The Rake Magazine

Author: Ann Bauer

  • Who Is Rachel Hutton?

    NOTE: This post originally appeared with a photo that Rachel Hutton herself asked me to remove — in a very nice note that said in part "I realize it’s impossible to stay anonymous. . . .but I spent all last week pulling as many images as possible off the S&S [Simon & Schuster] and BTM [Before the Mortgage] sites." I was happy to do so.  AB

    If you haven’t heard, Rachel Hutton is the new food writing star for City Pages. And it’s about time she got her own gig.

    Back when I was working for Minnesota Monthly as their food and feature writer, Rachel was an associate editor — and a whip-smart devotee of local restaurants. To be honest, she did most of the grunt work for our food section: keeping the listings and calendars up-to-date, writing short "Quick Bite" reviews, and reading my copy with an eagle eye. I was perennially distracted and lost in language; she (a Stanford-trained engineer who decided after graduation that she didn’t want to spend her life designing widgets) offered much-needed common sense.

    In late 2005, my first novel came out. It was a weird experience, frankly. . . .like giving birth to a little literary baby and being graded on the effort in newspapers ranging from the Strib to the Washington Post. Kirkus liked the book but didn’t give it a star; People had a piece on me slated that was canned [mysteriously] at the last minute. I got entirely caught up — forgot (for the first time in my life) to pay my property taxes — and went maybe four or five nights without sleep. That’s when Steve Fox, the publisher of MN Monthly, decided in a surge of Friday afternoon gallantry to throw a party for me. He went to Barnes and Noble and bought a copy of my novel for everyone in the office, ordered a case of wine, and asked me to inscribe the books while people mingled and drank.

    Here’s the thing: Not only was I exhausted, I’m also more than a tad agnosiac. But I’d never told a soul.

    Clinical prosopagnosia is a condition that makes it genuinely impossible for the brain to recognize a human face. Ears, eyes, nose, and mouth all appear, but they fail to fall into a pattern that provokes a memory. Oliver Sacks wrote a terrific essay about one sufferer called The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, which appeared in a book of the same name.

    But the point here is that I do not mistake people for hats, and there are some people I recognize. What I am is just sort of foggy on visual details, particularly when it comes to appearance. I rarely understand, for instance, the men other women find attractive (personally, I far prefer Harvey Keitel to George Clooney). And if one of my students cuts her hair or trades her glasses for contact lenses, I’ll certainly need to be re-introduced.

    It’s worth noting, too, the I’m the mother of an autistic son and it’s common for the parents of people with autism to have "shadow" neurological differences, such as agnosia, synesthesia, and a heightened sense of smell. I’m three for three.

    In any case, I finally found Rachel and confessed my problem. I’d been at MN Monthly for a year and a half but recognized only a handful of the 50 or so people who worked there. I could pick out everyone on our immediate staff, the receptionist, the director of sales, and one of the custom publishing people who had a very distinctive voice. With the other 42 or so, I was screwed.

    Rachel immediately (and unfussily) devised a plan. She would stand next to me with a list, open the books one by one and clue me in whenever I froze. "Here’s a copy for Jill," she would say. Or, "Don’t forget, Maryanne has an "e" on the end of her name."

    It was a kindness I’ll never forget. And it was representative of her extraordinary good nature. When I left MN Monthly and Fox did not (as he had suggested he might) hire a celebrity chef or a well-known foodie to take my place, I assumed Rachel would get the job. However, though she DID the job, she never assumed the title.

    Several weeks ago, when it was announced that Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl was taking over as the premier food writer at MN Monthly, I have to say I felt a twinge of dissatisfaction. I like Dara very much and I it goes without saying she’s a knockout writer, but Rachel had put in years of really solid work and there was a big part of me that felt the job should have been hers.

    So I was delighted to find that in one of those inside-baseball sort of trades, Rachel Hutton is moving from MN Monthly to take over Dara’s post at CP.

    OK, she’s not the powerhouse the mighty Moskowitz can be. But Rachel is a hell of an up-and-coming writer, and she’s an incredibly sweet person besides. She’s the one on the left above — and I wouldn’t out her if she were anonymous but her images are readily Googleable because about a year after my book came out with Simon & Schuster, Rachel co-wrote and edited one of her own, Before The Mortgage, with the very same publisher.

    I attended her first reading and publication party. But I’m happy to say, Rachel recognized everyone there, all on her own. And without a bit of prompting, she inscribed a book for me.

  • Blood, Sweat, and Chardonnay

    There is, perhaps, nothing on this earth so elemental as salt. It’s the flavor of the ocean, and of blood. Also sweat, tears, and — let’s be frank here — semen, that stuff which contains half the origin of human life.

