Author: Ann Bauer

For his fifth birthday, in February of 1993, my older son received a watch from his grandparents. It was a black Timex with a rectangular face, digital read-out, and several complicated buttons for setting the date, time, and alarm. Waterproof, shatterproof. He wore it everywhere, including the bathtub and bed.

Andrew was a child with a precise and refined sense of time. He loved it. Clocks, hourglasses, sun dials. His favorite TV show was 60 Minutes, because it began with a wonderfully loud, ticking stopwatch that featured real moving parts.

April arrived. A Sunday, damp with a yellow-tinted sky. It was late afternoon before we realized somehow — an inconsistency: some radio announcer’s "top of the hour" newscast or a store that said it closed at 5 o’clock shuttered by 4 — it was Daylight Savings Time. We’d been lagging. I quickly prepared dinner, a ridiculous effort to keep our kids on schedule, while their father re-set all the clocks. As we sat at the table, he noticed Andrew’s watch, held out his hand, and said only, "Let me see it."

Our son unstrapped the watch and gave it over. But when his father started working the buttons, changing the time, Andrew began to scream. We tried to explain, both of us. But the facts became muddled; or maybe we never truly understood ourselves. Why did time have to shift time around? Who benefited exactly? Where was that hour we’d lost and would we ever really get it back?

Andrew ran from the table, crying, and locked himself in the bathroom. We went after him — his father, his brother, and I. "Come out," we told him. "We’ll put your watch back the way it was." But there were only hiccups and sobs and whispered words coming from the other side of the door.

"What’s he saying?" I asked Max, my younger son and Andrew’s only confidant.

Max was a sturdy, spectacled three-year-old. Sober and wise. "He says," Max told us patiently, " that he can’t come out because he’s never going to know what time it is again."

There has not been a Daylight Savings Time since that I haven’t thought of that glowing, quickly descending dusk. I’ll admit to being unsettled myself by the whimsical manipulation of time. It takes all meaning from something I typically treat as fact (it’s 6 o’clock, 7 out east) and makes my various plans and schedules seem ridiculous. Like some childish attempt to make order of the world.

Autumn’s time change is always easier, though, than the one in April. I mourn the missing hour in spring but feel relieved when it’s returned to us. Or maybe we’re only borrowing it for six months. In any case, on Sunday — that 25-hour day when the time debt was brokered or re-paid — I lit a row of candles and opened a bottle of M. Chapoutier Belleruche Côtes-Du-Rhône 2005. This is a wine as balanced as Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony. Nearly metrical in its fruit, acid, and sugar composition, the Belleruche is elegantly structured but light in the mouth, neither too dry nor too sweet. A blend of Grenache and Syrah, it is soft and rubylike. And it is a reasonable Sunday night wine: $13 a bottle, with an alcohol content of 12.5%.

Andrew — now nearly 20 — was visiting. Six-foot-four and bearded, he remains quiet and wary, unsettled by changing clocks but comforting in his stoic resolve. To spend the extra hour with him seemed right. So I poured a couple inches of wine for each of us and together, we drank.

I mentioned to Jeremy last week that I’d driven by a strange little place called Old Arizona, right at the southern end of Eat Street where Nicollet dead-ends. There was a cluster of brightly-painted, Southwestern buildings with a stone courtyard and a cloth sign strung from the posts that said Cafe and Wine Bar.

"Yeah, what is that place?" he asked. "I’ve always wondered."

And that’s when I knew I was onto something. Because if Iggers hasn’t been to an eatery, you know it’s either two minutes old or way, WAY off the grid.

So I went to Old Arizona, walking in to find a tidy, happy little cafe strung with chili pepper lights, decorated with shelves of Fiestaware, and smelling of simmering soup. Two white-haired women sat at the table in the front window. One of them wore an apron that said "Elizabeth." I asked where I might find the proprietors and both of them stood.

It turns out Old Arizona has been in existence, on this gritty end of Nicollet in what was, 100 years ago, Twin City Scenic Company — a manufacturer of hand-painted vaudeville sets — since 1993. ("Oh, people think we’re new all the time," the ladies said.) It’s the brain child of Darcy Knight and Elizabeth Trumble, two former film staffers who met while working on the set of Bill Pohlad‘s Old Explorers back in 1989 and decided together to build something that had never even been conceived of before.

You see, Old Arizona is not any old charming 12-seat cafe and wine bar. It’s a theater, performance venue, party room, yoga studio, feng shui consultancy, chocolate "lounge," tea shop, and — most importantly — a thriving after-school program for at-risk youth. Knight and Trumble just rescued the historic Log Cabin Flowers structure, because it was going to be destroyed, and hauled it all the way from Franklin Avenue to their own side yard. Oh, and if all goes according to plan, they’re going to open an off-sale wine store in the coming months.

