Author: Jeremy Iggers

My guess is, Ryan Aberle dreams of someday running a restaurant like Grant Achatz’s Alinea in Chicago, or Thomas Keller’s Per Se in Manhattan. For the time being, though, he’s the executive chef at North Coast in Wayzata. During the summer months, Aberle runs a high volume feeding operation, turning out Thai chicken wraps and bacon cheeseburgers and Caesar salads for the crowds that pack the dockside patio.

When the leaves start to fall, and the crowds thin out, Aberle gets a chance to do something a bit more creative. He has already pushed his dinner menu about as far as a menu at a dockside restaurant can go, with dishes like Moroccan spiced rack of lamb, and Kobe beef short ribs braised in Guinness. But it’s his five-course tasting menu that really gives him a chance to show off his talent.

The prix fixe offerings change every couple of weeks, but recent offerings have included starters of juniper-scented Kumamoto oysters with apple-smoked King salmon and yuzu beurre blanc or a lavender braised Angus beef cheek with Stilton and Yukon potato croquette and herb-poached cherries. Last week’s menu, which I tasted, started with a salad of mache with sesame dressing and duck prosciutto, accompanied by a crispy tempura-fried poached egg and a wedge of Cabrales cheese with honey, followed by a vanilla-scented squash and lobster bisque. These were followed by a lamb chop with spiced figs and a pickled fennel and onion slaw, and then braised boneless beef short rib with horseradish spaetzle, and a sweet and sour finale of mango poached in black vinegar with coconut ice cream and a butterscotch pudding.

Not every course was as memorable as the first, but the overall batting average was pretty high, and it’s hard to beat the price: $35 for five courses, ($29 on Sundays), plus $20 for the optional flight of four 4-oz. glasses of wines (decent, not great) to accompany the first four courses. The new menu, which starts today, starts with kobe beef shabu-shabu, followed by monkfish Benedict, Tallegio “eclairs” and a pheasant confit cake with pumpkin coffee gnocchi and a spiced poached crab apple with hazelnut cream.

The cuisine may be haute, but the setting and service are more casual – a long bar in the center of the dining room is ringed with at least 10 large flat-screen TVs, mostly tuned to sports channels, which creates an atmosphere a bit less refined than, say, the dining room at Cosmos or D’Amico Cucina. And our young server was friendly and attentive, but not as polished as her counterparts at other restaurants that attempt cuisine of this caliber.

A six course $85 wine dinner featuring the wines of Cakebread Cellars on Friday, November 2 is sold out, but there are still a few places left for the second dinner on Saturday, November 3.

North Coast, 294 E. Grove Lane, Wayzata, 952-475-4960.

My esteemed colleague Ann Bauer is one tough critic. Last month, she claimed that there were only two restaurants in Saint Paul where you can get a decent upscale meal – I Nonni and Heartland, and in her most recent blog posting (see below) – she added Zander Cafe to the list.

My list is a little longer – I’d rate Muffuletta as one of the best restaurants on either side of the river. Chef J.D. Fratzke’s ever-changing menu combines local ingredients and global influences in dishes such as Moroccan spice-rubbed beef short ribs with preserved lemon relish, or pan-seared Arctic char with braised leeks, wild mushrooms, prosciutto and lobster-citrus sauce.

And what about Jay’s Cafe? The decor may be too modest, and the prices too reasonable, to qualify as “upscale,” but I have thoroughly enjoyed chef-owner Jay Randolph’s’ Midwestern cuisine. I’ve also had some pretty decent meals at Cafe Biaggio, Pazzaluna, and the Downtowner Woodfire Grill, though I haven’t dined at any of them very recently.

I do share Ann’s preference for contemporary creative cuisine, but when I am in the mood for classic Americana, The Lexington serves up a perfectly decent dining experience.

The Mill City Farmers Market wraps up its 2007 season tomorrow (Saturday) from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. with a Fall Harvest Festival. Highlights include a tasting of local wines and beer; a cooking demonstration by local chefs making fall stews, appearances by market mascot Roostini, and a mother hen and her chicks, music by the Light of the Moon band, and a pumpkin puppet-making class taught by puppeteers from Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater. The market is located between the new Guthrie Theater and the Mill City Museum on the Mississippi riverfront in downtown Minneapolis.
For details, visit the Mill City Farmers Market website.

