospital bedside scene with Alberto Gonzalez and White House Chief of Staff Andy Card trying to get then Attorney General John Ashcroft — no one’s idea of an ACLU whacko — to sign off on another extension of a plainly illegal domestic surveillance program.

    Producer Michael Kirk, who has obviously cultivated respect and sources from previous documentaries (“Rumsfeld’s War”, “Endgame”, “The Lost Year in Iraq”), gets Goldsmith, a lifelong ideological conservative — now in the news trying to put distance between himself and what he regards as the Cheney team’s reckless disregard for the rule of law — to talk at length about his experience in the grip of Cheney and David Addington, Cheney’s personal lawyer.

    Author Ron Suskind turns up in support of the basic thesis, that it is Cheney from who policy directives flow, with Bush as little more than a rubber stamp. Suskind, Pulitzer Prize winner and former senior national affairs writer for the Wall Street Journal, is best known for his two most recent books, “The Price of Loyalty” about former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s brief, unpleasant experience with Cheney and Bush, and the even more jaw-dropping, “One Percent Doctrine”, a genuinely startling behind-the-scenes look at how completely systematized Cheney and Bush’s chief strategist/public sock puppet act has always been.

    (Check out the chapter on then Saudi Crown Prince — now King — Abdullah’s visit to Bush’s Texas ranch for everything you need to know about who is actually running this government, and who pretty much does as he’s told.)

    By now documentaries like this are well past preaching to the hardened choir. A fair number of independents and political agnostics know something is profoundly screwed up, maybe even criminal. “Cheney’s Law” solidifies the “reality” around the last six years.

    (It was Suskind who got the following classic quote from a member of the Bush team:

    “The aide said that guys like me were, ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ … ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’.”

    The question for the commercial news media — the vaunted newsrooms of CBS, ABC and NBC — is where are they in raking together all the disparate
    but now available facts on this, dare I say, epic story? True, in 15 minute bits, “60 Minutes” has delivered some goods. But the skeptic in me says commercial news will wait until well after Dick Cheney has left office to program the obvious — if then.

  • Bite-sized Sensations

    What could be your key to fame and glory, the secret to a happy marriage, and the only way to make it through the entertaining season with grace and aplomb? Why, it’s the cocktail party, dahling. Libations aside, the best reason for hosting this type of gathering is that success doesn’t depend on a mass of properly roasted meat and a harmonious table. Scoring a hit is much easier when you can focus on the area your eaters care about most: the hors d’oeuvre.

    Think about it: How many times have you been enthralled by the appetizer portion of a restaurant menu, only to be bored and dismayed by the entrées? Those inspired small bites are seductive, for this is one area where chefs get to play a little, test some boundaries, and still leave you wanting more. Isn’t that also the recipe for a really great party?

    Hors d’oeuvre, that nightmare for proofreaders, is a French phrase meaning “outside of the work.” Originally an architect’s term for any structure not incorporated into the main building design, it somehow crept into the culinary lexicon as the appetizer served before the main dish. Similarly, an amuse-bouche, or “mouth amuser,” is an even smaller one-bite treat, usually offered in restaurants as a gift from the chef. Nearly every culture has some sort of noshing culture: Italians eat cured meats and marinated vegetables for their antipasto, Peruvians snack on tasty fried bocaditos, Russians put out a spread of zakuski to nibble while sharing vodka, and the Spanish have made an art of sampling tapas.

    Starters, as hors d’oeuvres are more popularly termed, can come stacked into tiny towers, rolled and stuffed, filled and folded; they include dips, spreads, salsas, and fondues. They can be foie-gras fussy or chip ’n’ dip simple. When considering what to serve for a party, it’s simple to hit upon the right combination: Know thy guest. Always consider those for whom you cook, and the rest will fall into place.

    A truly victorious hors d’oeuvre is one that speedily disappears from the tray. People may claim to love your Grape-Nuts Balls, but if you have thirty left over at the end of the night, it was a bomb; time to regroup. Champion appetizers tend to be simple but loaded with flavor; there may be much advance prep work, but the final construction should be easily executed, as you’ll have to keep refilling that tray. Bonus points go to the bites that don’t drip, fall apart on the way from tray to mouth, or require ladies to chomp down in unseemly nutcracker doll-like ways. Below are a few that fit the bill.

