Author: Ann Bauer

You may have noticed (at least I HOPE you’ve noticed) that I haven’t posted much lately. This is because I’ve been suffering from a monstrous head cold that’s made me pretty useless as a wine taster. It’s odd: feeling as if your one high-level skill — that ability to smell a whiff of nutmeg in an otherwise austere wine — is dependent upon something so pedestrian as post-nasal drip. Alas, it’s also true.

I haven’t quit drinking wine altogether over the past week, but my consumption has been a great deal less enthusiastic. There were a couple nights when I couldn’t taste a thing and I decided it would be a waste to uncork anything that cost more than $10 a bottle. So mostly, I drank tea.

And after a time I asked myself: Is this abstemiousness, in some ways, a healthy thing?

I’m not, by most standards, a heavy drinker. I have roughly 2 glasses of wine a night — occasionally, I’ll have three when I’m attending a dinner that involves many courses; often, I’ll stop at one on a summer evening when I plan to walk or run.

And I believe ardently in the health benefits of wine; in fact, I would say I even feel them. . . .But I’m also a woman over the age of 40, so the question of breast cancer does play on my mind.

Apparently, it plays on yours, too, because I do get questions about wine drinking and women’s health. Even more frequently, however, people [of both genders] write to ask me about wine drinking and weight gain.

“I’d love to follow your advice,” one man wrote when Beyond the Cask launched. “But I’m trying to lose 30 pounds, so wine’s off limits.”

Well, here I am, all sniffly, my olfactory system hardly up to snuff. So I decided now would be a good time to research all those questions about hearts, gums, tits, love handles, and wine.

The latest news to cross the transom is that wine may help prevent cavities, due to its antibacterial properties. It’s long been thought that red wine (in particular) prevents heart disease by raising good cholesterol (HDL), lowering bad cholesterol (LDL), and reducing clotting — but it’s only been in the past few months that scientists figured out why: a substance called resveratrol which has, according to an article in Science Daily “antioxidant, anticoagulant, anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer effects.” And one Harvard researcher is, apparently, trying to figure out how to synthesize wine-based resveratrol into an anti-aging drug so even beer drinkers can pop a pill and live longer.

Those are all the widely-publicized feel-good stories: Wine is wonderful! Drink up! And you wonder (or at least, I wonder), Who’s paying for these studies? Gallo?

Anyway, I went on a crusade to find out the truth about the two big questions:

1. Does wine drinking make you fat?

and, far more important,

2. Does it increase a woman’s risk of breast cancer?

Here’s what I found (please assume all the typical disclaimers about the fact that I’m a wine critic and not a physician):

1. No, wine drinking does *not* typically make a drinker fat. And it’s a mystery as to why. . . .A case in point: I’m the sort of woman who gains weight if I lift a doughnut from one platter to another and lick the residue off my fingers. So you would think that adding two glasses (roughly 200 calories — the amount in two 6-ounce glasses of dry red wine) a day to my diet would cause weight gain. This is exactly what I did: I was a teetotaler while pregnant. After my last child was born, 12 years ago, I began drinking wine regularly with no discernible effect on my weight. I suppose it’s possible I’ve cut those 200 calories out of my diet subconsciously (I hear lab rats do this. . . .), but I don’t think so. For whatever reason, the calories from the wine just don’t “stick” the way they would if I consumed them in, say, butter. And I’m not the only one who’s noticed this. In a 2003 Wine News article, Dr. Harvey Finkel, a professor at Boston University Medical Center, wrote that research shows “moderate drinking usually helps correct weight excess and reduces the risks of diabetes and cardiovascular disease by several means.” These include energy “wastage” and a generally salubrious effect on the metabolism.

2. About breast cancer, however, I’m far more circumspect. And serious. I am a habitual wine drinker. I also eat a low-fat, high-fiber diet, exercise daily, and avoid food additives, hair dyes, synthetic hormones, and toxic cleaners. I had three full-term pregnancies before the age of 30, breastfed each of my children for more than a year, and (this is the big one), I do not have a first-degree relative — mother, aunt, sister, or daughter — with breast cancer. Were any of these things different, I would be far more careful about my alcohol consumption. Even the way things are, I’m mindful. . . .I think there is NO question that there is a link between alcohol and breast cancer. The American Cancer Society has come out saying “for each 10 grams of alcohol consumed a day, the lifetime risk of a woman developing breast cancer increases by almost 10%.” But add to that this confusing bit of information: a recent study in the journal Cancer Research shows that red wine actually inhibits breast tumors. For women, it seems, a moderate amount of wine can be both a potential danger and a potent cure.

Uh, yes. Better tables, better service, better food. This is the ugly truth of our business.

Now that that’s out of the way, here’s why I bring it up: a reader responded to a recent post on my wine blog in which I praised a local restaurant. He’d visited the same place during the same time period, and while he agreed with me about the superior quality of the food and wine, he said his meal was all but ruined by bad service. He pointed out that I had a great experience in large part because I’m known at that restaurant — AND (actually, the reader had the tact not to mention this, but I will) because I have the power to give a restaurant smashing and absolutely free publicity.

He was right.

If you think there are other food critics out there who are avoiding the trap, my experience says you’re wrong. This is too small a place, and the community of restaurateurs too intimate, for real anonymity to exist for more than, say, a year. I’m willing to bet someone coming in from one of the coasts — someone who’s never been to Minnesota — could successfully hide his or her identity for about that long. And the better ones do expend a lot of effort: disguises, false names, hidden note taking devices, etc. But after a few years in the business, I’m sorry. . . . It’s simply a ruse, designed to make the public feel fairly represented.

