Q&A with Doug Anderson

I first met Doug Anderson in 2000; Doug was sort of the maitre d’ at the now-closed Pane Vino Dolce in South Minneapolis, and I was a cub QA writer waiting to interview PVD’s eccentric owner, Carlo Macy. In one of the most bizarre interviews of my career, the three of us crowded into the bathroom as Anderson hopelessly attempted to translate for Macy, as his soused king sat on the toilet and raved with his pants around his ankles. Clearly, Anderson was a man willing to go beyond in the name of hospitality. Now forty-three, Anderson has opened and closed two restaurants himself, the Bakery on Grand in Minneapolis and Au Rebour in St. Paul, gaining an eccentric reputation in his own right. A natural born raconteur, who grew up living in a series of Minneapolis flophouses with his father before moving to N.Y. in the mid-’80s, his latest venture is Nick and Eddie, named after a SoHo restaurant he waited at in 1986. It’s an attempt to bring the weird back to Loring Park.

You outfitted this place like it’s the trunk of a ’72 Impala, and you play The Fall and Pere Ubu—if you cranked it up, people would flee.
Yeah, but not everybody. And as long as they’re not hearing a lot of the words, it’s just great music. I mean, I play Suicide during the middle of dinner. It’s not that controversial. I play a lot of Sticky Fingers and Exile-era Stones, or Gang of Four, or Clash. And Phillip and Eric, the owners of the original Nick and Eddie, were really, really into music. It was sort of deceptive: Eric was a great, great cook, coming from California, working at Tower, and working in high-end restaurants in New York. But when you first met him, you know, he didn’t look like a cool guy. But then I tasted the food there, and it was obvious he was a real chef that just decided he was going to do simple stuff. It wasn’t arbitrary, and there wasn’t necessarily a drive to be innovative. It was just, affordable food, and it was before people used words like “comfort food,” but it all fit into one piece. It was a neighborhood joint that played great music and had great food. No bulls**t.

So did three-and-a-half stars from the Strib put you in the foodie spotlight for the next six months?
No. Let them have their fetish. I’m not participating. Probably makes it more interesting to any fetishist anyway, right? We don’t want to go to Prom this year. You and I have talked about it: It’s an infantile culture, that food culture, reflective of larger things in this culture that I find absolutely uninteresting. The first year the Sex Pistols came out, you had this amazing thing happening in music, and for the next twenty-five, you had the f**king Knack. Same thing in the food world.

Do you consider what you’re doing here an art or a commodity?
Neither. I mean, we’re just f**king Serving. People. Food. That’s all we’re doing. No, really. But there is something subversive about bringing somebody what they’ve asked for.

No. What’s subversive about fulfilling somebody’s wish?
You live in a culture that’s forgotten how to f**k.

So, that’s what you mean when you refer to it “fuel for f**king.”
Yup. It’s just another function like any other function. It’s having a conversation. It’s eating a good meal. The foodies have made it into something more. Made it into something to disclose to others. To show the world what you’ve eaten. You know, keep it to your f**king self. Just go about your business, and live your f**king life. It’s hard enough.

Do you think that your chef and your pastry chef are more ambitious than cooking “fuel for f**king”?
No. You know, obviously, it’s sort of a joke that I know will rile somebody. But it has something more to do with the MC5 than it does with pornography or sex or screwing. But no, I think their ambition is exactly the same. Steve already has been to the top of the mountain as far as celebrity chef. He was a part of the Newport thing at Tower that really turned the tide as far as cooking. But you just get to a certain point at which what does it do for you? Why is that interesting? It’s not. What’s interesting is to live your life. To do the thing that you like in an environment that’s acceptable to you. And I don’t think that either of them have any ambitions like that. I think we could have a really solid, really good restaurant. The fundamental rule that we’re following the sort of Lacan—and I don’t want to be taken as an intellectual or an aesthete, but some people read Erma Bombeck, and others read Lacan—no value judgments. (Laughs). But the one rule in psychoanalysis is don’t f**k with somebody else’s fantasy. Now when I walk into, I won’t say which restaurant, but one of those restaurants with the reeds and the fireplace, these concept-driven restaurants, and you’re clobbered over the f**king head. And I think any sensitive person has to think about where the f**k they are on this planet, at this particular point in time, being faced with this stuff. I just want to go someplace and not think about it.