Home Sweet Home

Having been home for a week or two means that I have had a chance to get some sleep, eat a few home-cooked meals, and spend time with the family. It also means that I get a chance to reacquaint myself with a few local haunts and check out more of the local food scene than I can when I am 5,000 miles away.

A couple of quick notes…

Lurcat is awesome. Many restaurants fail to slide into their next act as gracefully and as stylishly as this Loring Park stunner. We ate there last week and were also there at a party the month before (Amazingly, the tuna with preserved lemon is better as an appetizer at a catered event in the private rooms than it is as a dinner entrée in the restaurant.). The food was superb (Adam King puts out a truly tasty, consistent product), Molly is a great server, and the view from the dining room is one of the nicest in town.

Rudy Maxa’s new TV show, Rudy Maxa's World, is superb. Check it out on Saturdays at 2 p.m. on PBS. We stopped by his premiere party last week, and I have to say that Nick and Eddie’s major-domo, Doug Anderson, made my night by fetching me a toasted bialy from the kitchen and schmeering it with the best whitefish salad in town. Rudy was in fine fettle that night, and the crowd was packed to the rafters checking out the clips on the big screen and catching up with each other. When I was pulling fourteen-hour days in kitchens a few lifetimes ago, I wanted to be Rudy Maxa when I grew up. He’s a great journalist, an impressive companion under any circumstances, a sensational human being, and with another hit on his hands, he continues to inspire me. Rudy Maxa’s World is also shot in HD and looks great on the big TV in your rumpus room.

****

I had dinner with my wife at Morton’s, and the food is as good as ever, including those sensational crab cakes. Que Nha on University Ave in St. Paul was the site of a long-anticipated catch-up dinner with my best friend Aaron who had never eaten there. We stuffed ourselves silly on grilled shrimp and beef rolls, spicy chicken with onion, and combination rice hot pot casserole, which might be one of the top five best Asian menu items in the Twin Cities. On our way out the door, we grabbed a pair of avocado milk shakes, which are hard to finish after a big meal, but a few pulls off the straw were a tasty way to end the day.

And yes, I am also as stunned as you are that I have still not dined at the Strip Club or Heidi’s, two restaurants that I am eager to check out. But when I come home, I only get a few nights free, and it just didn’t work out this time. BTW.

****

Speaking of stunned, am I the only one in town who didn’t know that The Rake went under? And why do they think the online version can stay in business if the magazine couldn’t? Seems as if they are carrying a mighty large payroll for a website based on the byline count. How long do you give it? Does anyone read the online mag, and why? I am interested in hearing from anyone who regularly does. Speaking of web reads, I am now officially addicted to Brian Lambert’s blog on this site; his piece last week about the Stribune predicament was informative and laugh-out-loud funny.

****

I attended the third annual Cuisinart conclave at the Walker Art Center. It was awesome, a big sellout, and the food was superb. Huge shout out to Becky Pohlad and her committee, Wolfgang Puck and his team, and Scott Winter, the WAC genius of many hats. Some cool stuff went down. Scott Pampuch and his crew of attendees won the aluminum chef competition. In forty-five minutes, they made a bevy of compelling dishes featuring eggs and beef (the secret ingredients), and Rick Kimmes of Oceanaire guided his crew of partiers to an impressive second place finish on my scorecard.

Pampuch scored big points with the judges (Wolfgang and I) with his Meyer lemon hollandaise sauce and his house-cured pancetta that he smuggled in to the event and crisped, serving it on a poached egg. All his food was perfectly seasoned, and his restaurant, Corner Table, should be on everyone’s must-go list if it isn’t already. Wolf and I cooked together last week in Los Angeles, and I have gotten to hang out with him on my last few visits to LA this year. This guy is a rock star in every sense. He is unflappable in the dining room, hysterical to share a meal with, a doting dad, a cook of tremendous skill (often overlooked, BTW), and a global presence who would rather hang in the trenches with his troops, as he did most of the night on Friday, than schmooze it up with strangers despite his appetite for showmanship. The highlight of the evening for me, as it always is, was the awesome display of pyrotechnical wizardry that Sherry Yard and her staff put on: marshmallows in three flavors, marshmallow guns, squirt guns filled with sauces for spraying on sundaes, individual bite-size molten chocolate cakes (all hot!), and lollipop-sized banana ice cream baked Alaskas torched-to-order by the newly married Yard, who flew in to MSP from her honeymoon . . . amazing.

