The Rake Magazine

Tag: North Minneapolis

  • Naked Bones at the Brickhouse BBQ

    As I get older and balder, I have come to appreciate the t-shirt legend that proclaims, "Only a few heads are perfect – the rest are covered with hair." Something similar is true of barbecued ribs – the best way to serve mediocre ribs is smothered in sauce – but to serve ribs naked, they have to be done just about perfectly.

    North Minneapolis has been home to a lot of great barbecue
    joints over the years – Amos & Amos, Levy’s, and others that came and went
    so quickly that I can’t remember their names. The half-life of restaurants in
    north Minneapolis seems to be a matter of months, so if you want to try the
    terrific ribs at the Brickhouse BBQ, 4330 N. Lyndale, you probably should go
    sooner rather than later. There’s not much in the way of ambience, but at good barbecue joints there never is.

    The Brickhouse opened about a month ago and the grand
    opening pennants are still fluttering outside, but the place doesn’t seem to be
    getting much of a new restaurant buzz. I stopped in last night around 7:30 for
    the rib and chicken combo, and for the whole time I was there, only three
    customers walked in the door – and they seemed to be friends of the owners.

    It’s a family operation – Brad Bigger, his wife Blanca and
    their son Franklin Zumba-Deleg all share the cooking duties, while daughter
    Karina Zumba-Deleg works the front of the house. A note on the menu mentioned
    that the cooks have 45 years of cooking experience between them. The Biggers
    asked me not to mention their previous employer by name, but it’s one of the
    oldest and best barbecue restaurants in the Twin Cities – a market leader, you
    might say – and it’s famous for serving its bones naked – with sauce on the
    side.

    The Brickhouse ribs are served the same way, but rubbed with
    a spice blend before cooking. You have to be a pretty good and confident cook
    to serve ribs naked – a pool of sauce can cover a multitude of sins, and make
    up for a lack of flavor if the ribs have been parboiled to speed up the cooking
    time. These were firm and meaty and full of flavor, with just a hint of smoke –
    Brad Bigger says he uses oak and hickory chunks in his smoker, and occasionally
    adds a little maple or mesquite. The barbecued chicken was also quite good –
    meaty and not too dry.

    The homemade sauce ("a special recipe I don’t give out
    to anybody") was a perfect accompaniment – tangy, and not too sweet – but it added to the flavor of the meat, it didn’t cover it up. My combo
    of half a chicken and three pork ribs cost $16.95, including coleslaw, Texas
    toast and fries.

    There is a lot more on the menu that I would like to try,
    including the beef ribs (Bigger says his customers call them the Flintstone
    bones), the ribeye steak dinner ($16.95-$21.95), and the barbecue beef brisket
    sandwich ($7.95 with salad or coleslaw and fries.)

    The Brickhouse is open daily for breakfast, and offers an
    $8.95 breakfast buffet from 8 to 12 on weekends.

  • Muja Messiah's Debut Album

    "Don’t wait for the critics to jump on this dude before you start giving it up," says everybody’s favorite Albino rhymer, Brother Ali. He’s speaking about Muja Messiah, the latest local rapper to make a big splash in the national underground hip-hop scene. "Muja is the shit. The man is right with his."

    So this is your last chance to go grab (download…) Muja’s debut album Thee Adventures of a B-Boy D-Boy and enjoy it for yourself, before I ruin it with tempered, analytic praise.

    Ready, go. Now come back. We can have a nice discourse in the comments section below. We will agree with each other, all of us emphasizing each other’s opinions in a positive, supporting manner. Which happens.

    Okay. Let’s start with Bro Ali’s statement that "Muja is the shit." If being ‘the shit’ – and making an album that is also ‘the shit’ – necessitates putting forth an unbroken series of successful songs, then indeed there’s something gorgeous about Muja Messiah. Thee Adventures cycles through a medley of styles. The production ranges from the jazzy slow jam to the upbeat to the downright krunked, the rhymes from egotistical to introspective. And Muja effortlessly navigates from track to track, rapping convincingly over the varied beats – it’s not just like he wrote a rhyme and a producer made a beat and they synced them up and smashed them together; rather his flows seem actually to be linked with the rhythms.

    Overall, his style has a bit more of an edge than most Minnesotan rappers’. Just when I thought the local scene was as saturated as it could possibly be – this is a small city to have as many big names as we do – Muja is able to inject it with something that, if not completely new, is at least new to us.

    Though he expertly tackles the self-conscious and political rhymes that have filled several albums on the Rhymesayers label, Muja Messiah (whose album is put out by Black Corners) is most on point when he’s rapping about his life on the streets of North Minneapolis. (Not to say other rappers here haven’t dabbled in this milieu; it’s just that, to my mind, Muja is so far the most noteworthy.)

    On "What’s This World Coming To" (which features Slug) he’s all like:

    "I was conceived in a mustard green Cutlass Supreme/
    lucky me at the time I was the youngest of three/
    til my big sister drowned in a river/
    years later my brother got gunned down and they never found the killer."

    As this verse shows, he handles his personal history with frankness and even a little bit of humor. It’s his trademark mixture, and proves to be engaging on every track. One gets a sense that Muja is rapping about some important, personal issues, but where applicable he’s able to see the absurdity of his situations. I think that might be called scope.

    What’s maybe most endearing, though, is an inferiority complex that hovers over the album, in regards to street credibility. While Muja Messiah raps about the toughness of his childhood, the murder victims he knows (including his brother), and his absent dad – this is the stuff of Tupac, let’s remember – he still seems to need to validate himself and the city he grew up in.

