South African Wine With YC & Me; David Fhima’s Back; Open Letter to Haute Dish
Lots of news, everybody. Let’s do this!
YC & Me!
First off, what are you doing Wednesday night? Come drink South African wine with me and YC, the chef de cuisine at La Belle Vie. We’ll be doing an event called Wine + Dine by Design. Here are the details: For $25 you get two tickets, two lovely Riedel wine glasses (retail value about $10 each), and to wander about through the Bespoke kitchen showroom at International Market Square and taste a whole range of South African wines, provided by Z Wines (but chosen by me), and eat lovely food cooked by Mike DeCamp, the chef de cuisine of La Belle Vie (who everyone calls YC, for Young Chef, a title he earned when he was a 17-year-old in Tim McKee’s kitchen, though of course he is now all grown up and important). But that’s not all! You get to do this while feeling good about helping your community, since all proceeds of the event go to WAMSO, the volunteer organization that helps the Minnesota Orchestra. Buy tickets! Should be a blast, and frankly, I can’t believe the tickets are so cheap; me, YC, a South African wine mini-seminar, and Riedel stemware to take home, for $15 a person, or $25 a pair? Dang, we are providing some luxurious value around here!
Uptown Market Opens
I was chatting with Chris Lockyear of the lovely bright purple hippie schoolbus café Magic Bus over the weekend, and he reminded me that the new Uptown Market is opening this weekend and will be running every Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. till the fall. Here’s the story: They close down 29th street from Lyndale to Dupont—that’s the scroungy odd little street that parallels the Greenway—and fill the scroungy street with food trucks, farmers, artists, and who knows what else. The Magic Bus will be anchoring the event on Lyndale, and Chef Shack will be there too. And if you’ve ever put down your first cup of coffee of the day and vowed to go to the farmer’s market only to realize it’s 1 p.m. (you know who you are!), mark this one in permanent marker in your mind: A farmer’s market for bar-closers! And kids. And budget gourmets. Yum. uptownmarket.org
David Fhima’s Back! 
David Fhima, much beloved, semi-notorious Minnesota restaurauteur is... Back! In St. Paul. He’s set to open up a new restaurant in his old Lo-To space on Mears Park in Lowertown St. Paul, called Faces. It opens Thursday, and I caught up with Fhima on the phone about what it will be, and why. Fhima has spent the years after he lost splashy Fhima, Louis XIII, and the Minneapolis Café in the healthy and restorative arms of the healthclub chain Lifetime Fitness, for whom he opened a few Zahtar restaurants and now supplies baked goods for out of his Mears Park space. But he also came away from Lifetime with a new respect for whole and healthy living. “You can’t be in shape, mentally or physically, unless you’re eating right,” Fhima told me. “I realized the way I grew up, with my Moroccan-Spanish mother, my Sicilian father, with this Mediterranean diet of seafood and olive oil, was really the healthiest way you can eat, and I want to get back to that. Well, I hate to say healthy because you say healthy and people think steamed brussels sprouts. No flavor. But that’s not true at all. Healthy foods can have the most flavor of all because they’re starting out good and don’t need complication.” To that end, Faces will be ambitiously local, organic, and biodynamic, Fhima tells me. To this end, expect dishes like brisket, short ribs, and even filet mignon from local grass-fed beef co-op 1,000 Hills, lots and lots of vegetarian options (for some reason I’m particularly excited about their vegetarian banh mi with scrambled eggs on a home-made baguette), pizzas from their traditional pizza oven, and a wine-list that’s 80% organic or biodynamic. (There will be a stand-alone wine bar in one corner of Faces; does this qualify as the metro’s first biodynamic and organic wine bar? Hmm, I bet Brenda Langton at Café Brenda would volunteer that if we’re calling bars in restaurants wine bars, hers was first. Still, interesting to consider.) The place will also act as a bakery and coffee shop, serving homemade bread, pastries, and coffee from 8 a.m. on. Does pastry not sound very healthy to you? For Fhima, healthy now means good for your body, but also good for your sense of well being: “At Lifetime, as I was getting involved in the food and travelling around the country talking to people, I became more and more convinced that the best diet is to eat a little bit of everything, the healthy and not-so. I think so many people are just craving all the time because they are depriving themselves. We eat fake sugar, fake foods, and our body doesn’t recognize them and just tells us: I’m hungry, I’m hungry! And then we break down. So a little chocolate, that to me is a healthy thing too.”
Dear Haute Dish:
I was in the other night. What a mess. The snail & ham potpie was a yawn; well, the pastry was lovely, but there was nothing under the hood, as the snails and ham were indistinct and unlovely. The burger was catstrophically oversalted. Catastrophically. The pigs’ foot was mushy, gummy, and amateurish. And Chef Landon Schoenfeld, you were sitting at the bar drinking while this horror was unfolding! Adam Vickerman, where were you? Listen kids, everyone is pulling for you. But all your glowing advance praise can turn on a dime. You need a chef in the kitchen tasting and responsible for everything that goes to every table. I haven’t given up on you; I was in earlier and had a wonderful meal, so the next one will be the tie-breaker. Don’t mess it up. And don’t take my word for it, call any chef in town: You think getting open was hard? The hard part has just begun.
Posted on Friday, June 18, 2010 in Permalink
Comments may be edited for length, clarity, or appropriateness.