    Crostini: The versatile standby
    Arrange baguette slices on a sheet tray. Brush the rounds with olive oil and dash with sea salt. Place in a 400-degree oven for about ten minutes, or until nicely browned. Remove from oven and let cool. Smear with a mixture of goat cheese, mascarpone, and lemon zest, and perch a kalamata olive on top. Or top with Roquefort and drizzle with lavender honey. Or lay on a fat slice of ventresca tuna topped with a curl of roasted red pepper and one rosemary leaf. Or try a hunk of dark, dark chocolate. Or do whatever moves you.

    Cuke Cups: Fresh elegance
    Peel and slice a seedless cucumber into two-inch chunks. With a melon baller, scoop out the center of each, leaving a bottom. Dice sashimi-grade tuna into small cubes, toss with sesame oil, soy sauce, mirin, black sesame seeds, chives, and a touch of Sriracha. Spoon tuna into cuke cups and top with more chives.

    Bleu Cheese Chips: For the culinarily challenged
    Pile a bag of kettle-fried potato chips on a plate. Stir bleu cheese crumbles into crème fraîche to achieve a dressing consistency, and add a touch of Tabasco. Drizzle over the chips, top with more bleu cheese crumbles. No kidding.

    Deconstructed Guacamole: Built to impress
    Using toothpicks, skewer a half-cut cherry tomato with the flat side down. Then thread a sliver of white onion onto the skewer, a chunky square of avocado, a bit of peeled lime, and a flag of cilantro. Sprinkle with salt and pepper.

    Root-beer Float Shooters: A sweet novelty
    Using shot glasses, pour a dash of root-beer schnapps, a half-tablespoon of ice cream, and fill with root beer. Cap with a dollop of whipped cream.

    Frico Crisps: The cracker alternative
    Line a sheet tray with parchment paper. Grate small piles of Parmigiano-Reggiano, about two inches around, onto paper, spaced apart. Sprinkle finely chopped sage onto each pile. Place in a 400-degree oven for 45 minutes until mounds are melty. Remove from the oven and let cool for a minute. Lift rounds from tray with a spatula and mold them around the back of a metal spoon to give a curve.

  • Stage Mother

    Patricia Olive has no children. So you’d think she’d be spared that dinnertime nightmare: This one hates vegetables, this one eats only bologna sandwiches with ketchup, this one weeps about dead animals every time you serve beef. But when the Guthrie Theater staged Six Degrees of Separation in 2003, the veteran props manager got a taste of what it’s like.

    “In the play, a young con artist makes pasta for a huge party,” Olive says. “It had to be real because there’s a long scene where the actors are eating it. But one was allergic to wheat products and another one refused to eat anything with tomatoes, green peppers, or onions.” Ultimately, a compromise was concocted: rice pasta topped with blackberry applesauce that had been blended with a drop of yellow food coloring, making it a deep orange. “We spent a long time experimenting to come up with that.”

    But even with Olive’s hard work and careful planning, a new problem emerged: permanently stained napkins that had to be thrown away after each show.

    “We discovered the actors were pretending to eat this vile pasta, then spitting it into their napkins,” Olive laughs. “So over the course of the run, the portions got smaller and smaller.”

    Olive grew up in Detroit. She earned a degree from Western Michigan University in industrial education, and started her career in 1976 as a shop teacher in the Kalamazoo public schools. But she was always involved in theater: community, summer stock, experimental.

    After nine years as a teacher, she took a job as the production manager for a small theater company in Florida. And she’s been in theater full time ever since. She worked in New Jersey, Tennessee, and Colorado before a friend mentioned in 2002 that the Guthrie Theater needed an experienced prop manager.

    “I’d only ever driven through Minnesota,” Olive says. “But the Guthrie has such a wonderful reputation. Then I met with [artistic director] Joe Dowling. And that was it.”