    Salt has been used as currency. It is a mainstay of both religious ceremonies and superstitions. It can purify, preserve, and cure. Human blood is, in fact, .9% sodium chloride: the same concentration as the salt water that is used to cleanse wounds. It maintains the electrolyte balance in our cells and without it, we would die. Also, my mother insists a few grains are necessary to enhance every food, including her double-chocolate cake with angel-white vanilla frosting.

    Still, despite salt’s place in the canon of basic tastes, I am always surprised when I find it present in my wine.

    This happened a couple month’s ago, with a Grüner Veltliner called E & M Berger Kremstal 2006, which I described as having "the salty taste of sweat, like when you kiss a baby on the neck."

    However, that was a very subtle oceanic drinking experience; my most recent one was not.

    Domaine Vessigaud Cru de Bourgogne Pouilly-Fuissé 2005 is a
    powerfully briny wine, a French Chardonnay so robust, it will
    complement everything from strong cheese to fowl to a firm fish such as
    tuna or salmon. Even caviar. This wine is bursting with citrus, honey, and
    floral elements, but the central flavor is salt — like a wave of
    sun-filled, lemon-sweetened water from the Dead Sea.

    It’s tempting to compare this wine to sweet and salty foods: chocolate-covered almonds, caramel corn,crackling duck with cherry sauce. But that would be cheap. . . .and inaccurate. The tastes in the Vessigaud don’t contrast so much as scaffold, following roughly the primary areas of the tongue: sweet, sour, bitter, and salt. But in this case, the first three are only touched with honey, lemon, and a butterscotchy hint that’s ever so slightly dark. Then it is the final saline taste that remains.

    The truth is, I didn’t like the Vessigaud much at first. I was drinking it without food (probably a mistake), and found it offputting and difficult to parse. But after a couple ounces, I warmed to it — literally. The salty flavor softened and my palate accommodated. By the time I was halfway through the glass, it tasted far more natural. Nutritive in a biblical sort of way.

    As I poured the second, however, something else occurred to me. Back in the early 90’s, there was a late show on CBS called Forever Knight, about a reformed vampire living in an eerie and perpetually midnight blue section of Toronto and working as a cop. He was on the night shift, of course. Nick Knight was his name, and in order to soothe his 800-year-old urges, he drank cow’s blood (which he got from a slaughterhouse) from wine bottles that he kept stacked up in his fridge.

    As I sipped the Vessigaud Pouilly-Fuissé, I became more and more comfortable with the fact that even despite its clear color, it had a distinctly bloodlike taste. Nick Knight, I decided, would have loved this.

  • What You're Tasting When You Kiss

    It’s a slippery, messy business, kissing. Two tongues meetings in one person’s mouth, touching and rolling and wrestling like snakes. The transfer of saliva. The hot, warm breath vaporous with what the kisser has most recently consumed.

    Not only that, even strangers do it. People who’ve only just met in bars; partygoers on New Year’s Eve; returning soldiers and can-can girls.

    The fact is, even those of us who are married, living and trading body fluids with the loves of our lives are rather irrational. I mean, would you use your spouse’s toothbrush? Soiled strand of dental floss? Already chewed gum?

    Of course not! And yet, we invade the oral — and other — cavities of our partners quite whimsically. No matter how we think it through, the strangeness of kissing as a modern-day practice, we keep on doing it. Why? Well, it turns out scientists have an answer. It’s because we’re hard-wired to taste our mate’s body chemicals — essentially, through their spit.

    I’m sorry. You’d like me to put a nice veneer on this. But the fact is, according to an article called Why We Love in the January 28 issue of TIME, we’re actually "sampling" the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) of a person when we kiss. This is a gene family involved in tissue rejection, and it’s important that we mate with people whose MHC is different from our own.

    "Conceive a child with a person whose MHC is too similar to your own, and the risk increases that the womb will expel the fetus," writes Jeffrey Kluger in TIME. "Find a partner with sufficiently difference MHC, and you’re likelier to carry a baby to term."

    So you see? Kissing is a biological process, intended to help us propogate the species. Now it all makes sense. . . .

    Well actually, it does. It makes far more sense than Valentine’s Day, which is an incredibly manipulative and commercial annual event (second only to Mother’s Day in this respect). Cupid would have us kissing and doing all the wonderfully irrational natural things that come next. Nevertheless, we persist in celebrating this stupid holiday [myself included] with overpriced flowers and cards and shiny red things ranging from candy boxes to cars.

    My colleague, Jeremy Iggers, recently wrote about Valentine’s Day dinners, and I’d like to add a few suggestions of my own.