Adam was likely at his full-time job at Sea Change.
agree on haute dish. went to try a few days before your post and was underwhelmed after all the hype. uninspiring dishes. salty, salty, salty. no balance, flavors all mixed up. flat footed. you can't rely entirely on heavily seasoned reductions. they've got nothing over the modern. still my favorite QPR place with inventive food. every single time. the kids had a lot to learn.
An open letter to Dara
Dear Dara:
I feel that you have overstepped your boundaries a bit with your "letter" towards Haute Dish. It was a personal shot towards the staff and the Chef which was, in my opinion, quite unprofessional. It is one thing to criticize the dishes and your experience, which is understandable, but to refer to anyone as "kids" or write/talk about them in such a condescending tone is unacceptable, especially for such a well know food writer as yourself. I have followed your blogs and reviews and overall I feel that you are fairly reasonable, but why do you feel that you have to take such a direct and juvenile shot towards Haute Dish?
The way you had worded and structured that "open letter" focused attention away from your commentary on the food and experience and shifted it towards an implication that the staff is lazy and child-like. I can probably venture a guess that most of the people employed as cooks at Haute Dish has more experience in working at restaurants than you, so why do you feel like you have to act like you "know how it is"?
Also I don't understand the impetus to provide commentary laden with such a level of animosity towards the Chef in particular(you pretty much implied that he was a lazy drunk and didn't care about the food). I feel it doesn't really matter whether he was at the bar or not; you did not know how much he worked prior(there was no context with this observation, so what motivated you to include this commentary). Also I understand that you may feel that "you know" the scene and we get it but there really is no need to name drop the way that you did. I read a lot of your blogs/reviews and have never felt the need to comment, but I just felt like I needed to say something. The "open letter" to haute dish read less like it was about the food and your experience but more about some personal "tiff" you may have. In short you are not the "mother hen" and Haute dish are not your kids so please have some R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Don't blame the messenger. I delivered this exact same message to Jean Georges Vongerichten once: Telling you the quality and consistency isn't in your current project actually is a sign of respect, not a lack of it. And you'd really have to read something into this to claim I'm calling Schoenfeld a drunk, I'm the one who broke the story that he was putting in 20 hour days at Bulldog NE, I'm sure he's doing the same at Haute Dish. However, if you're the chef and your guests are getting lousy food it's your problem and no one else's. And if people can see you while it's happening it just makes it worse. And you know what? The great thing here is that Schoenfeld will make (or not make) his own success, I'm nothing but a critic.
But my point is that it has the possibility of being read as you are implying that he is a lazy drunk... and yes I am blaming the messenger, that is purposeful, because I feel the messenger is just as important as the message especially if the messenger has a particular reputation within the community... it just seems unethical and irresponsible especially as a critic to write in such a manner...
Just shut up and cook and you will be fine
oh and btw one can't expect a chef to be an omnipresent being seeing everything from afar... there are far more effective ways in which to show respect... you seem to structure many of your blogs in ways that show your "insider-ship", and maybe it would be read as respect, but when many "outsiders" read your blog and reviews and those very readers has material effects onto how the restaurant is perceived by the public I feel that there needs to be some level of discretion that must be taken.. to put it plainly a sea of crazy people could tell us that the world is going to end and many would not listen but when the same message is said by an individual that is perceived to be an "expert" heads will turn, and ears would open
Dara's always inexplicably picking on fancy new Washington Avenue restaurants.
If you need me to say it explicitly, I'm happy to: I do not believe Landon Schoenfeld is a lazy drunk. I do not now believe it, I have never believed it, I will not believe it in the future because I know he works very very hard. Good enough?
I'll go one more: And I know he's also very talented because I've admired his work tremendously at the Bulldog and Barbette. However, what sets Schoenfeld apart from other restaurant owners, like Lenny Russo and Stewart Woodman and Brenda Langton? That he's young. And young artists are inherently exciting: They have new ideas, they don't have conventional wisdom drilled into them, and so on. That's why people are so excited about Haute Dish, because it's new and young and fresh and potentially visionary, potentially game changing. (Mature artists, like Langton and Woodman etc. are also exciting, but in a different way, they have concerns they've been exploring for a career, they have an established taste, an established style, systems, a staff, and so on. And frankly, they're held to a much higher and different standard than new chefs. Should we judge Haute Dish not as a product of new, emerging chefs? I don't think that serves anyone.)
Finally, there should be no "discretion" among critics criticizing the restaurants they critique. The game is played like this: The restaurant puts out the food and experience they will, and I, using my experience and typing, tell readers what I think of it in the context of my experience. I can't even fathom what writing about it as an outsider would be: I was flying out of New York one day and glanced down, and what do you know, this great little city that sits on the Mississippi, people call it Minneapolis. Like if Minnie Mouse married Indianapolis. Love it!
Imastranger:
a) I think if you look through the history of Dara's writings about Landon Schoenfeld, you will find them to be overwhelmingly positive. If she's criticizing his work now, I suspect that it is justified and intended to be a constructive message (btw, I've eaten at Haute Dish and overall liked it, but found it to be uneven). In all honesty, without her writing about him, I doubt he'd have nearly the standing in this town that he does.
b) There is nothing in this article that implies that LS is a lazy drunk. You're reading too much into the phrase "sitting at the bar".
c) You say that one cannot "expect the chef to be an omnipresent being", which I take to mean that you do not think LS should be criticized for everything that happens in his restaurant. The fact is, every bite of food eaten there, no matter who prepared it or where LS is, has his name on it. He is the chef and part-owner. He is responsible for the food that comes out of his kitchen.
d) A restaurant critic's job is to criticize restaurants. Don't be so shocked when they do it.