    In addition to consulting on sets and costumes, Olive oversees every single item actors use on stage: stuffed animals, bells, power tools. She has an associate manager, Sarah Gullickson, and a staff of six, plus a sewing area, a prop room in the theater, a warehouse on East Hennepin Avenue, and an on-site kitchen for preparing food that will be consumed during performances.

    She had to fight for that last amenity.

    “When the architects sent over the plans for the new theater, the prop kitchen they gave us was only six feet wide,” she recalls. “That wasn’t even enough room to open a dishwasher or oven door.” After some negotiating, Olive got a real working kitchen, about the size you’d find in an efficiency apartment.

    Still, much of the food that appears on stage is fake. The seedcake served by Miss Temple in the current production of Jane Eyre, for instance, is made of painted upholstery foam, joint compound, and Flex glue; the “seeds” actually are pockmarks made with the end of a black Sharpie pen. Nevertheless, Olive and her crew did bake an authentic cake to use as a model.

    In another currently running play, The Home Place, the actors eat shortbread and cold beef sandwiches—which are real, prepared by a prop liaison during each performance—and drink “Irish whiskey”—actually watered-down, unsweetened, decaffeinated instant iced tea.

    “Often we need to provide something that looks like alcohol,” says Olive. “Juicy Juice is our wine of choice—we’ve found if it’s spilled on a costume it will wash out.”

    Some plays call for a combination of real and fake food. In the recent production of Private Lives, for instance, the actors both ate and threw brioche. Rather than waste dozens of rolls a day—and deal with the inevitable crumbs that would be left all over the stage floor—Olive bought a couple fresh-baked brioches from Rustica, the bakery in South Minneapolis, and made up a basket of fakes. The biggest challenge, she said, was marking them so actors could tell the difference.

    Over the years, one of the oddest things she’s run into, again and again, is an actor who will smoke for a part but refuses to eat meat. (Theaters are a rare exception to the statewide smoking ban in public places, which went into effect October 1; for the sake of art, you can still light up onstage.)

    “Often we’ll make steaks out of bread sprayed with Kitchen Bouquet, this brown spray-on coloring that’s supposed to make food look pretty,” Olive says. “My job is to make the food look good to the audience, and I try not to make it repulsive. But it doesn’t have to be great cuisine. That’s the actors’ job: to look like they’re loving every bit of what they’re eating.”

  • Pro-Fusion

    You can argue whether globalization is good for the planet or good for workers, but when it comes to gastronomy, the influx of foreign flavors has definitely enlivened the local dining scene.

    Mention fusion cuisine nowadays, and people are likely to think of the high-end stylings of celebrity chefs like Wolfgang Puck and Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Puck’s 20.21 menu at Walker Art Center combines East and West in dishes such as Shanghai Maine lobster with crispy spinach and Chinese risotto, while Vongerichten’s menu for Chambers Kitchen occasionally marries East and Midwest—as in a Berkshire pork chop with shiitakes and snowpeas, or a tempura salt-and-pepper walleye.

    But look a little further, and you’ll find fusion everywhere: Somali restaurants like Safari and Hamdi serve roasted goat over Italian spaghetti, a legacy of Italian colonialism. When local Ecuadorians get homesick, they go to Charly’s Polleria in northeast Minneapolis, or the Guayaquil Restaurant on East Lake Street, and order a heaping plate of chaulafan-fried rice with ham and chicken, which they learned to love at the Chinese restaurants in Quito and Guayaquil. At BonXai in St. Paul, a Hmong family took over a low-rent steak house, and added Thai curries and Italian pastas to the menu—along with a seared tuna salad that probably came from Japan via California, but can now be found in different versions on half the menus in town. The banh mi sandwiches available for takeout at Vietnamese delis like Saigon Express and Vinh Loi are made on baguettes, and slathered with mayonnaise and pork pâté, relics of the French colonial influence. And Vietnamese restaurants aren’t the only places serving banh mi anymore: The new Blackbird restaurant at 50th and Bryant in Minneapolis serves banh mi on focaccia, alongside curried lamb meatballs, crawfish hotdish, and pizza topped with Brie and apples.