****

Two years ago, right before I left FOX News, I did a story about the new eateries at the airport. I had written about it in our magazine the month before as well, and I really thought that the new restaurants had figured out a compelling way to motivate and train their host employees and seemingly had figured out a way to mobilize employees from their other Minneapolis-based sites (Ikes and French Meadow) in large enough numbers to offer competent service and food quality in their airport-based satellites. I was wrong.

I have eaten at Ike’s three times in the last two months and at French Meadow five times. What can I say? I am at the airport a lot with my wife and a three-year-old, and I am also a glutton for punishment. I can safely say that not only is the food TERRIBLE now at both locations (they were both serving pretty tasty grub the first four to six months they were open), but the service at both is beyond bad; it has morphed into painfully frustrating compounded by the fact that no one really seems to care based on my recent experiences in trying to rectify bad situations gone worse. For example, at FM, my wife and I waited for ten minutes on a line that shouldn’t have been there but only existed because of the inability of the seven counter workers and cooks to push some sandwiches up and out of the kiosk. Customers before and after us, some of whom vocally protested that that they had waited thirty minutes, all watched aghast as counter attendants and cooks alike simply shrugged and giggled, brazenly flaunting their I-don’t-give-a-sh*t attitude. Even the corporate managers from the food service group that is in charge of the place did NOTHING. Similar situations around the airport (along with a MOUNTAIN of personal experiences in other airports where nothing approaches this level of frustration and incompetence) tells me that the system is irreparably broken and that until restaurant owners can staff their own eateries, we will continue to get more of the same.

That being said, I know the owners of these places, and they know how important good service is, even in a quick-serve environment with a transient customer base. I am shocked that they allow this to continue and get worse. Their airport staff are the custodians of their brand, and right now, the barbarians are not only at the gate, they are in the La-Z-Boy, feet up, shoving meatball hoagies down their throats, and watching Oprah reruns.

Beard and . . .

What would you do if you were a participating judge for the James Beard Awards this year? Let’s say you were a Twin Cities based adjudicator, fully versed in the work of the five nominees in our region. Three of those nominees are 112’s Isaac Becker, Alma’s and Brasa’s Alex Roberts, and Solera’s and LBV’s Tim McKee.

Do you vote for the kid from Milwaukee or Indianapolis? That would be a cop-out, and frankly, our three homeboys are all more deserving. Now the results don’t come out until June when the winners are announced in NYC, and for the umpteenth year in a row, I can’t make it because of a prior commitment, which bites. But I did have to vote for one of the lads, and I will be happy to share that with everyone at the last possible moment. But the question is, who would you vote for, and most importantly, why? Check out the James Beard website for all of the nominees in several categories.

****

Want to see something hysterical? Check out the Deep End Dining website and the fun video that Eddie Lin and I made in Los Angeles last week.

****

An finally, in what might be the most horrifying piece of news that has ever come across my desk, proving once again that there is no accounting for taste of any type. The Emmy nominations came out, and the she-devil of the Food Network garnered a nomination that I am sure she is so proud of:

Outstanding Achievement in Hairstyling: Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee, Food Network 


As my friend Dan Barreiro says, you just can’t make this stuff up.

New Restaurants and Celebrity Sightings

Good news for St. Paul-ites. Finally, The River City outpost of Salut, the wildly successful Edina French American brasserie, opens mid-June, according to what I hear. That’s good news for Grand Ave. denizens in particular, and I can guarantee you it will do wonderful business there. It’s an easy concept to like, serving accessible food in a comfy space, it’s priced right, and it sits smack-dab in the middle of one of the most underserved restaurant areas in the metro.

**** 

Speaking of openings, 3 Squares opens today in Maple Grove, part of the Blue Plate Restaurant Company’s family of restaurants that includes Highland Grill, Edina Grill, Groveland Tap, and Longfellow Grill. In today’s sketchy economic times, a casual restaurant serving recognizable fare is exactly what the ‘burbs need more of.

****

The Bayport Cookery’s Morel Mushroom Fest begins May 8 and will run until June 28. This year’s twist is Jim Kyndberg’s Ten Year Celebration Dinner, a ten-course meal honoring Jim’s ten years of ownership at The Bayport Cookery. Ten years is a heck of a run and worth celebrating under any circumstances. Check out its website for reservations.

