Adam Minter writes: Funny thing happened this morning while I was at the pirate DVD shop beneath my apartment building in Shanghai: I met some people from Minnesota (accents gave it away pretty quick) who had a copy of The Rake with them. So I ran back upstairs, grabbed my camera, and snapped a couple of photos. Left to right, they are Dick and Sally Clayton of Forest Lake, and Barb and George Klosinski of Northfield. They’re on a two-week tour of China, including Beijing, Shanghai, and a Three Gorges cruise. When they’re not busy eating dumplings or shopping in Shanghai’s finest pirate DVD shops, they’re reading The Rake.
Blog
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Fox & Drake Tea Room
You needn’t worry about proper pinky etiquette while drinking tea at Fox & Drake; they’ll forgive you if you don’t perfectly emulate Queen Elizabeth. You also needn’t worry about dry, tasteless pastries or soggy sandwiches. An afternoon respite here can include a proper roast beef sandwich with Stilton and chive mayonnaise, or a savory shepherd’s pie. Evenings bring a positively civilized menu of roasted Cornish game hen with a ginger sauterne sauce or an elegant warm duck salad with strawberries and oranges. Look for traditional Sunday roast dinners in the colder months and holiday teas throughout the year. 647 E. Lake St., Wayzata; 952-476-6200
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Snap!
Snap! is the sassy younger sibling to Northeast Minneapolis’ stylish Pop!–a casual dining spot that makes us wish we’d had somewhere this cool to spend afternoons when we were in school. Generously topped pizzas boast names like Snaparoooskie and Shizaam, and hot hoagies come with or without red sauce (try the Far Out with spicy peppers and meats). The sundae creations are a blast from a past. We’re glad no one is tallying up the caloric damage inflicted by the Do the Hustle, a fudge brownie mess with coffee ice cream, toffee pieces, and butterscotch sauce. But that’s nothing compared to the Gilbertha option, for lovers and friends to share: twelve scoops and six toppings for twelve bucks. If Snap! were closer to the U, it would already be a campus institution. 2851 Johnson St. N.E., Minneapolis; 612-788-9800
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Hot Plate
This is one of those places you’ll be tempted to keep to yourself. Or maybe you’ll be okay sharing it with the lucky few deemed worthy–but then you have to decide: Does my co-worker deserve to know about Hot Plate’s outrageously yummy pumpkin buckwheat waffles? Is my neighbor witty enough to appreciate the paint-by-number collage and the Eric Estrada egg bake? But the restaurant’s good cheer is infectious, and you’ll soon realize that it’s impossible to be so stingy about dishes so generous, whether it’s the sourdough French toast, the BLT heaped with guacamole, or the beautiful Hot Plate burger topped with smoked tomato, spinach, and Brie. Besides, any restaurant that serves a Hotdish of the Day is meant to be shared with the world. 5204 Bloomington Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-824-4794
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Browsing Chinatown
St. Paul’s Chinatown isn’t of the polished, touristy variety celebrated by chambers of commerce in other cities. There are no novelty pagodas or souvenir key chains. What exists here is a multi-ethnic community that lives, shops, and eats within its borders. Every shop entrance is a mural of advertisements for practical services: tax preparation, real estate, life insurance, auto repair. Stores stock Thai parrot soap right next to hundred-pound bags of road salt. Try finding that in San Francisco.
From storefronts along Rice Street selling dim sum and Korean-style beef ribs to signs on University Avenue promising, “Men suit, short,” St. Paul’s Chinatown—or, more aptly, Southeast Asia-town—is bustling with color, activity, and commerce. Shoppers admire the Gaudi-esque public art piece Mosaic Chimney by Angela Carlson, in front of Somkeo Sengmavong’s on University, before popping inside for incense, a gold necklace, or lunch at the cafeteria. Around here, if you can’t find the perfect tea and a reasonably priced pot to go with it, you’re just not applying yourself.
The Sunrise Oriental Supermarket, located inside a University Avenue warehouse, is easily identified by its enormous sign proclaiming, “Asian Fabric.” A true community market, Sunrise is all things to all people. It offers a grocery, a pharmacy, a video counter, a portrait studio, an accountant’s office, an arcade, a small café, and a selection of very reasonably priced designer handbags. As advertised, the store is also stocked with a blinding array of fabrics—bolts of teal and red, silk and velvet—embossed, embroidered, and bejeweled. The walls are lined with traditional Hmong formalwear, and the sewing machines are always running.
Nearby sits Hmong ABC, which touts itself as the first and only Hmong bookstore in the world (the Hmong alphabet wasn’t developed until the 1950s, so, culturally speaking, Hmong books are pretty rad) and sells works by both local authors and Hmong writers worldwide. Besides books, the store has a smorgasbord of native crafts. Embroidered bedding is stacked floor to ceiling, along with dolls, jewelry, journals, and baskets from Thailand.