    Then there’s a sophisticated type of fusion, as at Ngon, a stylish new Vietnamese bistro in St. Paul’s Frogtown. According to its website, Ngon “strive[s] to use locally produced ingredients whenever possible and do our best to support the local economy; from using organic Peace Coffee in our Vietnamese coffee mix to having an exclusively Minnesota beer list” (it also boasts a sophisticated wine list). The flavors here are distinctly Vietnamese—their pho (beef noodle soup) is one of the best in town—but you’ll also find such hybrids as Vietnamese beef over pappardelle noodles, a superb ahi-tuna mango salad, and a succulent lamb shank with pho spices, served over lemongrass rice.

     

    Locally speaking, fusion isn’t exactly new; East and West have been meeting in Minnesota for decades. Minnesota chow mein, with its rich green slurry of stewed celery, minced pork and crispy fried noodles, is unknown in China, but has been a tradition here since at least the 1930s. Cooking teacher and restaurateur Leeann Chin has introduced generations of Midwesterners to the joys of cream-cheese wontons and Chinese chicken salad. (The bar menu at 20.21 pays tribute to this venerable tradition by offering both a Chinese chicken salad and mini-burgers of Kobe beef topped with a wasabi aioli.)

    Back in the day, restaurant critics and food snobs like yours truly used to turn up their noses at cream-cheese wontons because they weren’t “authentic.” But one good thing about globalization is that it’s putting that whole silly conversation about authenticity to rest. What’s authentically Japanese? Tempura? Nope—introduced by Portuguese sailors in the sixteenth century. Tonkatsu? Another Western import, originally known as katsu retsu, which was how the Japanese pronounced cutlet.

    The Japanese did invent teppanyaki cooking shortly after World War II as their own version of East-West fusion, but it really took hold in the U.S. thanks to immigrant chef Rocky Aoki, who built his Benihana chain of Japanese steakhouses on the premise that (as quoted in a Harvard Business School case study) “Americans enjoy eating in exotic surroundings but are deeply mistrustful of exotic foods.” And what about the spider rolls, rainbow rolls, and other specialty rolls served at so many local Japanese restaurants? They trace their ancestry to the California roll, invented in Los Angeles in the early ‘70s. Mt. Fuji, the Chinese-owned sushi and hibachi restaurant in Maple Grove, takes sushi innovation one step further: its “French-style” sushi includes rolls like the Treasure Island, filled with yellowtail tuna, blue crab, and crunchy tempura crumbs, topped with flying-fish roe in neon shades of red, orange, green, and black. This is a fantasy version of sushi that has never been seen in Japan or France.

     

    At its worst, fusion is a dumbing-down of ingredients taken out of context, for instance when steak, chicken, or fish are slathered with sweet-and-salty teriyaki sauce. But at its best, it brings together ingredients from different cuisines in imaginative juxtapositions—or, through innovative preparation or presentation of traditional dishes, offers a new insight or fresh appreciation.

    Saffron, in the Minneapolis Warehouse District, excels at fusion, even though Chef Sameh Wadi says he doesn’t like the term: “When I think of fusion, I think of wasabi mashed potatoes, and that turns me off.” But Wadi’s cuisine draws inspiration from all over the Mediterranean and Middle East: tagines and bisteeyas from North Africa; an eggplant dish from Turkey; a seasonal appetizer of white cheese and watermelon, popular in Egypt. (The menu changes frequently; don’t expect to find all those dishes when you visit.) The fusion concept is carried even further by combining those flavors with the aesthetics of contemporary cuisine. “In the Middle East we think about flavor only, and it’s not very pretty,” says Wadi. Best bets from Saffron’s current menu include the bisteeya, presented in a beggar’s purse, and the salmon and clam tagine, prepared with saffron, peppers, olives, fennel, and Yukon Gold potatoes.

    Some of the most creative culinary fusions come about when chefs from immigrant backgrounds get professional training and experience. Wadi was born in Kuwait of Palestinian parents, trained at the Art Institutes International in downtown Minneapolis, and worked at Solera and La Belle Vie before opening Saffron with his brother Saed.