****

For Food Network fans, Bobby Flay will be at Mall of America on Sunday, May 11. Flay will be signing copies of his first full-color, fully illustrated grilling cookbook, Bobby Flay’s Grill It! The event runs 3–5 p.m.

****

In other FN news, Paula Deen is going into syndication, something we need less of, not more. Deen has a few problems to deal with. Remember last year when I wrote about her Smithfield sponsorship and the inherent conflict with sponsorship from a company with a worker health history such as Smithfield?

Well, Atlanta-area churches are joining a campaign to get Paula Deen to meet with injured and abused workers from Smithfield, the company she promotes. Rev. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Rev. Lowery, Danny Glover, Susan Sarandon, Judge Greg Mathis, National Hispanic Leadership Conference, and others have mounted a national campaign to support the Smithfield workers and are pressing Deen to follow up on her promise she made in previous interviews on Larry King Live to meet with these Smithfield workers who have been fighting for more than a decade to improve the working situation in Tar Heel, North Carolina.

According to an e-mail I received from friends in the South,

"At the Smithfield Tar Heel plant workers suffer crippling injuries. They endure excessive line speeds and receive inadequate training to do their jobs. A 2007 Research Associates of America report, using company data from federal safety and health reports, reveals that injuries at Smithfield Tar Heel went up 200 percent between 2003 and 2006.

In 2006, a federal appeals courts enforced the National Labor Relations Board decision that found that the company assaulted people, harassed and threatened violence against the Tar Heel workers during an election in 1997. Human Rights Watch, an organization that normally documents abuses by foreign governments, published two reports, in 2000 and 2005, decrying the dangerous conditions and numerous abuses that workers faced at the Tar Heel plant. Similar to the Kathie Lee Gifford controversy, the ministers want Paula Deen to meet with workers and are appealing to her sense of morality and faith to ultimately speak out on their behalf."

Food for Thought

OK. Remember when Levain and Auriga and Five closed, Seth left Cosmos, and I announced I was out on the ledge, so to speak, over the local state of restaurant affairs? Well I am back on a ledge. Except this time, it’s the ledge of global food production, world hunger, and the threat to our international security.

I have been abroad for a while, and after coming home, I can tell you with utmost assurance, from both anecdotal and scholarly resources alike, that we are in for a sh*tstorm of problems related to the rice panic, the rise of Chinese and Russian food demand, and the falling strength of the dollar. I was in three European countries last week and spent a lot of time with farmers, fishermen, and restaurant employees. The situation in Europe is terrible, and you will read a lot about it in the coming weeks, I am sure.

The French housing market is about to crater, the average EU citizen is facing unprecedented economic uncertainty as food prices eclipse the reach of single earner families in the middle class and lower income families with two wage earners. The cover of the International Herald Tribune even ran with a story about this phenomenon. And watching Al Jazeera, BBC News, and China News for a few weeks would scare the crap out of the average American. Anti-Americanism, fear of economic uncertainty, rising Chinese nationalism of the type that burst into the news last year in Russia (remember the Putin youth stories!?), and a tidal wave of problems rumbling across the Middle and Near East (Pakistani political clashes, Muslim Brotherhood threatening Egypt’s Mubarak oligarchy, Iranian obstinateness, Iraqi everything . . .) are making traveling and news watching uncomfortable.

There seems to be a solution for our ailing image abroad in all this, and it’s food related. Why doesn’t the United States stand up tomorrow and announce a global hunger initiative aimed at getting food into the hands of the world’s hungriest? Why don’t we single-handedly take care of the UN World Food Programme’s money crunch? Why not stand up and show the rest of the world that in our country, we stand alongside the least fortunate in time of need? Well, probably because we can’t even do that in our own country.

A report out on Tuesday from the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production examined the impact of the growth and rampant use of factory facilities masquerading as farms where huge numbers of the cattle, swine, and poultry (some right here in Minnesota) are concentrated in such large numbers and in such close quarters for the sole purpose of speeding up both the growth process and the slaughtering timetables. The report’s conclusion was that we must end this practice or continue to create an ever-widening epidemic of environmental and health problems.  To quote, ”There is increasing urgency to chart a new course . . . (These facilities) often poses unacceptable risks to public health, the environment and the welfare of the animals themselves.” And the canard we have been sold for too long is that all of this is good for farmers. Wrong! As an AP story I caught so succinctly put it, “it is good only in that it has shifted rural Americas economic power from farmers to livestock processors.”