Heidi’s, the long awaited new restaurant from Stuart and Heidi Woodman is set to open “next week,” say the Woodmans, in the former Pane Vino Dolce space at 819 W. 50th St. in south Minneapolis. The Woodmans made their reputation dishing up ambitious haute cuisine at two very high-end restaurants that have both gone out of business – Five and Restaurant Levain (replaced by the more affordable Cafe Levain.) This time around, they are aiming for something a bit more modest: Heidi says all appetizers will be under $9, and all entrees under $19. Stuart describes the cuisine as “modern French…basically food that is prepared in the french style but more modern technique and plate presentation.” Typical dishes will include peppered pork with a bordelaise sauce, served with crispy potato roesti; and sauteed barramundi with roasted parsnips and a mussel jus scented with pico de gallo. (Barramundi, by the way, is Australian sea bass, now being farm-raised in the U.S. Stuart Woodman describes the flavor as a cross between sea bass and snapper; it has gotten some positive press as a “green” species that can be farm-raised with less environmental impact than some other farm-raised species.
There’s not much to see at Heidi’s website, www.HeidisMpls.com, but I imagine that will change soon.

Me and the missus decided to celebrate five years of married bliss by going back to the scene of the crime, Paris, France. We had gone out on a few dates in the spring of 2000, before I went off for a fellowship at Oxford. We kept in touch during the spring by email, and when the term ended, we rendezvoused in the City of Light. Not much happened in Paris that would make for exciting reading – we toured the markets together, made dinner together, smooched a little on the couch of a friend’s borrowed apartment in the 13th Arrondissement, and somehow the spark got struck.

Given the utter improbability of us finding each other, getting hitched, and actually staying in love for five years, we probably should have gone to Lourdes to give thanks, but we went instead on a meandering trip through the countryside. We stopped in the Loire Valley and Burgundy to visit old friends, and then headed to the Dordogne, home of truffles, ducks, geese and foie gras.

Foie gras seemed to be on nearly every menu in Dordogne, and I will confess that I ate my share: a big tranche of foie gras as an entree at L’Os a Moelle in Paris; roast quail over foie gras at La Recreation in Les Arques, foie gras and artichoke heart at La Belle Etoile in Roque-Gageot. It’s a very sensuous taste experience – with a flavor both impossibly rich and extremely delicate.

It’s also a touchy subject on this side of the Atlantic – the city of Chicago has banned it from restaurants, and the state of California has set a deadline of 2012 to end production and sales of the fatty bird livers. The charge is cruelty, since the birds are force-fed a high-salt diet to produce the delicacy.

I’m in sympathy with the motivations of animal rights activists, and I eat a lot less meat than I used to. I try to support the restaurants that serve humanely and sustainably produced meats. But based on everything I have read, I am not convinced that the force-feeding of ducks and geese (gavage in French) causes nearly as much suffering as the meat production practices that are routine on factory farms, especially in the US. In the Dordogne, local farmstead producers even offer farm tours, with tasting of their products, and demonstrations of gavage. You’ll have a hard time finding a commercial producer of pork, beef or eggs in the US willing to let consumers see how their animals are treated.

At any rate, I didn’t take notes on my dining experiences – I promised Carol that this wouldn’t be a working vacation – so now a lot of wonderful food swims in my memory as a diffuse fog of recollected pleasure – succulent lobster ravioli in a langoustine sauce at La Recreation, a hearty plate of steak tartare in a Paris bistro; magret de canard medium rare with tender cheese quenelles at the Belle Etoile.

One meal was a pilgrimage – a few years ago, I had read Michael Sanders’ book, From Here You Can’t See Paris: Seasons of A French Village and Its Restaurant, about a struggling village in the Lot whose inhabitants recruited a young chef from Marseille to turn their abandoned schoolhouse into a destination restaurant. When I discovered that the village, Les Arques, was near our route, we made a point of a lunchtime visit. The 30 Euro ($42) five course prix fixe menu was one of the gastronomic highlights of our trip, with highlights including lobster ravioli in a langoustine sauce, scallops in passionfruit sauce, medallions of monkfish with stuffed zucchini blossoms, and a sublime nougat glace.

