The Rake Magazine

Tag: Grand Cafe

  • Krishna Comes to the Kingfield Market

    Okay, I really intended to get this post up days ago, or at least sometime before Sunday (today), because today is the day of the weekly Kingfield Farmers Market, which runs from 9 a.m. to 1:30 a.m. at 43rd and Nicollet Ave. S., but life got hectic, and I had to go to Chicago for a conference, and so here it is, 9:20 a.m. on a Sunday morning. So I’m going to do a quick post and then jump on my bike and ride over to the market for breakfast.

    The Kingfield Market is pretty small, in terms of the number of vendors and shoppers, but the gastronomic batting average is pretty high: both Rustica, the terrific artisan bakery at 46th and Bryant, and the Grand Cafe, at 38th and Grand (one of my favorite restaurants), have stalls at the market, selling bread, cookies and pastries (UPDATE: the Grand Cafe will be there twice a month); and Clancy’s Meats (43rd & Upton, sells bratwursts – they were missing last Sunday, but are supposed to be there every week (UPDATE: starting in July). And the Ikawa Coffee Company sells Rwandan coffee – hot, cold and by the bag – to raise money for its projects to help Rwandan coffee farmers.

    The gastronomic highlight of last week’s visit, though, was discovering the Akshay-Paatram stall, run by Anasuya Mahabeshwari and Tina Ray. They offer a small selection of Indian vegetarian dishes, as well as a vegan sloppy Jane and little fruit turnovers, all very reasonably priced.

    Akshay-Paatram does not have a restaurant, but does operate a catering service; for a menu or more information, contact them at 612-964-1954, or e-mail them at akshaypaatram@yahoo.com.

    When I asked Anasuya about the name of the stall, she told me a charming story from the Mahabarata. I will make a complete hash of the story if I try to retell it, so instead I am pasting the Wikipedia version below.

    "Akshayapatra: अक्षयपात्र) meaning inexhaustible vessel, in Hindu mythology, was a wonderful vessel given to Yudhishthira by the Sun god, Surya, which held a never-failing supply of food to the Pandavas every day. 

    "When the Pandavas began their exile in the forest, Yudhishtra was despondent at his inability to feed the holy sages and others who accompanied him. At this, Dhaumya, the priest of the Pandavas, counselled him to pray to Lord Surya.
    Pleased with Yudhishtira’s prayers, Lord Surya blessed him with the
    Akshaya Patra, a vessel that would give unlimited food every day till Draupadi finished eating.

    "Lord Krishna also once partakes food from the Akshaya Patra, when sage Durvasa
    arrived at the Pandavas’ place with his disciples. When Durvasa
    arrived, there was no food left to serve him, since Draupadi had
    already finished eating. The Pandavas became anxious as to what they
    would feed such a venerable sage. While Durvasa and his disciples were
    away at the banks of the river bathing, Draupadi prayed to Lord Krishna
    for help. As always, they were once again saved by him, who partook of
    a single grain of rice from the Akshaya Patra and announced that he was
    satisfied by the meal. This satiated the hunger of
    Durvasa and all his disciples too, as the satisfaction of Lord Krishna
    meant the satiation of the hunger of the whole Universe.

    Akshayapatra, in current usage, refers to any store that is inexhaustible."

  • Cribbage Night at the Grand Café

    I’ve got a great week of eating ahead of me, and I hope some of you will be able to join me.

    On Monday, (March 24th) I am planning to stop by at the Grand Café,
    (3804 Grand Ave. S., Minneapolis) for their first ever cribbage night.
    (I actually majored in bridge in college, but I minored in cribbage.) I
    haven’t decided yet whether I am actually going to compete in the
    double elimination tournament and compete for the fabulous prizes (gift
    certificates and other stuff, I am told) but I do want to dip into the
    buffet, which will include a lamb stew, vegetarian stew, cheese board,
    fruit, bread and crackers, and the Grand’s legendary pignole (pine nut)
    cookies for dessert. The excitement starts at 6 p.m.

    Here’s the
    fine print Cost is $25 plus tax and tip, with tap beers on sale
    for $3 a glass, and wine for $5. Reservations are required – call
    612-822-8260 – and you are requested to bring your own cribbage board
    if you have one – they’ll supply the cards. Owner Mary Hunter cautions
    that this tournament is not sanctioned by the American Cribbage Congress,
    and that you need to already know how to play the game – lessons will
    not be provided. (It really isn’t all that complicated: you can find
    the rules online.) Ordinarily, the Grand Café is closed on Monday
    nights, so don’t show up two weeks from now looking for hot card action.

