Courtesy of Tim McKee
Tim McKee’s pintxos
Skewers of the traditional Basque snack pintxos, as made at his Travail pop-up
Update 10/6/22: It was announced this week that chef Tim McKee's new restaurant will be part of the upcoming hotel property The West, a restoration of four buildings in the North Loop.
I picked up the phone, seeing via caller ID that it was Tim McKee, chef of one of Minneapolis’s hallmark restaurants, the dearly departed La Belle Vie, which closed in 2015 after 17 years of service. “I’m opening a new restaurant,” said McKee.
“Well that’s shocking,” said I. “I thought you got out of the game. Where?”
“It’ll be in the North Loop. On 1st Street.”
“Fantastic,” I said. “Is it inside Gavin Kaysen’s Spoon and Stable? Is it a pop-up on one of the cocktail tables near the bar?”
“It is not,” said McKee. “There are questions I can’t answer, and that’s one of them. People will figure it out but hopefully not today…” and he trailed off.
“What kind of restaurant?” I inquired, inquiringly.
“Basque inspired. We’ll take inspiration from Spain in general with an emphasis on Basque cuisine, primarily cooked over charcoal. Similar to the pop-ups I’ve been doing at Travail.”
“Okay,” I said, rifling through my knowledge of existing 1st Street restaurant HVAC systems, and coming up with likely suspects. “When you say ‘we’ are opening something: Who’s we?”
“If I told you the we you’d know the where,” McKee replied. “We’re not talking about that yet.”
“All right, then I’ll ask the obvious: When?”
“When, I can answer when,” laughed McKee. “A year from now. We’re thinking it will be August of 2023.”
“Last question,” I lied. “Why?”
“Here’s part of the why,” said McKee. “At the beginning of COVID I ‘pivoted’ to consulting, product development, all the sorts of things I thought would afford me the type of lifestyle I wanted without the difficulties I didn’t want. Wrong. Maybe I’m broken and I can no longer function the way I’m meant to function, but I need the mayhem of restaurants. I love them, I miss them. Do they make economic sense today? I’ve been grappling with that. It seems like they’re starting to make a little more sense, even though restaurant economics have always been problematic, this seems like the right direction.”
“Oooh!” I gasped, the importance of all of this assembling in my mind. In 2023, the gravity of Minneapolis fine-dining will totally reorient to 1st Street. “North Loop, into the belly of the beast! A 1st Street showdown with Gavin Kaysen on one corner, Daniel del Prado on another, Shige Furukawa at Kaiseki Furukawa on another, David Fhima building out a brasserie in the old Ribnick Furs building, down the street from former pastry chef Diane Moua at her Bellecour Bakery inside Cooks, a scant block from former business partner Josh Thoma (now of Smack Shack, then of La Belle Vie and their Spanish restaurant Solera, the longtime best Spanish restaurant in the state), down the street from protegé Jamie Malone’s Paris Dining Club, within blocks of the coming Butcher & The Boar, a stone's throw from Kaysen's Mara at the Four Seasons…”
So I peppered McKee with more questions about the “we.” He declined to answer. He did say there will be an extensive vermouth program, and an elaborate Spanish gin and tonic program, for what the Spanish charmingly call gintonics.
I began throwing gin- and vermouth-specialist names around.
“I told them, I said they’re going to ask me questions, I’m going to say I can’t answer, and it will just turn into an Agatha Christie. As soon as I get off the phone, they’re going to figure out everything.”
Are you feeling your inner Miss Marple and/or Hercule Poirot, and have you cracked the case? Send it to me on Twitter, @DearDara, and Minneapolis: Get ready for a dining scene in full flower, in 2023?