    Chef Jon Radle at Grand Cafe is offering a prix fixe dinner featuring gnocchi with braised leek cream; pickled beet and watercress salad; a choice of roasted prime rib, butter poached lobster, or pan-fried polenta; and a malted chocolate tartlet or coconut-cardamom trifle. The price is $55 per person, $85 per person with a flight of suggested wines.

    With its French-bistro-by-the-Seine sort of feel, Barbette is a romantic place to kiss in a dark corner any night of the year. But on V-Day, you can get a four-course meal for $42. Beet and walnut soup; stuffed quail on Swiss chard or pistachio-crusted goat cheese; cream cheese stuffed beef tenderloin or seared scallops or wild mushroom risotto; and petit fours with hot chocolate.

    Now, I have to admit, I’m throwing this last one in simply for the name: Give the treat of meat on Valentine’s Day. It’s a dinner going on at Fogo de Chao Brazilian Steakhouse, which promises to "shower" guests with "15 savory cuts of delicious meat." Personally, I’ve never been to Fogo de Chao and I’m not a big meat-eater. But with messaging like that, even I’m tempted to give it a try.

  • Filling The Gaps at Il Vesco Vino

    My husband and I found ourselves over the weekend in that gap between wedding ceremony and reception and desperately in need of a drink.

    Now, I must admit, I’m a bit bewildered by the whole traditional formal wedding affair. It’s always seemed to me more show than celebration, a day seized by the "happy" couple to make other people a) focus attention on them b) follow their directions and c) WAIT. There’s the "everyone turn to look at the bride as she makes her way down the aisle" moment; the "you may not leave your pew until the newly married couple greets you" ritual; and then, of course, the "we must take several dozen photographs before leaving the church so you should hang out in the vestibule or on the street or in the empty reception hall waiting while we do so" tradition.

    Which is exactly why I got married barefoot on the deck of a boat with only my children in attendance and a preacher (Mitch Omer, from Ode to a Sycophant fame, in fact) who got his license from the back of Rolling Stone. . . .then threw a big party two months later with a lot of food and wine and absolutely no requirements of the guests but that they come and enjoy.

    But I digress.

    We’d just left the church on Saturday afternoon, where the brightest moment of the ceremony — for me, at least — was the minister’s recounting of the "love story" in Rocky. I’ve never seen Rocky, which sounds incredible, I know. But after his telling, I probably will. The anecdote had to do with the thug played by Sylvester Stallone falling in love with a plain woman who worked at a pet store then explaining to someone who questioned the romance "she’s got gaps, I got gaps, together we fill gaps," which was as fine a description of the strange magic of marriage as I’ve ever heard.

    So we were talking about this and dawdling along Dale Street in St. Paul, on our way to the reception near Cathedral Hill, when suddenly I remembered something wonderful: Il Vesco Vino was just around the corner!

    So we went.

    What a lovely interlude, a perfect place to fill the gap. Because first, this is a simple, warm, rectangular room lit with the sort of turnip-shaped fixtures you might imagine at an Italian carnival. But better even than this is Junior, one of the area’s best and most unusual sommeliers. This guy KNOWS HIS WINE. He was trained at D’Amico Cucina and he’s a friend of Bill’s (Summerville, that is). But he’s also, well. . . .just freakin’ cool, in a way that most wine experts — I’m sorry, guys — simply aren’t. The son of jazz saxophonist, Irv Williams, Junior has that low, blue, lazy, smooth-voiced style.

    It’s all an act, however, in that behind the laid-back facade is a man who keeps a sparkling bar and makes the best personalized wine recommendations in town.

    I, for instance, love an earthy, sweaty red. ("Dirt," my husband will sometimes say when he sniffs the wine in my glass. "Terroir," I will respond. Just one example of our gaps.) So Junior poured me the Azienda Agricola Morellino di Scansano, a hot muddy Sangiovese that’s full of plum and cherry with the strangest hint of banana underneath, also black roses, leather boots, and peat. Just the way I like my midafternoon, post-wedding wine.

    John drank a far lighter and generally more approachable Nero d’Avola — again, selected by Junior — which tasted of raspberry and black cherry and finished clean.

    And we sat, holding hands under the bar, until our wine was gone, at which point we said goodbye to Junior and reluctantly got up and headed to the clamorous wedding reception where there were too few tables for the guests and the only wine available was heavy and tannic and about as subtle as a brick to the head.

    Sometimes, I find, it is in filling the gaps that the best of life occurs.