     

  • 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.

  • Beyond the Obvious

    Some guys—and gals—get all the ink. If you are a devoted Twin Cities foodie, you know all about Tim (and Josh), Vincent, Alex, Stewart and Heidi, Lucia, Doug, J.P., Lenny, and Brenda—and you can pair them with their restaurants. Odds are pretty good that you have also heard of Tanya Siebenaler, Don Saunders, Scott Pampuch, Mike Phillips, and J.D. Fratzke.*

    Google any of these names and you’ll get hundreds of hits. And by the time this issue is on the streets, your chances of getting a Valentine’s Day reservation at any of their establishments are slim or none.

    But plenty of other very fine restaurants don’t generate the same buzz and don’t make it into the Zagat Guide. Some of them are too new, others too old, some are a bit off the beaten path, and some are just a notch less ambitious than the places everyone’s talking about. Following are a few of these under-the-radar places that seem especially appropriate for Valentine’s Day, or any romantic occasion.


    At First Course: A chicken roulade with gorgonzola risotto, with a tres leches cake for dessert.

    Unless you happen to be his mother or one of his loyal customers, odds are pretty good that you have never heard of Travis Metzger, chef-owner of First Course. The décor at this little neighborhood bistro might be rather minimal for some tastes (varnished plywood takes the place of teak and mahogany veneers), but I find the place quite charming, fake fireplace and all.

    The first time we visited, Metzger was doubling as waiter, and listening to him describe the nightly specials made it clear that this is a guy who really knows and cares a lot about food. We started with a couple of his nightly specials: field greens and roasted beets with chopped walnuts, dressed in walnut oil with a pumpkin-infused goat cheese, and a tapas plate of polenta topped with a savory duck confit.

    I was a little skeptical about ordering the seafood stew in lobster broth, fearing a commercial soup base loaded with salt and MSG (there are no other lobster dishes on the menu); this version, however, was delicious: shrimp, mussels, clams, and calamari in a light but intensely flavorful broth, spiked with just enough chipotle pepper to command your attention. Other best bets from subsequent visits include the pappardelle with lamb ragu; braised leg of lamb with rosemary, white wine, and tomato; butternut squash ravioli with a brandy-Gorgonzola cream sauce; and the chicken roulade filled with prosciutto, spinach, and provolone, served over a Gorgonzola risotto.

  • Grassfed buffalo: something to chew on

    I had a lovely dinner last night at the Grand Café:
    cauliflower soup with a fig gastrique; pan-seared scallops with porcini-potato
    pave, and lean slices of medium rare bison (buffalo) top sirloin with lentils, bathed in a fig and port wine
    demi-glace. Then this morning, I happened to see the full-page ad in the New
    York Times for Michael Pollan’s new book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s
    Manifesto    . Pollan wrote the best-selling Omnivore’s Dilemma, which takes a
    critical look at our overly industrialized food system.

    The new book is billed as The Omnivore’s Solution, and the
    dozen recommendations in the ad start with

    1. Don’t
      eat anything that your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,

    and ends with

    12. Eat deliberately, with other
    people whenever possible, and always with pleasure.

    But it was recommendation #9 that caught my eye:

    9. Eat food
    from animals that eat grass.

    I’d read the literature about this before: meat from
    grass-fed is lower in calories and higher in healthy omega-3 fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid, which is supposed to reduce your
    risk of cancer. And grass-fed animals have a much smaller environmental impact that animals raised on corn.

    That made me curious about last
    night’s bison: was it grass-fed or grain-fed? Ordinarily, I would have simply
    assumed that buffalo are raised on grass, but a recent letter to the editor of
    the New York Review of Books claimed otherwise: the writer had done a little
    research and discovered that a lot of buffalo sold in supermarkets (including
    Trader Joe’s) is actually raised on corn. Apparently, a lot of consumers like
    the idea of buffalo, but like the flavor of corn-fed meat.

    Our hostess, Mary Hunter, who owns the café with her husband Dan,
    had told me that the bison came from Venison America, a family-owned business
    in Hudson, WI. According to their
    website, their bison comes is raised in Minnesota by a supplier who "feeds
    the bison grains and grasses but also supplements this with a weekly ration of
    whey from their cheese factory." The website does claim that their bison is
    still a lot leaner than beef:

    " Bison has per 3.5 ounce serving: 143 calories and 2.42
    grams of fat.
    Choice Beef has per 3.5 ounce serving: 211 calories and 9.28 grams of fat."