Our final destination was Barcelona. Barcelona is just a short train ride from the French border, but the culinary culture is vastly different. Catalan cooking isn’t as delicate or sophisticated as French cuisine, but what it lacks in delicacy, it makes up for in robust flavor. If in France, food is a religion, in Catalonia it is a sport. Our best meal in Barcelona – our anniversary dinner, actually -was a perfectly seafood paella for two at the venerable Set Portes, the oldest restaurant in the city. But perhaps the most memorable meal was a late-night outing for tapas at La Flauta on Balmes. At 11 p.m., every table in the dining room was taken, with a line as long as the tapas bar of eager customers waiting for a seat – and diners were still arriving when we left around midnight. The dishes we sampled, like an eggplant tortilla (a kind of frittata), a shrimp salad, patatas bravas (fried potatoes with a spicy tomato sauce), offered robust flavors that matched the energy level of the diners.

I don’t want to stereotype Catalan cuisine as hearty but unsophisticated, though that’s just the kind of food that we sought out. Catalonia is actually at the cutting edge of world gastronomy, thanks to such celebrated chefs as Ferran Adria at El Bulli; neurologist-chef Miguel Sanchez Romera at L’Esguard, and Quique Dacosta at El Poblet. (To get a sense of the direction in which these chefs are taking cuisine as art form, spend a little time surfing the El Poblet website.)
I didn’t even try to get reservations for any of these gastronomic pilgrimage sites; reportedly El Bulli gets 300,000 calls for reservations every year, and its hopeless unless you call many months in advance. Maybe if I start dialing now, I can get a reservation in time for our tenth…

What do Kim Bartman of Cafe Barbette and Bryant Lake Bowl, Brenda Langton of Spoonriver, Lenny Russo of Heartland, Tracy Singleton of the Birchwood Cafe, Lucia Watson of Lucia’s Restaurant, Jim Grell of The Modern Cafe, Steven Brown, formerly of Harry’s Food and Cocktails, and J.P. Samuelson of jP American Bistro all have in common?

They all have a strong commitment to local, sustainable food, and they have all donated gift certificates to the silent auction at next week’s monthly Eastside Coop Food Forum, to be held Wednesday, October 10 at the Ritz Theater, 345 13th Ave. N.E., Minneapolis. No food will be served at the forum, but there will be plenty of food for thought – the event, co-sponsored by the Land Stewardship Project, is a fundraiser for the whistleblower lawsuit filed by former state hydrologist Paul Wotzka. Wotzka was fired by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency after he requested permission to testify before a state legislative committee on the levels of atrazine in Minnesota water. Also speaking will be UC Berkeley biologist Tyrone Hayes, an expert on the impact of atrazine on amphibians; and Minnesota state senators John Marty and Ken Tschumper.
The doors open at 6:15, with music by Paul Metza from 6:30 to 7, and the program from 7 to 9 p.m. Suggested donation is $20, but nobody will be turned away.

You don’t really have to be a gastronomic adventurer to enjoy the cuisine at Tam-Tam’s African Restaurant in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, but if you are looking for something out of the ordinary, the option is there. The menu really covers most of the continent, ranging from Ugandan Hunter’s Ribs ($11.99), an enormous portion of grilled marinated beef ribs, served on the bone, to West African palm butter stew, served with your choice of chicken beef or goat ($11.99), and Ethiopian Injera n’ Wot, a dish of spicy chicken and vegetables served over flat bread ($9.99). I stopped in recently and had the lunch special of beef stew ($7.99 / $11.99 for dinner), tender chunks of beef in a rich gravy, accompanied by a couple of sides.I chose the collard greens, and the ugali, a steamed corn meal dumpling that’s perfect for sopping up gravy. Ugandan-born owner Steven Kaggwa is a genial and engaging host, happy to answer questions about the menu.
Tam-Tam’s now also offers wine and beer, including South African and Ethiopian vintages, as well as Tusker beer from Kenya – and highly rated Bell’s beer from Uganda is expected to arrive soon.
Tam-Tam’s African Restaurant, 605 Cedar Avenue South, Minneapolis,.