Author: Ann Bauer
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Manhattans in Minneapolis
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…
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Moved to tears
You might think that a pagan Jew with a taste for dry, fruity, lusty red wines couldn’t fully appreciate a luminous white called Lacrima Christi, or “Tears of Christ.” You would be wrong. I’m actually a big believer in Jesus Christ. I think there’s little doubt he existed: a fine man, a prophet, and a…
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Diner beware
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…
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License to serve
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…
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A smoky, cerebral wine
With most wines, I know right away: I like it or I don’t; it enhances the meal I’m eating or it doesn’t; it’s full or light or insipidly thin. But this one I had to taste for most of an evening — slowly, letting it breathe and change — with food between glass one and…
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Lemon or sugar in your Zin?
I ran across this refreshingly blasphemous article in Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, titled Putting a Cork in Wine Snobs. It’s a good read and underscores a few of the points I’ve been making. Among them: The phrase room temperature refers to the cool interior of a drawing room in the French Alps, not a 90-degree…