Photo by Caitlin Abrams
Doug Flicker
I was milling inside a vacant restaurant space on Hennepin Avenue when chef Doug Flicker stepped out of the kitchen with a grin on his face.
“Those are still my old walk-ins,” Flicker said. What chef doesn’t fondly remember his first walk-in cooler? “It’s kind of like going back to the house you grew up in: totally familiar, but also really weird.”
This particular weekday morning in mid-November marked the first time Flicker and his friends from Travail had toured the space together. They’d recently agreed to team up on a pop-up called Late ’90s Fine Dining—although the rest of us may think of it as the second coming of Auriga. From March to early May, Flicker and Travail’s Mike Brown, James Winberg, and Bob Gerken (plus their kitchen crew) will host ticketed dinners in the former Auriga space. There will be a few seatings per night, while the bar will remain first come, first served.
Will you be able to find your favorite Catalan fish stew from the old Auriga? At this point, anything is possible. “We’re going to dig into some old Auriga menus and pull some fun stuff out,” said Brown, from Travail. “But we’ll also do some dishes inspired by Charlie Trotter and French Laundry. Those were also the kings of the ’90s.”
We can’t label it a strict Auriga revival, because Auriga didn’t just come from Flicker. Melinda Goodin, Scott Davis, and James Andrus represented part of the ownership and creativity. And countless cooks passed through its kitchen, including Catbird Seat’s Josh Habiger and Coi’s Erik Anderson. If the name (and its legend) escapes you, Auriga represented the first experimental restaurant in the Twin Cities. Opening in 1996, it stood out as the most significant chef-owned collective of that generation.
Auriga arrived at the dawn of the local food movement, when fine dining first began to break away from formal, stuffy tablecloth restaurants and enter smaller, darker places. Here, the rules were looser: They cooked what they wanted to cook. Shockingly, Flicker and his colleagues wanted to cook seasonal preparations, changing the menu weekly. They championed fresh ingredients from local farmers, elevating them to the same level as the chefs. Then, the burgeoning food set would gather around the bar at the end of the night. I would argue that Auriga marked the moment when our food creators stopped looking to the coasts as a measure of their achievements, and began looking at the talent around that bar, instead.
Gawd, the ’90s. Who can remember the dining scene before Facebook and food Instagram? We all survived the tech apocalypse of Y2K—but 9/11 sent deeper tremors through the local economy. “We woke up on September 11, 2001, feeling really psyched because it was our fifth anniversary,” Flicker recalled. “Then we turned on the TV and everything changed.”
“It was a good run. We did what we set out to do.”
- Doug Flicker
The restaurant would stick around for six more years, before submitting to financial pressures and closing in 2007. (Since then, the space itself has passed through multiple hands—Rye Deli, then Bradstreet; it’s been empty since last year.) “It was a good run,” Flicker said. “We did what we set out to do.”
His co-conspirators no longer run restaurants. Davis is a partner and distiller at 45th Parallel Distillery. And Goodin (who married organic farmer David Van Eeckhout) owns Hog’s Back Farm, in western Wisconsin.
Flicker went on to join the dream team at the Hotel Ivy’s former Porter & Frye restaurant (where he met Brown and Winberg). Next, he opened and closed his small tasting-menu joint, Piccolo. Flicker and his wife Amy Greeley now own and operate the divey bar Bull’s Horn and Sandcastle on Nokomis, while Flicker oversees the Walker’s Esker Grove.
The idea for this pop-up came not from Flicker, but from the Travail collective, who’ve counted the chef as one of their mentors. They’ve been reflecting on these influences while building out a new Travail 3.0, in Robbinsdale. Brown recalled, “Our first pop-up was at Piccolo, while we were building Travail 2.0, and that was a French Laundry theme.”
You can watch old movies and read books to understand an era. But it’s a rare opportunity to taste some of the food. Plenty of young guns, working in kitchens now, weren’t even alive in 1996. I hope they see this fine-dining flashback as their chance to pull up a chair to history.