There are exceptions, of course. It’s certainly easier to visit a brand-new restaurant anonymously (assuming its chef and front-of-the-house man both are new to the industry or the area as well) than it is to slip in unnoticed to La Belle Vie. And reviews of small neighborhood joints, mom-and-pop shops, and ethnic restaurants usually are the real deal. But when it comes to the big, showy places or trendy urban spots, a food critic tends to get found out by visit number two or three.

My colleague, Jeremy Iggers, and I have discussed this at length. One of the things we’ve pledged to do at The Rake is disclose when we are known to the restaurant (as I did in my wine blog), so there’s no wink-wink arrangement whereby we pretend to be anonymous while management rolls out the red carpet. Even if we only suspect we’ve been “made,” we’ll own up. Then we’ll do our best to assess the food, service, and ambiance of a place fairly. But it’s helpful for us to know what happens to other people when they walk through the door.

And that’s where you come in.

We want this blog to be a real dialogue. We’ll put forth opinions based on our years of journalism experience and culinary education. But so far as adding a genuinely egalitarian element to the site — and to the resource guide we’re compiling for local diners and wine drinkers — we’re relying on input from the community.

The reader who commented on Sweet Spot did exactly what we hope people will do, adding his experience to the mix. So, if you see a post you agree with, we’d love to have you write in. But if you see a review you disagree with, or if you’ve had an experience that was significantly different from ours, please post away. . . .

Back when Zeno opened, its New York owners — two attorneys, no less — thought they’d make millions bringing their ultra-hip wine bar-sandwich shop-coffeehouse concept to Minneapolis. And they might have, if they’d stuck it out with their flagship storefront in Uptown for more than about 30 seconds. Instead, they rushed to open a second store in a risky Hennepin Avenue location and made plans to expand to the suburbs. By 2006, their tiny empire came crashing down.

Enter Daniel Gelb, president of Plaza 1, Inc. He and his partners were smart. They bought the law guys out, closed the Uptown Zeno briefly and re-opened it under the same name some weeks later. But the downtown restaurant — an odd split space with a bar facing Hennepin Avenue and a separate seating area across the hall from Palomino — stayed vacant for a while.

Last month, Gelb took advantage of the weird layout to open Manhattans, a clubby restaurant and martini bar designed to feed the State Theater crowd. It’s decorated in olive green and charcoal gray and features a “boardroom” for private dining. The wine list is varied, with a lot of robust California options, but some others — including a Spanish Albarino and a Tuscan Chianti — and the drinks menu features cocktails so complicated they require a “mixologist.”

Currently, Manhattans is serving dinners only — and here’s a lineup of good, solid standards: steak, pork tenderloin, pasta in vodka sauce. For those who want to re-live the stock market boom of the 1980’s, I suggest you make a reservation. Leave today’s real estate crisis behind, order calamari, a Caesar salad, maybe a NY Strip. And imagine your portfolio growing. . . .

For those who aren’t into speed-clogging their arteries, I want to make it clear that poutine is, literally, a dish that takes French fries, tops them with cheese curds, and finishes them off with a ladle full of gravy. I swear, I am not making this up. Please see my colleague Jeremy Iggers’ entry on Harry’s Food & Cocktails below. And note that Steven Brown is the chef who once gave me a tour of the kitchen at Levain and insisted I take a sprig of just-picked microgreen and savor it, so I would know how good food is supposed to taste.

My husband, older son, and I spent the weekend in Duluth, helping friends get their new Canal Park restaurant ready to open later this month. After a day of schlepping waffle irons, shelving, and cookware from a third-floor storage space to the kitchen, using a hundred-year-old elevator whose gates you had to close with a strap, we headed to dinner — filthy, exhausted, ready to relax.

I won’t say where we went. But it was one of those bustling tourist meccas on the North Shore. I ordered a glass of Zinfandel, my husband did the same, our friend Cynthia ordered a Cabernet Sauvignon, and then my son piped up and said, “That sounds good. I believe I’ll have a glass of Cabernet, as well.”

Now, here’s what you should know about my son. He stands six-foot-three-and-a-half and has a full beard and a weary expression and a way of speaking that makes him sound as if he once wrote speeches for Winston Churchill. He’s also 19. . . .and autistic. So the arbitrary rules of society — like, for instance, you can be shipped off to fight in a senseless war at 18, but you can’t legally buy alcohol until you’re 21 — are lost on him.

I expected our server to ask for his ID, so I moved toward my son in order to explain and save him the embarrassment he might feel. But before I could say a thing, our server said, “Thanks! I’ll go get your drinks and be right back for your order.” And off she went. . . .

Later, after he’d drunk his glass of wine (which we felt conflicted about, but allowed rather than making a scene), we pulled our son aside and told him it is illegal for a restaurant to serve him alcohol. The woman who waited on us could have been fired, and the restaurant could have lost its liquor license. [His response: “Oh, is that so? How odd.”] I did not alert the manager, for fear of getting the poor, frazzled server in trouble.

But I’m warning them now, along with all the other packed, lakeside, summer-season restaurants in town. Have a talk with your staff. Tell them to card even those who appear to be of age. It’s the law — whether or not we agree. And the consequences of ignoring it can be pretty deadly for a hard-working restaurateur.