    On the Lil’ Jon-inspired "Get Fresh," he’s all like:

    "Niggaz backstabbin’ my city
    like it’s all backpackin’ and hippy
    like it ain’t crackin’ in my city
    We don’t be rappin’ about rappin’
    We rap about what be happenin’
    in the streets."

    Likewise, Thee Adventures features guest verses from Black Thought (The Roots), Slug, and I-Self Devine; his beats are produced by guys that have worked with Eminem, Nas, and De La Soul; and yet it seems like Muja’s ego still needs some propping up. It’s sweet, kind of. Coming from the state that labors to make sure everyone knows that Bob Dylan was born here, the self-conscious ego seems a very Minnesotan thing. The overall effect works in Muja’s favor: Because of its insecurities, his thuggish style of rap is accessible even to guys like me.

    At the end of the day, he can’t ignore the fact that Kenwood and Linden Hills are as much a part of his city as any other neighborhood. Seeing as how he’s the wordsmith here, it’s not surprising that he puts it best himself:

    "I’m from a pasture where the grass is greener
    started as a rapper and emerged as a leader…
    I’m down with Black Thought
    I’m down with Black Blondie…
    I am the Black Honkie."

     

    **CD release party Sunday, July 27 at First Avenue**

  • Get Sauced! A Northside Discovery

    It’s in Minneapolis, it’s the best restaurant for miles
    around, and odds are you have never even heard of it.

    Sauced, a little neighborhood bistro at 2203 44th
    Ave. N. (at Penn Ave.) isn’t just the best restaurant in north Minneapolis; it’s the only restaurant in north Minneapolis with a menu
    of contemporary cuisine and a real wine list. Chef John Conklin’s menu ranges
    from spaghetti squash cakes over a red pepper coulis ($9) and seared scallops
    with a chamomile glaze ($11) to seared salmon with saffron risotto ($18) and
    grass-fed beef tenderloin over roasted red potatoes with currant demi-glace.

    North Minneapolis has some charming little neighborhood
    cafes, like the Sunnyside, 1825 Glenwood Avenue North; and Milda’s, 1720
    Glenwood; and Emily’s F&M Café, just down the street from Sauced at 2124 44th
    Ave., but nothing nearly this ambitious.

    When Carol and I stopped by for lunch yesterday, we grazed
    across the menu, starting with a Caesar salad ($9) and the duo of spreads –
    smoked salmon with tarragon and pancetta with blue cheese and roasted walnuts,
    and then moving on to a salad of garlic roasted vegetables with goat cheese,
    served over a bed of spinach with a balsamic vinaigrette ($10), and an entrée
    of bucatini with mushrooms, asparagus and caramelized onions in a red pepper
    cream sauce. We enjoyed it all – the flavors were lively and robust, but still
    had subtlety and nuance, like the notes of fresh tarragon in the smoked salmon
    spread. We really didn’t have room for the roasted peach-strawberry tart ($8),
    but we ordered it anyway, and ate every bite.

    There is a lot more on the menu that I would like to try, including
    the shrimp ceviche ($10) and the tarragon mussels ($11), the cold soup duo of cantaloupe
    peach and tomato gazpacho ($9), and the vegetarian sandwich of avocado,
    oven-dried tomatoes, caramelized onions and cremini mushrooms, topped with Brie
    and served on rosemary kalamata bread ($10). You don’t have to eat fancy,
    though; if all you want is a burger and a beer, the menu also offers a couple
    of Angus beef burgers and a tuna melt, and the selection of tap beers includes Surly
    Bender, Fuller’s ESB, and locally brewed Finnegan’s.

    Later yesterday afternoon, I called Conklin and asked him
    about his plans for the restaurant. "We are not looking at doing anything
    fancy," he told me. "I am not Doug Flicker (chef at Mission American Kitchen),
    I am not trying to do anything that has never been done before. "I am just trying to take the traditional
    French mentality and put to good traditional rustic food."

    Conklin didn’t learn French technique in France, or even at
    a cooking school. He learned his craft on the job, starting as a dishwasher in
    small-town Minnesota at the age of 12, and working his way up. He was as a line
    cook at a Bakers Square in Saint Cloud before going to work for Michael McKay
    at Gallivan’s in Saint Paul; when McKay was hired to open the Sample Room in
    northeast, Conklin joined him as sous-chef. He credits McKay with teaching him
    everything he knows about cooking.

    Conklin and his wife Tricia Clark, and partner Susie
    Gilbertsen took over the restaurant in December, but the sign above the door
    still says Rix, the name of the burger joint that preceded it. He had hoped to
    have a new sign up by April 1, Conklin told me, but there have been some
    unanticipated expenses.

    These guys are facing an uphill climb. A lot of very good
    restaurants have failed in north Minneapolis over the years, from Skip’s
    Barbecue and Lucille’s Kitchen to Rick’s American Café and Coconut Grove. But Conklin is an optimist. He and Tricia
    bought a house nearby in the Folwell neighborhood, and he is not discouraged by
    the abundance of For Sale signs nearby. "I see this neighborhood taking off,"
    he told me He sees families starting to migrate across the river from Northeast
    and buying homes on the north side.

    Wouldn’t it have been a lot safer to open a place in south
    Minneapolis? The idea has no appeal for Conklin: "the people in south
    Minneapolis who can afford $180,000 – $220,000 homes have enough places down
    there."