And for 14 years, they’ve been doing all of this together, just the two of them, with no employees except a 3/4-time coordinator for the after-school programs.

The cafe serves from 11-7 Wednesday through Saturday (except when it doesn’t — more on this below). Trumble does all the cooking. She has a very limited menu, but what she does make is exquisite: Michael’s Favorite, a sandwich of Brie, tart apple, arugula and fig spread on ciabatta; a grilled Rachel, with Jarlsburg and plenty of sauerkraut; and the Old Arizona Signature Sandwich, with oven-roasted turkey and Dubliner cheddar with raspberry chipotle mayo. There’s a fresh, organic soup each day. A wine list that includes a Gabbiano Pinot Grigio, the Chateau St. Jean Fumé Blanc, and a Malbec from the Argentinian winery Altos Las Hormigas.

Old Arizona’s tea shop is a mystical collage of Laughing Buddha statues, waterfalls, organic herbs, and incense, as well as books on herbology, Feng Shui, eastern medicine, and witchcraft. Also tea, which they sell in small plastic bags by the ounce. There’s top-quality chocolate, too. And behind this, a theatrical space that seats 120 (it accomodates 200 standing) which they rent out for wedding receptions, artist’s shows, and private parties.

On any given day, they might have half a dozen customers in the cafe — more in the weeks after the performance space is rented and people have been made aware they exist. But typically, those extras dwindle away, leaving the stalwart regulars who can’t get enough of Michael’s Favorite or wouldn’t know where else to get their jasmine pearl tea.

One of the reasons, I suspect, is that Knight and Trumble are rather erratic about their hours of operation. They close if one of them is ill or they must, for whatever reason, leave town. (This coming Friday and Saturday, for instance, they’ll be in Wisconsin with their friend Ali Salim, helping him celebrate the film Sweetland, on which they both worked. So Old Arizona will be closed.) They keep talking about hiring someone to work alongside them, but somehow that never happens. The money isn’t there. And besides, they have more important things on their minds.

Because the fact is that The Arizona Bridge Project — the umbrella name for their girls’ programs — is really at the heart of this thing. Eighteen years ago, before she met Trumble, Knight was living in the neighborhood and becoming aware of the problems facing its youth.

"I watched young girls sell themselves out on the street corner," Knight says. "And I found myself pacing every night, wondering why someone wasn’t doing something about this."

So she set out to do exactly that. And while her entrepreneurial ideas may seem a bit ungrounded in the reality of the commercial mainstream, her vision for an after-school program that would keep girls off the streets has become very real. The Arizona Bridge Project has served thousands of young women, ages 13-17, providing them with food, care, and a variety of programming ranging from songwriting to visual arts to dance. Old Arizona has received funding from Hennepin County, the McKnight Foundation, and (before Avista took over) the former Star Tribune Foundation. They also accept private donations.

"It’s all about teenage girls who need us finding their way here," says Knight. "That’s really what we’re about."

This is all quite odd, I grant you. The food, the wine, the tea, the chocolate, the spiritual message, and the kids. The haphazard hours and sprawling "complex" and mixed missions. But if you spend an hour with Trumble and Knight, as I did, I swear: somehow, it all starts to make sense. And you’d be hard pressed to find a cozier place for a bowl of homemade soup.

Have I mentioned how much I hate Trader Joe’s?

A little over a year ago, when the California-based grocer moved into Minnesota, and located their inaugural store about a mile from my house in St. Louis Park, the POLICE had to be called in to direct traffic. It was like Lourdes: people streaming in from St. Paul, from Red Wing, from Kansas, for all I know, to witness this retail wonder. The streets in our neighborhood were a mess for weeks. I had to drive to Golden Valley just to buy coffee and bagels.

So about a month later, when I finally walked into the place myself — this magnificent edifice that so many had traveled so far to experience — I expected to see a bright light and hear a chorus of angels. Instead, I found myself inside a garishly-painted space stocked with haphazard piles of "natural" foods. Only this was the thing. I’m used to my natural food being, you know, natural. But here, at TJ, the apples weren’t bare-naked and glossy and gloriously orchard-like; they were packaged four to a bulbous plastiform container. There were aisles full of fancy [high-fat] multi-colored chips and pre-assembled kits to make various incredibly basic homemade things — salsa and guac and such. Also chocolate "energy" bars, pressed packages of cheese, pump bottles of lotion.

I passed up the fruit encased in crude oil and went to the dairy section for some plain yogurt. Not yak-milk yogurt, mind you, nothing fancy. Didn’t even have to be organic, though that would have been nice. But I was out of luck. This place had Chocolate Eclair yogurt and Nut-Berry Crunch. All the Lucky Charms varieties of yogurt in bright, rainbow colors. No plain.