Walking into the simply named Market on nearby Como, it feels as though you’ve left the United States. Teens check out designer clothing, and each other. Children run screaming from one loud electronic toy display to the next. The arcade buzzes and pops. Old men and women socialize over tea, gossiping and discussing politics. Rows of tables are laden with dried mushrooms and fragrant twigs, icons and incense burners, jewelry and clothing. Children’s Mandarin-styled dresses hang next to neon green platform boots, and—as is always the case in these urban bazaars—there is a large table covered with industrial-looking bras and granny underpants. This must have been what New York’s Canal Street was like before it was overrun by fake Rolexes and I ™ New York
T-shirts: frenetic, dirty, and thoroughly amazing.
If you insist on spotless floors and airtight food packages, head to Double Dragon Foods, the Kowalski’s of Asian supermarkets, at the corner of Maryland and Rice. Here you will find moonfish, baby octopus, fresh lobsters, and six types of shrimp. The bok choy and the taro root are neatly stacked, and the baby limes are misted regularly. The housewares department stocks all the usual suspects, along with the not-so-usual red plastic shrines, electric dragon candles, and ginseng soaps.
Perfect places to take your time and browse, to slurp noodles and eavesdrop on conversations you don’t understand, University Avenue and Rice Street are no longer simply routes to somewhere else. The byways are now their own destination.—Sarah Lemanczyk
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The Handmade Tale
"I’ve always found you get more spiritual energy if you have things made by two hands—especially your own two hands,” said Kimber Fiebiger. If so, then her home is coursing with such energy: The entire place was built with her hands, and those of friends. It sits atop Fiebiger’s Joan of Art gallery, which, with its bronze Humpty Dumpty sculptures perched on stone-wall pedestals along Franklin Avenue in the Seward neighborhood, is a colorful Minneapolis landmark. When she purchased the hundred-year-old building, in 2000, it was a wreck. The entire second floor was but a shanty attic, so Fiebiger, along with her kids and friends, “tore it off and built a house. We had about fourteen people in the middle of winter—friends, my kids—and we just framed it up. It was like an old-fashioned barn-raising.”
Windows were the touchstone for Fiebiger’s architectural vision. She bought a handful of one-of-a-kind pieces from the Marvin Windows Outlet in Warroad, Minnesota, and “we just designed the building around the windows,” she said. Her whimsy is on view along the living room’s east wall, where a picture window and three boxy, smaller panes are lined up to keep the room flooded with sunlight. At night, they cast geometric shapes of moonlight all over. “People do drugs to get this effect,” she said with a chuckle.
For home furnishings, Fiebiger headed to dumpsters and alleyways around the city, adopting others’ cast-offs; her kitchen’s retro cupboards were salvaged from the Reuse Center. But Fiebiger mainly creates fixtures and housewares, such as her artsy dishware, in a suite of basement studios equipped for welding, woodworking, potting, and making stained glass (some of which she sells in the gallery). She often makes use of remnant materials from art and building projects; for example, she nailed down—by hand, of course—leftover spalted maple and Brazilian cherrywood strips for flooring. For her son Gabriel—or rather, his collection of Lord of the Rings action figures—she improvised a landscape out of hardened drizzles of insulation foam. The delighted twelve-year-old made it the centerpiece of his bedroom.
Even in a home where every square inch has been lavished with handcrafted care, Fiebiger’s expansive bathroom is extraordinary. Outfitted with both a hot tub and an upright shower, it’s plastered with thousands of black and white tile shards. Curlicues and fiddleheads coil around the floors and walls of what she calls her “homage to insomnia.” The catalyst, apparently, was the end of a long-term relationship. “I was pretty wiped out, so I broke a lot of tile and made an art piece out of it,” she said. Her troubles turned out to be transformative: “This is my favorite thing I’ve ever made.”—Christy DeSmith
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The Art in Attendance
A long time ago we were very serious about going to art openings to take in whatever was on the walls (or hanging from the ceiling, or stuffed into a crack in the floor, or lurking beneath a staircase). Now, though, the crowds at such events are simply too distracting. But who’s complaining? Not us—especially if the scene includes men in chunky eyeglasses with crisp shirts underneath their jackets, and women who’ve gone to the adventurous outer reaches of their wardrobes for the occasion. For the simple, often solitary act of perusing art, one might as well come back another day; save opening-night receptions for studying the well-dressed human form.
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You Were Like This:
You acted all negative at breakfast, making everything heavy and chore-like. You were like this: Where is my coffee? Is there one thing on this menu that is not fried? What’s wrong with Grandma? Do people in rural America have like super strong hearts that don’t get all plugged up and clogged? Grandma is healthy and strong, why did she stay at the motel? Where’s my coffee? I can’t believe that Grandma stayed in bed.
Your wife was like this: Honey, relax. This is our vacation. You should make the most of it. Your mother is just resting. We can bring some food back to the motel for her.
Your youngest daughter was like this: Pancakes aren’t fried, Daddy.
You rolled your eyes at her and sighed.
Your older daughters were like this: Gosh, Dad, chill out!
You were tapping your fork against the plastic tablecloth and stacking the artificial sweeteners and going on and on like this. You didn’t stop. You put the sweeteners away and you said the coffee was stale and that you were going to walk down Main Street and check on the van.