    There aren’t a lot of buffalo producers in Minnesota, and
    even fewer who own cheese factories, so the producer in question had to be
    Eichten’s Hidden Acres, which raises buffalo and produces cheese. Steve Loppnow, the owner
    of Venison America confirmed that Eichten’s is the supplier, and said that
    while the buffalo spend most of their lives eating grass, in the last 30 days
    before slaughter, they are fed a diet of oat silage, alfalfa, and "a little bit
    of corn, not a huge amount because corn is really expensive."

    Loppnow said that if restaurants want bison that is purely
    grass-fed, he can supply it, from an organic producer in Rice Lake, WI, but
    it’s more expensive – and he added that the fat from grass-fed beef is not as
    palatable as the fat from animals that have had some corn in their diet.

    Bottom line: that bison sirloin at the Grand Cafe was from an animal who consumed some corn, but a lot less than the typical feedlot steer.

     

     

     

  • Highlights of a Year of Eating

    I don’t do ten best lists, but looking back over the last
    year, I can recall some memorable dining experiences. For now, at least, I am going to limit myself to the new places – the
    list will just get too long if I try to work in more than just a mention of old
    favorites like the Grand Café Vincent, and Atlas Grill.

    My nominee for best new restaurant of 2007 is Saffron, where
    chef Sameh Wadi brings together the flavors of the Middle East and North Africa
    with the techniques and presentation of contemporary haute cuisine in very stylish
    surroundings. Highlights of my visits included an entrée of fork-tender lamb
    shoulder, over a savory bed of chick peas and a tagine of salmon and clams with
    roasted peppers, olives, fennel and saffron.

    Other favorite new places:

    Heidi’s Café: The
    same talent that the husband and wife team of Stewart and Heidi Woodman
    demonstrated at Restaurant Levain and Five (both now defunct) is again on
    display at Heidi’s, but this time at much more affordable prices: poached
    pheasant breast with cauliflower arugela salad for $19; a vegetarian entrée of
    pappardelle Bolognese for $12 .

    Meritage: Chef
    Russell Klein, cooked Regional American at W.A. Frost, but as chef-owner at
    Meritage, (in the former A Rebours space in downtown Saint Paul) he is free to
    return to his first love, French cuisine – which he delivers up with some
    playful and creative twists (like a Nutella and matzo sandwich for dessert.)

    Rotisserie Brasa, which Alex Roberts opened this summer in a
    former gas station on E. Hennepin remodeled to look like a Caribbean chicken
    shack. Roberts, known for much pricier and refined cuisine at Restaurant Alma,
    sets out at Brasa to show that local and sustainable can also be affordable.
    Only two meats are offered – rotisserie chicken and a terrific roast pork shoulder,
    along with a bunch of classic southern sides like cheese grits and collard
    greens.

    Keefer Court Bakery & Café. This funky little Chinese
    bakery at Cedar and Riverside recently hired Jack Ma, one of the most talented
    Cantonese chefs in the Twin Cities, to run their kitchen, and now serve a menu
    of traditional rice plates, noodle soups and stir-fries, at bargain prices.

    Pagoda in Dinkytown: The décor is much trendier than the
    usual noodle house, but the menu here, too, is traditional Cantonese street
    food plus a smattering of Japanese, Thai and Korean dishes in very stylish
    surroundings, at student-budget prices.

    Shiraz Fireroasted Cuisine: The chicken and lamb koubidehs
    (ground meat kabobs) at this new Persian restaurant at 61st and
    Nicollet tasted so authentic to me that I assumed that the chef must be from
    Iran, but it turns out it’s the same Mexican chef who ran the kitchen when the
    place was called Cintia’s of Mexico.

    Little Szechuan: The best Sichuan cuisine in the Twin
    Cities, plus some amenities you won’t find at many other Chinese restaurants in
    the Twin Cities, like a small but decent selection of wines. Try the fish
    fillet and tofu with spicy tasty broth.

    Café Ena: I live a few blocks from El Meson, and I have been
    a fan of chef-owner Hector Ruiz for years. His new Latin American fusion
    restaurant at 46th and Lyndale is just a tick more upscale, but the
    cuisine is just as lively and imaginative.

    Ngon Vietnamese Bistro: A lot of the restaurants that attempt East-West fusion wind up with the worst of both worlds, but this stylish storefront in Saint Paul’s Frogtown neighborhood is an exception: smart combinations of Asian and Western flavors in dishes such as Vietnamese beef over pappardelle noodles, ahi-tuna mango
    salad, and a succulent lamb shank with pho spices, served over
    lemongrass rice.

    Well, that’s about as many highlights as I can think of at the moment, but check back – I’ll probably add a few more to the list.