  • The Truth: You Absolutely Must Drink if You Watch This Show

    I would like to tell you that my daughter and I spend quality time together watching the Masterpiece series of Jane Austen stories: pretty, bonneted heroines practicing archery and dropping calling cards and plotting to win the hearts of handsome young men. I would like to tell you that. But it’s just not true.

    A few nights ago, in the interest of bonding, I sat down with her to watch (and I shudder, literally, as I type this) The Moment of Truth.

    It’s a game show. . . .sort of. Also a reality program, I suppose, in the sense that humiliating people seems to be the staple of these shows. It involves a "contestant" who agrees to answer something like 50 questions — personal questions — while hooked up to a lie detector. Then he or she goes on FOX-TV (which I’m embarrassed to say, I was not aware prior to this was one of the 8 channels we receive) and must answer an assortment of the same questions in front of three people: a spouse or partner, parents, friends, in some cases a boss.

    "You won’t believe it, Mom," my daughter said and invited me to sit next to her. (Do you know how rare this is??) So I did. And I didn’t. . . .believe it, that is.

    The questions start off easy: Do you belong to the Hair Club for Men? Have you ever gone through a co-worker’s personal things? And by answering these "correctly" — meaning truthfully — the person in the chair wins something nominal, like ten grand.

    Then they get weird, sick, and invasive. Also strangely banal. Have you ever had a sexual fantasy while in church? Have you ever touched a client more than was necessary? Have you put off having children because you’re worried that your marriage won’t last?

    Now first of all, I’ve heard that men have something like 12-25 sexual fantasies a day. So how in the world could any guy be expected to make it through an entire hour-long church service without? Second, you need to define the word "necessary" before it’s possible to determine what touch is or isn’t. And finally, when on the brink of becoming a parent, isn’t it normal — healthy, even — to question whether or not your marriage will last. . . .especially if you’re the sort of person who will go on national television to talk about intensely personal things.

    These questions strike me as tedious and rhetorical. I mean, do you walk up to strangers on the street and ask them if they masturbate? Or if they pick their nose while driving. No (I hope). You simply assume that they do. But it is not in your nature — certainly it is not in mine — to solicit the details.

    And what have we come to if this is considered entertainment?

    I’ll tell you what I came to: I came to the point where I needed to cleanse. Say you spent an evening eating cotton candy and drinking root beer (again, I shudder); you’d need to spend the next day ingesting nothing but raw carrots and hot tea in order to undo the damage you’d done.

    The same goes when the damage is psychic. Watching Moment of Truth was so sullying, in fact, that I needed to spend the rest of the evening talking seriously to my daughter about dignity (she was thrilled); listening to Mozart; and drinking a $70 Burgundy.

    The Givry 1er Cru 2005 is made by Domaine Joblot. It has 13% alcohol and is a deceptive wine: so smooth at first it seems simple, like a single, ripe, ruby fruit. But if you pay attention, you’ll find hints of lavender, rose, and nutmeg within the soft cherry base. As you drink and the wine breathes, it seems almost to wink: elements of orange zest, allspice, and just a breath of musk come zinging through. This is a vintage that was made for age: experts say the Givry 1er Cru may be cellared — and will continue to improve — for up to 15 years.

    Still, I’m not sorry I drank it all, rather than waiting for 2023. I needed it as an antidote to the sleazy stream of "truths" I heard the other night. I’m hoping in 15 years the reality TV craze will have died down, and that when my daughter and I sit down together — she at 28 and I at 56 — it will be over a bottle of something equally as nice.

  • Swallowing

    It is an established fact that we human beings want what we cannot have. When exorbitantly priced iPhones hit the market—already in limited supply—people line up at 2 a.m. And by telling a couple they are not allowed to have sex for a week, therapists say they can cause even the most uninterested spouse to churn with desire.

    So it is with absinthe, the drink preferred by Ernest Hemingway, Vincent Van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, which supposedly drove each of them crazy and was outlawed in the United States in 1912.

    It is supposedly the wormwood in absinthe that makes it so deliciously dangerous. An herb that’s poisonous in even moderate amounts, pure wormwood contains thujone, a ketone with hallucinogenic properties. It’s possible, I suppose, that absinthe provokes delusions in very rare cases—though the same can be said of sugar, sleep deprivation, over-the-counter cold medicines, and lust.

    Laws restricting the sale of absinthe have been loosening for years. In 1972, the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act lifted the ban on the liquor itself and focused instead on concentrated thujone (which also occurs naturally in sage, thyme, and rosemary). Then American distillers realized that the absinthe they’d been drinking in Spain and Portugal—and believing had mystical properties—actually contained such a negligible amount of the hallucinogen that it qualified for sale in the U.S. They were faced with a conundrum: The very argument they could use for making the case that absinthe should be legal might also lessen its appeal.

