Jeremy Iggers recently retired as executive director of the Twin Cities Media Alliance. His newest project is a website called www. GlobalTwinCities.com. He lives in south Minneapolis with his wife Carol and two cats.
Thursday is Valentine’s Day, but my sweetie was feeling surprisingly unromantic about the prospect. “I’m not really in the mood for going someplace for an over-priced special menu dinner just because it’s Valentine’s Day so you have to go out and celebrate,” she said. Or words to that effect.I hope she feels the same way about over-priced flowers. We’ll see.At any rate, we’ll probably spend Thursday evening at home, nibbling on assorted aphrodisiacs. So instead, we’re planning on celebrating early—on Tuesday night, when the Grand Cafe has its Date Night Tasting Menu. Unfortunately, that’s right after this week’s deadline, so the original published version of this review will be a little sparse on details (check back for an update).At any rate, we’re longtime fans of the Grand Cafe and its owners, Mary and Dan Hunter, and the Date Night menu sounds great: three courses with wine for $50 for two. Continue Reading
Do you believe in the power of prayer?I have always been skeptical, but an experience I had yesterday has made me reconsider.I was sitting around thinking about the fact that my weekly deadline for my column was only 24 hours away, and I didn’t have anything to write about. This reminds me of my Jewish agnostic mother, who spent most of her teaching career at Catholic colleges. Her students would sometimes write “VMPFM” (“Virgin Mary pray for me”) at the top of their exam papers, and she would point out to them that if they had spent a little time studying, they wouldn’t have to pray for divine help.I can’t say I was actually praying for divine intercession, but I was at least hoping something would come along to get me out of this fix. And then, it happened. An e-mail from Anthony Kaczor, with the subject line, “Come Join Our Fish Fry Group.” Coincidence? I’m not so sure. Consider that each of these fish fries takes place at a house of worship. Continue Reading
Tracing the genealogies of the local restaurant scene is a bit like sleuthing the vectors of STD transmissions: Chef A worked in the kitchen at restaurant B with sous chef C, who transmitted his technique of making dish D to chef E, who showed up six months later at restaurant F with a variant strain of that dish, which sous-chef G spread to cafe H…etc. etc. At any rate, this interconnectedness of everything in the culinary universe struck me recently when I dined at three different restaurants: Parka, the Sample Room, and Borough (which I wrote about recently), and realized the web of connections among them.Parka is the latest venture from chef Erick Harcey, owner of Victory 44 in north Minneapolis. A couple of years ago, several members of Harcey’s kitchen crew decamped and opened their own restaurant, the now semi-legendary Travail in Robbinsdale. Two former members of the Travail crew, Nick O’Leary and Tyler Shipton, are the founding chefs at Borough, while another, Geoff Hausmann, is now the chef at the Sample Room. (Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl reports that he has exciting plans for his new venue.)The three restaurants are very different—there is a hipster playfulness to Parka, Borough is a bit more formal and sophisticated (but only a bit), and the Sample Room carefully balances culinary ambition with the welcoming aesthetics of a neighborhood tavern. Continue Reading
Stephanie Fox’s recent Global Groceries column, Double Dragon Foods: Good eats, touchy staff, really got readers talking. While she was taking photos to accompany her article about the St. Paul grocery store, she was confronted by a store employee, who told her that photography was not allowed without the manager’s permission. She described the store manager’s attitude as hostile. “In most stores, small or large, the owners are willing—actually, they’re usually delighted—to talk with anyone, even a member of the press, about their store and the foods they carry. Not at Double Dragon…This is all too bad because the store is phenomenal,” Fox wrote. Continue Reading
Please join us for the second annual Daily Planet Winter Party and Sausage Fest, from 6 to 9 p.m. on Wednesday, January 30, 2013 at the Summit Brewing Company, 950 Montreal Circle, St. Paul.Last year’s party was great—and don’t take my word for it. Read this write-up from the Heavy Table. Writer Tricia Cornell had a terrific time, and she didn’t even mention one of the biggest highlights of the evening: the Brass Messengers, who play the kind of rompin’, stompin’ music that turns 20 below into Mardi Gras.Tickets include Summit beers on tap, and a chance to sample some of the Twin Cities’ finest sausages. Nearly all of the sausage makers from last year will be back, including The Butcher and the Boar, Clancey’s Meats, the Modern Cafe, Three Sons Meat Co. Continue Reading