You were like this: Even if the van is running and ready, and we get there by the end of the day, there will only be enough time for the girls to dip their toes in the ocean before we’ll have to pack everything up and head home.
You put on your Braves cap and tromped through the crowded diner, past everyone eating fried food and laughing. You stepped out into the blizzard with steam coming out of your ears and your mind full of complaints, like everything was serious and like you were the only one that could see that.
You were walking through the blizzard and getting your ankles wet and the thoughts in your head were like this: This sucks. This is my vacation, and it sucks. I didn’t spend the past year in a windowless office to sit out a blizzard and eat lousy fried food in some podunk town.
You found the body shop and you were shocked to see the garage door open to the elements and half a dozen guys sitting around, drinking Cokes. Snow was blowing in at them, melting and making puddles. You looked down and saw magenta rainbows swirling around in the puddles and you got all bent out of shape about it. You looked at your van and saw its innards strewn about in the puddles and on the tables.
You were like this: What the hell am I paying you for?
The guys sitting around, drinking Cokes were like this: You’re not paying us for anything right now; we’re waiting for your part.
You shook your head thinking you were talking to a bunch of idiots, and you were like this: You could at least close the door.
They told you that they’d never seen a blizzard before, but you just threw your hands at them and went back out into the blizzard. You were retracing your steps, getting wet up to your knees, and you were like this in your head: I didn’t spend the past year in a windowless office to sit out a blizzard and eat lousy fried food in some podunk town. This sucks. This is my vacation, and it sucks.
You slid back into the booth with your family and you saw that your eggs were cold and you said that you had only been gone for thirty seconds and you decided right then and there that the eggs must’ve been cold when the waitress brought them to you. You said this like it was the most obvious thing in the world, but your family was totally silent, like they didn’t believe you, so you grabbed your plate and got up from the table and marched to the bar and waited for the waitress.
You were like this when you saw her: These eggs are cold.
She wouldn’t take responsibility for the cold eggs so you didn’t leave a tip, but you saw your wife leave a tip and you decided to confront her on the way back to the motel.
You were like this to your wife: Why did you leave a tip?
She just shook her head. You could tell she was trying to be sensitive to you and attentive to your gripes, but she just kept quiet, like she didn’t know what to say.
She held the Styrofoam to-go box of waffles in her hands and was eventually like this: Did I make the wrong choice? Does your mother even like waffles?
You didn’t answer her question. You just kept turning around and pointing to your three girls, marching shoulder to shoulder with their heads down and their underdressed arms crossed. You pointed at the white specks melting on their heads and you used them as an example of how much everything about the vacation was sucking.
You went on and on, pointing back and saying how bad it was, but your wife was like this: The girls are having fun. They’ve never seen a blizzard before.
She told you to look at their faces and see how they were smiling and giggling right then and there, which got you all worked up and made it impossible for you to prove your point. You were barmy inside and your feet were cold and everything around you was painted white.
You were quiet and angry when you slid the metal key into the lock at your motel room door, listening to its smooth clicks. You were about to say something about key cards and the Stone Age but when you opened the door and looked in your room, you were shocked and disgusted and you couldn’t believe what you were seeing. Your mother was there, jumping naked on the bed. She was holding her breasts in her hands and bouncing around in circles with a big smile on her wrinkled face. The girls busted their guts and started shouting out to Grandma. Your wife started sucking air in a gasping guffaw. Grandma started laughing along with them. Then she started singing some old song, something she sang to you when you were young. This made you start laughing, but it was like you didn’t even decide to do it, it was just there, coming out of you like a long hiccup. Everyone got up on the bed and started jumping in circles around Grandma, and you were like this: Girls, we are going to the ocean.
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B.B. King
This may be one of the last chances to see the legend. He’s already decided that his scheduled U.K. tour will be his last one there, and when an eighty-year-old performer says he’s weary of life on the road, we tend to believe him (certainly more than when we hear it from, say, Cher). King hasn’t said heÕs done with touring in the U.S., but at Orchestra Hall, he’ll be treated in appropriately kingly fashion for what is being billed as an eightieth birthday celebration–so why not see him now? After all, he’ll eventually be sitting home with his feet up, and it’s not like there’s an acceptable heir waiting to take his place. 612-371-5656; www.minnesotaorchestra.org
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Rose Ensemble
Choral music sounds especially good in December, although the Rose Ensemble can get even the statuary at the stodgiest of churches to prick up its ears at any time of the year. Known for its magnificent renditions of Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music, the ensemble specializes in obscure and unpredictable pieces, and its holiday programs are no exception. This year, it focuses on Mexican Baroque music–fanciful and exuberant songs that express the joy of the season without getting hung up on the holiness. A new recording, Celebremos el Ni–o, collects some of the best pieces from the ensembleÕs current songbook, but no CD can capture the way a live performance–the expanse of the stage, the power of all those huge lungs–can change the properties of air and space; that’s what this holiday tour of Duluth, the Twin Cities, and Stillwater is all about. 651-225-4340; www.roseensemble.org