    In other words, without the naughty element, what is left of absinthe but a foul-tasting green syrup with a nearly lethal level of alcohol?

    I am both a confirmed wine drinker and someone who does not care for the taste of anise. Keep these two facts in mind. But my experience tasting absinthe for the first time left me truly puzzled as to what all the fuss is about.

    It smells herbal with a touch of sweetness, like a bakery in the middle of a stand of fir trees; this I truly enjoyed. But the first sip was like dragon effluvium: livid, scorching, and green. It burns for a long time (a looonnnggg time): on the tongue, in the throat, and later in the gut. The predominant taste is licorice and leaf and something vaguely scotch-like—if your scotch had been subject to a nuclear flash.

    Most disturbing, absinthe’s flavor lingers for hours. Neither breath mints nor vigorous tooth (and tongue) brushing can expunge it. With an alcohol content of sixty-two percent—that’s 124 proof—it’s as if the imprint is soldered onto the inside of your mouth.

    I tried drinking it straight and as an absinthe drip, a process that reminded me of every heroin-cooking scene I’ve ever seen on TV. There is dramatic ceremony to this drink—no doubt one of the things that has made it popular among writers, artists, and actors. Traditional preparation requires a sugar cube placed on a slotted spoon that is set over a glass of absinthe. You trickle ice water directly over the sugar, allowing it to melt into the liquor through the spoon’s vents. This creates a “louche,” or pale white cloud, in the drink, topped with a ring of iridescent chartreuse.

    It’s pretty. But I actually liked the absinthe even less this way, preferring the pain and boldness of a flavor I found confounding to a watered-down, sugary slurry edged in green. The only way I could imagine liking this liquor, frankly, is in coffee with a heavy dollop of whipped cream—a variation on Irish coffee that would not only soften the flavor but might thankfully burn off some of the alcohol as well.

    On December 27, Surdyk’s opened early and began selling Lucid Absinthe Supérieure, one of only two varieties currently available in the United States, for $75 a bottle. And when Jim Surdyk, who had a five-day exclusive on the introduction, opened his door at 8 a.m., twenty-five people were already lined up to buy. (The day after New Year’s, Haskell’s began selling Lucid for $69.99.)

    “It’s just interesting to people, the whole mystique of it,” Surdyk says. I agree. I also think absinthe is a perilous drink, not only for the pocketbook but for public health: a century-withheld novelty that will make you very, very, very drunk very, very, very fast.

    This—in addition to depression, schizophrenia, and syphilis (respectively)—is likely what really caused the madness of Hemingway, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec.

  • What Is This Thing Called Cheese?

    OK, I know what cheese is. And I also know — because I researched it once — why it exists.

    In nomadic societies, back when people had to carry their food on their backs as they moved from place to place, and spoilage was a huge and potentially life-threatening issue, particularly in the heat, tribes discovered they could "preserve" their goat, cow, yak, or sheep’s milk by putting it in a burlap sack, throwing it over their shoulders, and walking briskly. Agitation and warm, re-circulated air caused the milk to separate into curds (cheese) and whey. The latter, they would drink immediately. The former, however, would last them through the winter, providing protein, calcium, and fat. This makes sense to me.

    Modern cheese-eating, however, does not. I happen to live with two voracious cheese eaters: men who love triple-cream bries and smoked goudas but will also go through entire blocks of sharp cheddar, Swiss, and monterey jack. Pizzas, enchiladas, quesadillas. Everything the world is hungry for seems to be smothered in cheese.

    From a health standpoint, however, cheese has done an about-face. Whereas once it saved lives by providing sustenance during times of snow cover or drought, now it does little by my estimation than add things to our diets that few Americans genuinely need.

    I rarely eat cheese. I would never choose it as an appetizer or a dessert. One exception: when it will improve my wine. Then I’m all over it.

    I’ve done wine tastings with chocolate, with biscuits, and with fruit. Nothing — and I do mean nothing — brings out the unique flavors of wine better than a perfectly paired cheese. The right blue with a robust Bordeaux. Manchego alternated with a spicy Rioja. Chevre to accompany a dry Sauvignon Blanc.

    This is nearly universal among the serious wine drinkers I know. Jack Farrell, owner of Haskell’s and a staunch Catholic, once told me, "If you have a glass of vintage port and a little bit of Stilton cheese, that’s when you know God’s in heaven and all is right with the world.”

    He also told me that in 38 years of business, his only regret is that he didn’t grow the cheese shop, a tiny mousehole of a store behind the downtown Minneapolis Haskell’s on 9th Avenue.