Stop me if you have heard this one:”A priest and a rabbi are sitting on a plane, and the priest turns to the rabbi and asks…”Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not going to give away my old friend Gary Gilson’s punchlines. Gilson, a well-known local broadcast journalist, television producer and journalism teacher, added another job to his résumé last Sunday, when he launched his career as a storyteller and comedian in front of a sold-out crowd at the Jewish Community Center Sabes Theater in St. Louis Park with his show You Don’t Have to Be Jewish, But It Couldn’t Hurt.And even if you have heard that joke before (some of his jokes were classics) before, you probably haven’t heard it told the way Gilson tells it. Gilson has great comic timing, but he does more than tell jokes. Over the course of the show, Gilson strung together poignant families stories, entertaining anecdotes about his encounters with Hollywood and Broadway show biz celebrities, and even a few basic Yiddish lessons. Continue Reading
I got a friendly but challenging note the other day from Waheda Yasmin, owner of the India Cafe in Bloomington. She had read one of my articles—South Asian Adventures: Gorkha Palace, Bombay Bistro, Bombay Palace—published last June in the Daily Planet. “I like the news,” she wrote. “But to my understanding you have not tried the real authentic taste of Indian food. I want to invite you to our restaurant (to) taste our food, too.”Oh yeah? Continue Reading
I can’t say that I was really looking forward to the arrival of Burough and Parlour, the new restaurant and cocktail bar In the North Loop, with very much enthusiasm. Maybe I am just getting jaded, or bored, but it seems like every week, some new hipster hangout opens up somewhere in Minneapolis (why so seldom in St. Paul?), and they mostly seem to follow a familiar formula – they all have a big selection of craft beers, and they all have something with pork belly on the menu, and small plates at what used to be big plate prices, and signature cocktails prepared by a celebrity bartender. And they are mostly crowded and noisy.Okay, maybe I exaggerate. They don’t all have celebrity bartenders. Continue Reading
I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging, but I just spent a few hours going back through the stories that TC Foodies published in 2012, and well, gosh, I really think TC Foodies is the greatest food news source in the Twin Cities. Maybe even on the planet. And I am really not bragging about myself, because we published over 500 food articles and reviews last year, from dozens of contributors, and most of the really good stuff was not written by me. In addition to the hundreds of restaurant reviews and articles, our contributors wrote about cooking, gardening, food policy, nutrition and more, all with a local angle. No disrespect to the Star Tribune, Pioneer Press, Mpls-St.Paul, Minnesota Monthly, City Pages, Heavy Table, and all the other food news sources in town — they have great writers and great coverage — but we have dozens of contributors, each with a different expertise and point of view. And our food writers and blog partners venture to lots of places where the other guys seldom go. Stephanie Fox explores the Twin Cities’ ethnic markets in her Global Groceries column, finding little gems you are unlikely to read about anywhere else, from the pickled herring at Ingebretsen’s Scandinavian Deli, to the Filipino foods featured at Phil-Oriental Foods in St. Paul, and the Guy-Am Grocery in North Minneapolis: Your go-to place for West Indian, Caribbean food.Guy-Am owner Sookdeo (Son-Son) Somaiah is a huge cricket fan. Continue Reading
So many meals, so little time to write. Highlights of the past week or two include the After 8 dinner for two at Broders’ Pasta Bar, and the Chinese banquet for eight at Pagoda in Dinkytown. I’m not sure anybody learned very much about food writing at the Foodwriting Workshop I organized recently at Pagoda, but a grand time was had by all, and it gave me a good excuse to get enough people together so that we could order Pagoda’s 8-course banquet menu.We ordered the least expensive version, eight courses for $99, with a menu that included seafood tofu soup, drunken chicken, ginger & scallion lobster, yinyang sole fish fillet, walnut jumbo shrimp, beef brisket hot pot, Jing dou pork chop, and Chinese broccoli with garlic. If you split the $99 tab eight ways, it’s cheaper than eating at the Olive Garden – and a whole lot tastier. That was an ample feast for eight diners, but a couple of more elaborate versions are also available: the 10-course banquet menu for $199 includes crab meat fish maw soup, abalone with Chinese mushroom, and golden fried garlic crab; while the 12-course $299 menu also features Fujianese style oyster soup, whole crispy roast duck, two lobsters and a chrysanthemum fried walleye. Owner Justin Lin graciously stopped by to answer questions about the menu – it’s basically traditional Cantonese fare, mostly. He also introduced the chef who prepared the dinner, Yuyang Huang, who won a bronze medal in the New Tang DynastyTelevision 5th International Chinese Culinary Competition, held in September in New York City. x x x x x x xBroders’ Pasta Bar doesn’t take reservations, and even if you call ahead, the wait can be pretty long (up to an hour and a half), especially at the peak of the dinner hour. The best way to beat the crowds is to dine later, when the dining room empties out, and Broders’ offers its $30 After 8 menu for two (available Sunday through Thursday). The price includes a choice of salad for two, a bowl of warmed olives in oil with orange zest,bread basket, a choice of two pastas and a small carafe of red or white wine. Continue Reading
