After the Gold Rush

What happens after we name a restaurant one of the best? So many things.

by

Every year critics go out and anoint restaurants the best this or the best that—best of the year, best cocktails, best new spots, you name it. But we never follow up: Did getting on the cover of the magazine make a difference over the year? Over 30? I recently leafed through a stack of Mpls.St.Paul Magazine’s best new restaurant stories with an eye on adding an epilogue. 

Buried in these back issues are tales of rags and riches. For rags, let us consider the plight of Aperitif in Woodbury—picked as a best new restaurant in 2010 but then closed in 2011 as part of a bankruptcy of a larger company reporting $6.5 million in assets and $284.5 million in debt. Ouch! They must have given away too many slices of flourless chocolate cake. For riches, we might as well look at last year’s cover star, Revival. The small south Minneapolis chicken shack leveraged cover-star success and universal acclaim into a Vikings stadium booth, a forthcoming outpost in St. Paul, as well as plans to triple the size of their original site. Oh, and they’ll also anchor the new Keg & Case Market on West 7th with something entirely new. But it’s not all about rags and riches, as the following tales prove.

Trading in One Restaurant for Two Trucks

In 2013 Ian Gray was on the cover of this magazine with his magnificent food at The Gray House on Lake Street—which is now the hot dog restaurant Prairie Dogs. What happened? Divorce, assets claimed and shifted. When the dust settled, Gray emerged with a food truck, The Curious Goat, focused on the products of his favorite goat meat and goat cheese farm, Singing Hills. He’s parked all year, Thursday through Sunday, outside Minneapolis’s only cider-specialist brewer, Sociable Cider Werks. His other truck, The Smoking Cow, roams. Is he happy? “I am,” says Gray. “I would put our nachos up against any nachos in the city. I think we have a killer burger. We get to sit back and have a low overhead, which I like. Restaurants are amazing and blooming—but frightening.” Why frightening? Gray says that one thing magazines aren’t good at conveying is the financial terror a startup entrepreneur endures. “That magazine cover, it was a surreal experience. I was flattered, honored, it was humbling. I might have cried. But it didn’t pay the bills. I still have to work in a way that makes the numbers come out.” I ask if a chicken truck is coming next. “No chicken truck, ever,” says Gray. “I think it would go pig [next], and then vegetable.” 

Thirty Years, Countless Awards, Ceaseless Challenges

Tammy Wong was the oldest girl of a family of émigrés from southern China near Chaozhou. Her father wanted a restaurant, so in 1987 they opened one in a little strip mall, and she started working there. A year later critics found it, and Rainbow Chinese went on as likely crown-holder for the most awards in the history of Twin Cities restaurants. Oh, those dumplings! “Every time someone wrote about us, there would be a line out the door,” Wong says. “That’s how you knew someone wrote about you. To have a popular restaurant you need the food, and then someone to talk about the food. That’s what the magazines and papers do. I can’t be on the phone calling every person to come here!” That steady drumbeat of critics talking about Rainbow got Wong out of the strip mall and into the regal 19th century building Rainbow occupies today. Though it hasn’t helped with the restaurant’s latest challenge. “What should we do for our 30th anniversary?” Wong asks. “If you have any good ideas, let me know!” 

From Actor to Restaurateur

In 2010, Ann Kim started her first restaurant, Pizzeria Lola, as a second career after she left acting, with not much more to her name than a handful of credit cards and a home-equity loan. Pizzeria Lola leapt into these pages instantly, as everyone raved about its ethereal wood-fired pies and top-shelf toppings. Slice joint Hello Pizza followed, and now pizza fanatics are going into fainting spells waiting for Kim’s newest, biggest spot, Young Joni, expected to open later this month in northeast Minneapolis. It will have the same wood-fired oven they use at Pizzeria Lola and a wood grill, as well as an expanded menu with items like a salad inspired by bibimbap with ancient grains, pickled and fresh vegetables, plus wood-grilled Korean marinated beef. “I’ve had regular guests say, ‘How much do you pay journalists to write about you guys?’” says Kim of all that good press. “I don’t know why the press say the things they say. I didn’t get very many reviews when I was an actor—I’m getting far more positive reviews as a restaurateur.” 

A Life in Full-Color Pages

Doug Flicker’s now-shuttered Auriga dominated awards here in the early 2000s. Next, he opened Piccolo, which took a moment to get its footing as folks tried to figure out the challenging tasting menu. Today, though, it’s universally beloved. Flicker’s newest project is the hotly anticipated Esker Grove at the Walker Art Center. The restaurant is set to open next month, when the museum debuts a big new restaurant space near the Sculpture Garden. It’s a funny circle-of-life homecoming for Flicker, as Auriga was just doors down from his new spot. But Auriga was done on a shoestring, while Esker Grove has tapped world-class architects who never ask the chef to swing by Home Depot for another bag of grout. His presence in the food pages of this magazine has also been a thread through his career. “When a critic says you’re the best restaurant, it means so much. It’s a validation you were maybe hoping for but wouldn’t ever admit,” says Flicker. “The subscribers got them first. They’d call [with the news]—but you never believed it till you got a physical copy. I’d go up to Burch Pharmacy [now Burch Steak] and stare at the magazine rack waiting for one to show up. I think the first picture of me that was ever in a magazine was for Mpls.St.Paul Magazine. I was at D’Amico Cucina, and there was a picture of the plate, but you could see me in the background, blurred, in my big pouffy white hat. I know my mom still has that magazine.”  

Sprints and Marathons

Lucas Almendinger has been in these pages a lot in the last five years, first for running the best new restaurant Third Bird, which he left for the noble but brief experiment that was fine dining at Seward Co-op’s Creamery Cafe. Now he’s the chef-de-cuisine of Steven Brown’s Tilia. What’s it like to find yourself back in the theater’s wings after a couple turns in the spotlight? “You never know what’s going to happen,” says Almendinger. “I never wanted to be that dude who opens a restaurant and gets a good review and is gone in eight weeks or a year and a half—but you can find yourself suddenly looking for a gig when you thought you were in a long-term thing.” Almendinger had kept in touch with his mentor, Brown, who knows a few things about the ups and downs of young chefs and young restaurants. “He always tells me, ‘It’s a marathon, dude, not a sprint. Keep doing good work and you’ll be fine.’” None of us—critics, restaurant-goers, or chefs—ever know if we’re mid-sprint or mid-marathon. But in food we’re lucky, because we still get the tasty morsels as we go.