    Indeed, the cheese business has been very good to other wine sellers, including Surdyk’s and Buon Giorno, as well as grocers that sell wine, beer, and other spirits, such as Byerly’s and Lunds.

    Now, France 44 is getting back into the game. They closed their cafe in December, co-owner David Anderson says, because while the lunch business was booming, evenings were dead. "We needed both to survive," he explains. Right now, workers are renovating the south side of the store, removing the deli cases and putting up more shelves so that come March, the liquor and wine business can expand.

    But the front third of the space will be devoted to cheese — and only cheese. "It’s the only food we’ll carry from now on," Anderson says. "But we’ll go deeper, carrying a much greater selection than we ever have before."

    This is good news for the people of Morningside, that pocket where Minneapolis, St. Louis Park, and Edina meet. It’s a little known fact, but they’re nomads, you know. Occasionally, they’ve been to travel as far as St. Paul or Brooklyn Park. And you need sustenance for something like that: Curds in burlap and maybe a yak to ride, in case you get tired along the way.

  • JP: Even Better Than You Remember

    For a long time, whenever people asked me to recommend a restaurant — not by food critic standards, but a personal favorite — I immediately told them to go to jP American Bistro.

    Why? It was everything: the simple, clean decor; the mid-priced menu with absolutely drop-dead beautiful, satisfying perfectly-proportioned dishes; the crack staff that provided a level of service you typically cannot find without dropping $500 on a meal. For a year and a half, this was my favorite special occasion place. It’s where my husband and I ate in September 2006, the night before leaving on our honeymoon.

    Then, I quit going.

    There were three reasons. First, life got very complicated for a while and I simply didn’t have as much time for dining out. Second, I found a couple other restaurants that I loved (even on my off-time) nearly as much. But third — and this is important — I simply hated fighting the construction traffic at Lyndale and Lake.

    It’s hard to admit this. I was part of the problem, a little bit of the reason that JP Samuelson and his staff suffered a scare in 2007. The street outside was torn up. The intersection often had a ten-minute wait for a left turn. Business slowed. It was still busy on nights when the Jungle Theater was running a popular show, Samuelson told me. But weekday nights, this once-red-hot eatery ran 1/3 full.

    I’m ashamed, and after visiting again over the weekend, downright grateful to all the people who did keep going and sustaining this jewel. Because JP is better than ever.

    One thing you should know, if you’re not already familiar with this restaurant, is that JP is one classically-trained chef who doesn’t do guest appearances, radio shows, newspaper columns, or photo sessions. He doesn’t leave the line to schmooze with the restaurant guests. What he does is cook, with singular focus and consistency. (The shot of him, above, with his wife and pastry chef, Cheryl, came from his website and is one of the only such photos I could find.) He’s also a very smart businessman who hires great people and empowers them to run the front of the house.

    It works. With one notable exception — which I’ll get to in a minute — JP’s had the same people working for him for years. Andrew Pickar, the dining room and bar manager, and Mark Mckenzie, his head waiter, both take a proprietary interest in the business, caring for the people who walk through the door the way you imagine they might guests in their own homes.

    I will cop to the fact that after a year’s absence, both men greeted me by name and stopped by my table. I will also attest that I saw them do the same with any number of other patrons. Once you’ve been to jP two or three times, you’re part of the in-crowd.

    There were four of us on Friday, and we sat in the bar, which is a lovely candlelit alcove looking out on Lyndale Avenue. We started with the calamari, a lightly-breaded version spicy Thai dipping sauce and a spun nest of carrot and cabbage strips on top.. . .plus an order of pommes frites with a very garlicky aioli (hands down, my husband’s favorite bar food in the world). Then I had a duck confit salad so savory it had elements of bitter earth, with crunchy thick bacon, radicchio, and a nearly sweet ginger-pear vinaigrette. We also tried the fettucini with braised pork shoulder, onion, charred tomato and parmesan — a warm, smoky winter dish — and the fish special, a trout served with garlic mashed potatoes and a mango salad.

    But the best by far was JP’s handmade butternut squash agnolotti in a lemon beurre, tossed with toasted walnuts and pecorino. I love squash and pumpkin pasta, but indulge infrequently because too often its more bread than root, an imbalance that ruins the dish. This was perfect: plump cushions of pasta with a hefty little serving of pureed squash inside — enough so you got the smooth mouthfeel and Thanksgiving flavor. Then a rush of toasty, salty, lemony cream.

    I have only one complaint about jP American Bistro, and that has to do with the only original fixture who’s left. Used to be Karl Rigelman, sommelier extraordinaire, saw to the wines there. Now that Rigelman has moved on to the Minikahda Country Club, the wine list at jP has become disappointingly pedestrian.