In addition, there was no bulk section: no whole wheat pastry flour, no rice, no white popcorn, no loose leaf tea. There were, however, dozens of different flavors of Trader Joe’s sauces, soups, mixes, cookies, and cakes. In other words, junk. Finally, I bought some tangerine-scented lotion, just to say I’d been. Took it home, used it, broke out in a rash, threw it away. Until this week, that was the last time I was in Trader Joe’s.

Finally, the traffic’s died down. There are two more Twin Cities TJ locations — an outpost in Maple Grove and brand-spanking new one in Woodbury — so the burden on St. Louis Park has eased up. Plus, I’ve been hearing and hearing (and hearing) about the so-called Two Buck Chuck, which because we’re in Minnesota actually is THREE Buck Chuck (or, more precisely, 2.99 Buck Chuck — but that doesn’t sound as good), and especially the Charles Shaw Chardonnay 2005 which won all sorts of blind taste test wine awards.

So yesterday, during the sunny, windy peak of a gorgeous autumn afternoon, I walked over to Trader Joe’s and stepped inside. I’d love to continue grumbling, but I must admit, things have improved. The apples were piled in a respectable pyramid this time; the dairy case did contain a couple containers of plain yogurt in and amongst the sparkly, sugary tubs. The aisles, once again, were stack-packed with chips, crackers, and Annie’s instant dinners — the original ersatz organic fare. But Trader Joe’s is, after all, not The Wedge, but rather, I’ve learned, the Super America of sandal-wearing yuppie-hippie-Boomer types who love their psychedelic mac and cheese and wouldn’t know how to cook a pot of quinoa (or pronounce it, for that matter) if their lives depended on it.

Next, I went into the wine store, where I learned that the 2005 Chard that was so widely talked about has all sold out and what they’re hawking now, for $3 a pop, is the 2006. So I bought a bottle, which the cashier kindly double-bagged for my mile-long walk home. I treated this wine like a prized White Bordeaux from 1998: chilling it at a careful angle, opening it as dusk fell, decanting it gently into a crystal glass. I took a sip and then another. And I had to admit, grudgingly, that it didn’t suck.

Like most inexpensive party wines, the TBC Chard 2006 is a little frothy when it first meets the mouth, and it causes the tongue to go a little puckery as it slides down the sides. It’s bright and simple — like the sun in a child’s drawing — full of lemony fruit and not a lot else. But what’s remarkable is what it doesn’t have: a sour, metallic, or too-sugary aftertaste. It’s rare, in fact, to find a dirt cheap wine that finishes this clean.

Still, I was cranky about it — that plain yogurt incident just weighing on me — and I wanted to prove myself wrong. So I did a blind taste test of my own. When my husband came home, I handed him a glass and barked, "Tell me what you think." So without even putting his briefcase down he tasted and smiled and said, "Not bad. It’s a little sweet maybe. But there’s something really good about it, like a nice mid-price Viognier."

Well, there you have it. It wasn’t the California State Fair Commercial Wine Competition, I grant you, but a random test in my living room, performed by a curmudgeonly wine critic (can a woman be a curmudgeon?) and a well-traveled software developer says it is so. If you’re looking for a profoundly ordinary but inoffensive bottle of white wine that costs less than your Sunday New York Times, there is, a legitimate reason to go to Trader Joe’s. Just don’t drive down my street, OK?

Were someone to tell me the world were ending tomorrow, I would pick up the phone immediately and make a reservation at Restaurant Alma. No doubt. Given a scenario where there wasn’t enough time to jet off to New York City or Paris, Alma would be my choice for a last meal. Actually, maybe even in a scenario where there were. . . .

It’s a near perfect place: never snooty but stylish, with high ceilings, plain tables, and smart servers clad in denim and black. And the food is always exactly (if I may be so bold) what God intended food to be. Alex Roberts, the 36-year-old chef behind Alma and the more casual Brasa, believes in taking whole ingredients and just touching them — with heat, with spice, with sauce — so the natural flavor is dominant and the other elements only enhancements that make sense.

Such was the case with the duck I ate the other night, roasted rare and set on a bed of the best baby Brussels sprouts that have ever passed my lips. What’s important here, though, is how well those leafy little heads went with my wine: Domaine de la Tour Penedesses Carignan 2004, a Languedoc Roussillion that Roberts sells for a mere $8 a glass.

A hearty pour in a tulip glass, the nose is of wet wood, plum, and leather. This is a dry wine that tastes wise somehow, but also a little wild — of dark red and purple fruits, oak, and pepper — like a French cowboy, great in the saddle but also well read.

Yes, given what I know of food and wine, this — the duck and sprouts, the sagacious wine, and the salad wearing a savory dressing spiked with caraway — would have been a lovely last meal, had the world imploded today at dawn. It didn’t, however. Lucky you. Pick up the phone.

Restaurant Alma, 528 University Avenue SE, 612-379-4909.