    Hector Ruiz, chef-owner (with his wife Erin Ungerman) of the delightful new Café Ena in south Minneapolis, followed a similar path. Born in L.A. and raised in Mexico, he started cooking locally at Tucci Benucch in the Mall of America, and wound up in the Brown College’s Cordon Bleu Culinary Arts Program; that led to an internship with chef Alain Senderens at Lucas Carton in Paris (back before Senderens Restaurant renounced his three Michelin stars, cut his prices, and renamed the venerable restaurant after himself). The result is a repertoire in which more or less traditional preparations like the chile en hogada, a roasted pepper stuffed with ground beef, almonds and raisins, play off North American dishes like salmon croquetas, which are given a Latin flair. (At El Meson, Ruiz and Ungerman’s other restaurant, the menu has a more Caribbean flavor, but a similar versatility.)

    Sometimes fusion is very personal, as is the case with Nina Wong, who is ethnically Chinese, born in Vietnam, and raised in Minnesota, and Thomas Gnanapragasam, who is of Indian ancestry and was raised in Malaysia. When they married, Wong renamed her restaurant, formerly East River Market, the Chindian Café, and added daily specials like Indian Madras chicken and Malaysian nasi lemak to a menu of Chinese stir-fries, Asian noodle salads, and Vietnamese spring rolls.

    One of the most improbable fusions anywhere is the Ethiopian-Malaysian menu at T’s Place on East Lake Street in Minneapolis. Chef-owner Tee Belachew learned Malaysian cooking from his neighbor, Kin Lee, when Lee was the chef at the Singapore Restaurant in Maplewood; for a time, the two were partners at Singapore! in south Minneapolis. T’s Place offers traditional Ethiopian dishes as well as a sampling of Asian dishes prepared with Ethiopian seasonings. Lovers of steak tartare, for instance, will enjoy its Ethiopian counterpart, kitfo: chopped beef seasoned with clarified butter and light chili pepper, available raw, lightly seared, or fully cooked. Belachew’s Asian specialties, such as the spicy bean curd and spicy shrimp, don’t have the subtlety of versions you might find at Peninsula or Singapore! (where Kin Lee is again cooking, after a long absence), but for gastronomic adventurers they’re worth a try. Belachew struggled against long odds to open his own restaurant, and still faces big challenges, ranging from road construction on Lake Street to finding reliable staff, so I’m rooting for him; if the wait’s too long at the Town Talk Diner down the block, stop in at T’s.

    With Azia and now Temple, chef-owner Thom Pham has created two of the sexiest and most sophisticated-looking dining spaces in the Twin Cities. I admire Pham’s effort to break out of the low-budget Asian restaurant ghetto, so I wish I could be more enthusiastic about the cuisine. Unfortunately, most of my experiences at both restaurants have been disappointing. The Asian fusion at Azia invites comparison with other Eat Street restaurants that have livelier fare and lower prices, including Yummy for Chinese, Peninsula for Malaysian, and Quang and Pho Tau Bay for Vietnamese. And Temple’s prices put it in competition with hot spots like 20.21 and Chambers Kitchen, but gastronomically it isn’t in their league. My suggestion: Try both places at happy hour (daily from 3 to 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. to 2 a.m.), when half-price appetizers and cocktails are more in line with value.

     

    20.21 Restaurant & Bar by Wolfgang Puck
    in the Walker Art Center, 1750 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis; 612-253-3410; www.wolfgangpuck.com

    Azia
    2550 Nicollet Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-813-1200; www.aziarestaurant.com

    Blackbird
    815 W. 50th St., Minneapolis; 612-823-4790; www.blackbirdmpls.com www.blackbirdmpls.com

    Café BonXai
    1613 University Ave. W., St. Paul; 651-644-1444

    Café Ena
    4601 Grand Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-824-4441; www.cafeena.com

    Chambers Kitchen
    in the Chambers Hotel, 901 Hennepin Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-767-6999; www.chambersminneapolis.com

    Charly’s Polleria
    2851 Central Ave. N.E., Minneapolis; 612-789-9535

    Chindian Café
    1500 E. Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis; 612-676-1818; www.chindiancafe.com