    On the white side, they offer a La Poule Blanche Languedoc and a Saint M Riesling each for $7.50 a glass — mediocre wines at best, which retail for $8 and $10 a bottle respectively, making the markup around 300 percent. As for reds, they have a passable Parker Station Pinot Noir ($8), a Hahn Cabernet ($8.50), and a Milton Park Shiraz ($7).

    They also, supposedly, have a Cabardes Pennautier Languedoc, a blend of cab, merlot, malbec, syrah, and grenache, which was the wine I was interested in drinking. After I ordered, however, I was told they’d run out. I asked the waiter for something comparable; he suggested the shiraz. (This would by like my ordering a spinach omelet and his suggesting I have a Caesar salad and T-bone instead.) I declined, and they accommodatingly opened a bottle of Le Jaja de Jau, a French blend — yes — but one that is entirely syrah and grenache, fruity and sweet, sweet, sweet. Imagine you’re craving a square of dark Belgian chocolate and someone hands you a Three Musketeers Bar. . . .

    I yearn for the days of Rigelman, when wines at jP tended to be unique, well-chosen, and dry. But still, I will return — soon and often. Samuelson is ignoring the wines just as he ignores the press, the hype, and the trends, in favor of producing some of the best food in town. He’s a balls-to-the-walls kind of chef who keeps his head down and cooks, the ultra-chic, leek-and-goose-foam culinary world be damned, getting better (and better) with each passing year.

    So the next time someone asks me for my favorite place, it’s an even bet I’ll say it’s jP.

  • Raging

    Something terrible happened to my family this week.

    What it is isn’t important, and I’m not being self-effacing when I say that. Individual calamities mean little but to the people who suffer them. Tragedies occur every day: Little children are struck by cars and killed; young people are diagnosed with hideous diseases; old people die after slowly losing their minds. We assume, generally, that this is the natural order of the world. It is only when it is happening to us that we object.

    There are those who learn to make peace with their suffering. They accept and accommodate and make alternate plans. This always reminds me of the maternity nurse who attended me when I was 21 and giving birth to a nine-and-a-half pound baby boy. "Just give in to the pain," she told me. "Work with it. Let it help you." Luckily, my husband at the time — a large man — stepped between us before I could kill her.

    And later, when that child was diagnosed with autism (the event which preceded, in many ways, the crisis that took place just three days ago), I read Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People. A rabbi, Kushner wrote this spiritual self-help manual after the death of his own son, Aaron, from progeria. He deconstructed the Book of Job, claiming it proved that God is both benevolent and fallible. To suffer, Kushner claimed, is simply to be fully human. The secret, he said — this man who certainly knows anguish — is to embrace one’s lot and look to God not for help but for strength.

    I tried to find solace in his words. But I couldn’t. Because no matter what the circumstances, I fight. Back in the early 90’s, I abandoned Kushner and read the works of a man whose outlook on the world rather frighteningly matched my own. A chronic philanderer and suicidal alcoholic, the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas better captured my philosophy, then and now.

    So late yesterday afternoon, in the spirit of Thomas, I poured a glass of Elderton Shiraz 2003 well before the official cocktail hour. I didn’t like this wine, frankly. It’s pricey (a $40, 14% alcohol vintage that someone had given me as a gift) and I’ve no doubt it’s good by objective standards, but it was far too jammy and bold for me. Dark fruit and red licorice flavors marched across my palate like a high school band, raucous and insistent but with no refining grace. I like my wine more subtle — as you know — yet, in the tradition of DT, I drank steadily simply because the bottle was there.

    Then I read, as I have so many times:

    Do not go gentle into that good night,
    Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

    Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
    Because their words had forked no lightning they
    Do not go gentle into that good night.

    Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
    Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

    Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
    And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
    Do not go gentle into that good night.

    Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
    Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

    And you, my father, there on the sad height,
    Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
    Do not go gentle into that good night.
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

    And as they always have, these words gave me comfort. I’m a Jewish woman who doesn’t know from acceptance. But rage, I get.

  • Sex and the Fat Man

    I learned again last week that any blog, book, or article with the word "sex" in the title will be read. Not that this was news to me. But it’s a lesson that was reinforced by our nifty Popular Today list, which proved that sex sells better than anything except basketball. Which, when you think about it, is an interesting commentary. . . .

    Now, I don’t know the Lakers from the Bears, but I do know sex. And I even have a legitimate reason to write about sex because my new novel is absolutely chock-full of sex. Really good sex. Only the person who’s having it happens to be an attractive but very, very large man — and I do mean that, in every way.