Remember, when only three companies control two-thirds of the beef processing in this country, something is wrong. It creates untenable health risks and an ad hoc food cartel, which will very soon have OPEC-like powers that will continue to marginalize the average consumer when it comes to choice and access to healthy, inexpensive quality food. Mark my words, this is happening right now. Eating well is becoming a class issue in this country and around the world.

And if that doesn’t piss you off and give you food for thought, check out these links:

Here is a link to a PDF of "CAFO's Uncovered". Do you know how much tax we pay to clean up after these sh*tholes—literally?

Here is a link to the new Pollan article in the NYT Magazine about the impending climate doom and why someone should plant a garden, or not.

How about going on a recession diet? Really!

Slate has an article on how food writers don't necessarily write about the cost of food. True enough, but that’s not every food writer’s job, is it? That being said, there is a cool idea or two in here. 

Has anyone seen the Vanity Fair green issue? This Monsanto article is amazing in its ability to show you the reach and power that companies like this one have in our world today.

Shipping food around the EU through the perspective of the humble kiwi. 

Truth in Labeling bugging anyone other than me? Chipotle's nutritional info just doesn't add up.

Conspiracy Theory

According to a WCCO piece I caught online by John Lauritsen, it is a weak economy to blame for Temple having to close its doors, rising food costs, a sluggish economy (let me tell you, this is a full-blown recession and could approach depression standards very shortly). I logged on to several local blogs and news sites and checked out the temper of the commentary, and several posters got it right. As they see it, and as I wrote four months ago, there will be a lot more closings across the region as the discretionary budgets of Minnesotans shrinks.

Temple was not a victim of the economy as much as it was a casualty of its own miscalculations of the marketplace. Restaurants close because customers don’t go. And Temple failed to create a compelling reason for being there. The food was poorly conceived and executed from the get-go, the chef was gone within the first year, and naked sushi is a more desperate attempt at wooing customers than half-price wine nights could ever be.  It’s an important distinction to make because restaurants still work, in good economies or bad, so long as they are resonant with customers and create a business model within their own four walls that allows them to quickly adjust their costs to stay in line with their weekly haul and customer counts. In rugged times, simply thinking (as I believe Pham did) that if you build it they will come is a mistake of the highest magnitude.

The reason I launched my BODY COUNTS in these pages last year was to illustrate the point that the amount of people in your restaurant on a given night is the single greatest indicator of long- and short-term success. We had to suspend our counts because travel schedules and the like in our office, but I would encourage readers to take some body counts as they make their way around town. You might see some interesting trends.

****

Heidi’s restaurant, Heidi and Stewart Woodman’s restaurant, appears in this months Condé Nast Traveler’s annual “Hot List” guide to the “world’s most exciting new establishments.” Check out the May issue of Condé Nast Traveler or visit the website.

****

IACP Awards were handed out not long ago and Lee Klein's November 22 article in the Miami New Times, "Eat Shit and Die,” won an award. Klein’s piece detailed the dirty little secret that food animals are fed feces in the American Ag system. Other secrets that I have heard and read about recently include, but are not limited to, male chicks thrown into trash cans as soon as they hatch in egg farms; male calves torn from their mothers at birth and slaughtered before they are one-day-old; pig farms slice off the toes, ears, and tails of live piglets using knives and no painkillers; meatpacking plants (slaughterhouses) keep it a secret that up to four out of ten animals are not properly stunned, and the list goes on.

For real conspiracy theory freaks, here are a few pieces of food for thought: Some think the USDA isn’t really interested in mad cow disease because finding it would be bad for business. The American Medical Association keeps it a secret that there is overwhelming evidence linking dairy products to cancer. The American Veterinary Medicine Association keeps it a secret that food animals are pumped with hormones and antibiotics, which are directly responsible for many antibiotic-resistant strains of disease. Anyone else care to chime in? In the light of the fact that industry spokespeople are now saying that the powers that be are willing to concede that downer cattle have no place in the food system, it might be time to start stirring the pot.