    Guayaquil Restaurant
    1526 E. Lake St., Minneapolis; 612-722-2346

    Hamdi Restaurant
    818 E. Lake St., Minneapolis; 612-823-9660

    Mt. Fuji
    7094 Main St. N., Maple Grove; 763-315-5885

    Ngon Bistro
    799 University Ave., St. Paul; 651-222-3301; www.ngonbistro.com

    Safari Restaurant
    1424 Nicollet Ave., Minneapolis; 612-872-4604; www.safarirestaurantmn.com

    Saffron
    123 N. Third St., Minneapolis; 612-746-5533; www.saffronmpls.com

    Saigon Express
    2538 Nicollet Ave., Minneapolis; 612-870-7979

    Temple
    1201 Harmon Pl., Minneapolis; 612-767-3770; www.mplstemple.com

    T’s Place
    2713 E. Lake St., Minneapolis; 612-724-8868

    Vinh Loi BBQ
    2515 Nicollet Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-872-2282

  • Remembering Michael Brecker

    Thank you for the insightful and sympathetic comments about Michael Brecker [“Honorable Exit,” October]. Every day as I work, I listen to and come to know the work of countless musicians/composers … thank God for wireless headphones! It’s hard for me to believe that Michael Brecker was dying as I listen to Pilgrimage. I can’t say it any better than you did in your column. Keep up the good work!

    Homer Lambrecht, St. Paul
    Letter

  • Rocky Horror Picture Show: Apparently PG-13

    Wow, what a great article Ann Bauer wrote on The Rocky Horror Picture Show [“The Sweet (and Saucy) Transvestite,” October]. When my teenage daughters found a copy of the movie and wanted to know what it was about I described it as an “American classic.” I hoped they would file it next to McLintock! and The Quiet Man, two other movies I have described the same way. But no, they watched and enjoyed it as much as I did. Don’t worry, Ann, it didn’t do any permanent damage. They both are now college grads and successful adults. I think I will miss the stage version for now but your review was great.

    Dan Collins, Eau Claire, Wisconsin
    Letter

  • Hungering for a career change?

    I love [the Band Box Diner]. The chef, and I mean, a chef, came from Caffe Solo [“The Original All-American,” October]. He introduced garlic chicken with mashed potatoes to Minneapolis. He is so nice and runs a wonderful grill. You can have a classic diner dinner and chat him up at the same time. He even told me that if I wanted to take a vacation and relieve him at the grill for a day or two he would allow it. What an offer to a real foodie.

    Stu Borken, M.D., St. Louis Park
    Letter

  • St. Paul Public Libraries Forsaketh the Sabbath

    OK, let me see if I have this right. You published an article about the director of the St. Paul Public Library, and you made some errors, which you corrected and for which you apologized [Letters, October]. You could not fact-check the article, you say, because Minneapolis doesn’t have a reference librarian available on Sunday or Monday. Such a problem, and you would have my sympathy, but …

    On Sunday, from 1 to 5 p.m., you might have found answers at St. Paul Central, Highland Park, Rondo Community, St. Anthony, or Sun Ray. On Monday, various hours, all of the St. Paul branches, and the Central library, are open.

    If St. Paul is a problem for some reason, you could try the Ramsey County system, where all branches are open on Monday and several on Sunday.

    If St. Paul and Ramsey County give you the heebie-jeebies, you could try Hennepin, where the Ridgedale library is open on Sunday and all branches are open on Monday.

    I grant you, you might not find a bona fide reference librarian at each of these libraries at any given time, but a few phone calls could probably have tracked one down.

    I love the Minneapolis Central Library, but limiting yourself to Minneapolis for library services is just that: limiting.

    Editor’s note: Ellen, we’re surprised you didn’t mention all the other excuses we proffered for our complete lack of fact-checking that article. We also said the sun was in our eyes. If you really wanted to be helpful, you could have also offered us a list of stores that sell hats.

    Ellen McEvoy, St. Paul
    Letter

  • The Great White Wipeout

    Shame on you; the Twin Cities has a kaleidoscope of nationalities, races, and ethnic backgrounds [“What Do You Do?” October]. Yet you all chose to represent only a single minority in your profiles of real-world work. Seriously?

    Angelica Baldwin, Minneapolis
    Letter