    So you should know that I spent my entire morning searching for a photo of a sexy fat man for this blog. Finally, I gave up and e-mailed our web guru who spent her entire afternoon searching. And what did we find? Well, what’s above is the best by far.

    I sorted through photos of fat men wearing baseball caps and stuffing enormous hamburgers into their mouths; clinical shots of obese men with pendulous fins of flesh hanging off their 1,000-pound bodies; pictures of sumo wrestlers in diaper-like garb. The closest I could come to a stud with a little meat around the middle was a stock shot of John Goodman, back in the Roseanne years. Yet — and I find this interesting — when I looked for cheesecake photos of hefty women they were in large supply.

    What’s that all about?

    Well, I’ll tell you what it’s all about. We women can talk about weight discrimination until we’re 90 (and probably will): the way men want stick-thin babes on their arms, women who look like heroin-addicted teenage boys and have collarbones that could kill. But suddenly, I’m not at all convinced that the problem isn’t really the other way around.

    Men are out there looking at jpegs of zaftig females lounging on pillows among dozens of cats. They’re getting turned on by women with rounded Rubanesque tummies and thighs that meet. But women, it appears, are not at all interested in looking at photos of beefy, hairy, barrel-stomached men.

    This has become a real hot button issue for me because my book is about a synesthetic 40-year-old food critic [nothing autobiographical there] who begins dating a smart, witty, reliable, thoughtful six-foot-six-inch 300-pound guy. (And no, for all of you who are wondering, my new six-foot-one-inch husband weighs a mere 203 dripping wet. . . .)

    The plot of my novel hinges around the fact that in high-falutin’ foodie circles, fat is simply not acceptable. Oh, the people who attend restaurant openings may talk about food constantly, describing as if it were sex, longingly and with hungry eyes. But they don’t eat much. And they do not care, as a group, for people who do.

    Mind you, I’m exempting real food lovers, most chefs (they eat constantly but they also move constantly,which is how they stay so thin), and those lusty gourmets of the Ruth Reichl type. What I’m talking about here are the socialites who attend every haute cuisine gala in town. When my heroine tries to bring her big man along as escort to one such event, he is openly derided for being not of the right type.

    So the couple ends up instead frequenting a small Persian restaurant in suburban Chicago where he, a scientist, is treated with dignity and she, a food critic, is not even recognized. They fall in love over a dish called fesenjoon, which she describes this way:

    The flavor reminded me of the mood rings we used to have when I was in grade school, with stones that would change color — supposedly depending upon the wearer’s emotional state, but really due to body temperature. Fesenjoon seemed to change in the air: its scent was of one thing and then another. Berries, citrus, bakery buns, roasted chicken, nuts, and earth.

    I wrote this, however, before ever having tasted fesenjoon. I’d read about it. I knew the ingredients (chicken, pomegranate juice, walnuts, onion, and citron), so like a person who can read music and hear the melody in his head, I conjured up the scent and flavor of the dish based upon its recipe.

    Last Friday, my normal-sized husband and I went to Shiraz Fireroasted Cuisine, on 60th and Nicollet, so I could taste the dish around which I’d based the whole crux of my book. Let me tell you, I was nervous. . . .

    "What if I hate it?" I asked my husband in the car.

    "You can write about something else," he said. "Send your editor the changes." He was nice enough, you’ll notice, not to point out that I might have tried fesenjoon before sending the book in.

    Shiraz was, I’m sorry to say, nearly empty. We sat in a booth next to a miniature Persian rug that looked like a little flying carpet. The lights were low and the walls a warm rose color. It would have been a very pleasant place to be except that the noise of clattering dishes coming from the kitchen echoed through the cavelike space.

    We ordered the fesenjoon (called fesenjan at Shiraz) and a ghormeh sabzy stew. Each came with a plate of white rice and lemon zest. I spooned a little of each on my rice and tasted.

    "Do you hate it?" my husband asked.

    I shook my head. But the truth is, I didn’t love it, either. The fesenjan was redder and sweeter than I’d expected, and the Shiraz version seemed to have no onion in it, nothing savory to counter the syrupy pomegranate sauce. The other dish, however, was extraordinary: chunks of rich, tender filet mignon with red beans in a thick gravy made of beef juice, herbs, and lime. It had a nearly South American flavor, mixed with the wondrous plain meaty taste of a rare Manny’s steak.

    Speaking of Manny’s, they have fat men there. Lots of them, and they’re sexy, too. Forget the wifty, silk tie types who hang out at places where the food is vertical, these are guys who take their 4-pound steaks lying down.

    So could someone get over there right now and take a picture. Please?