Elephant Bar food
Elephant Bar
Big news, peeps. Chef Lucas Almendinger is opening a serious destination restaurant and bar in downtown St. Paul, called Elephant Bar. Taking over the former Hygge space in Lowertown, it’s going to have Lucas Almendinger-style food created with a spice palette inspired by his business partner Nabeel Ahmad’s Pakistani heritage, and it’s coming soon.
Restaurant-heads in the Twin Cities are well acquainted with the name of chef Lucas Almendinger, who has in the last decade opened one restaurant with beautiful food after another. His most notable achievement was perhaps the first exquisite version of the Co-Op Creamery Cafe which made our Best Restaurants of 2015, before significantly downscaling in ambition and accomplishment. Or perhaps it was the 2014 version of the Third Bird, when it was fine dining and wonderful. In any event, by 2016 we were left to wonder if Almendinger was suffering the same difficult road that his mentor Steven Brown once walked, opening highly acclaimed restaurants that shuttered too soon. Yes, children, Steven Brown was once something other than the head of always-packed Tilia and always-languorously glamorous St. Genevieve. "It's a marathon, not a sprint," Brown has often told us all, and it seems as if Almendinger has been one of the chefs on that difficult marathon.
Still, I insist his food at both the early Co-Op Creamery and Third Bird was remarkable and memorable in specific ways. Vegetable-sensitive, in that individual vegetables always retained their individual essence even in a complex tangle with other ingredients. Earthy, in that he was always able to maintain an ingredient’s accessible rusticity within the confines of a typical meat-and-a-starch-and-a-veg construction of an American restaurant plate. And finally, he was always able to cook with a quality I think of as musicality, everything coming together gracefully and prettily, a little song. For the past few years Almendinger has been cooking at Tilia, and the news that he’s attempting another solo flight is just very good news for us.
Elephant Bar will have fine restaurant food inspired by an Indian-sub-continent spice cabinet, while reaching for something new. The owner of the building was looking for the right chef to helm a good restaurant in the space. Nabeel Ahmad, born in Pakistan but raised mostly in the Midwest, was already on board on the financial side of the team. Ahmad and Almendinger met during discussions, and just really hit it off as friends. Soon they were cooking together, with Ahmad introducing Pakistani home-cooking techniques and ingredients Almendinger wasn’t familiar with. Ahmad became increasingly delighted with the way these ingredients took on a new personality through Almendinger’s techniques. “This is not a South Indian or Pakistani restaurant,” Almendinger told me a few times, pointing out that if anyone wanted such a thing there are many talented chefs who could do that. But in fact, this team is trying to do something new, namely see our foods and ingredients in fresh ways. “There’s an aspect to cooking that can be rearranging deck chairs,” Almendinger told me. “You’re doing the same thing in the same way. This is something that was making us both fall in love with food and get me to question what and how I was doing things, that has really opened up certain subtleties that were closed to me before.”
How will this be conveyed on the plates? Expect flavors like dehydrated and micro-planed black lime, funky dried turmeric combined with sparky fresh turmeric, and different uses of saffron. At dinner, there will be dishes like a yogurt-marinated chicken, fried, served with saffron rice, flatbreads, chili-honey and raita. Perhaps there will be a pan-roasted cardamom-and-fennel dusted duck breast with olives, chilies, and bitter mustard, watercress, and arugula. Elephant Bar will also have a bar program, created by Jesse Held and his company Earl Giles, which could make it one of the most exciting things on deck in St. Paul’s 2019 cocktail-world: Cardamom, different cinnamons, different citrus—there’s a lot to think about.
Besides the full-service restaurant, there will also be a quick-serve café, where lunch will bring salads and sandwiches, including a marinated kale salad with smoked salmon and a yogurt, Aleppo pepper, shallot, and honey dressing. Elephant Bar will also continue Hygga’s tradition of coffee service, serving Bootstrap Coffee and Patisserie 46 pastries in the mornings.
They’re shooting for mid-March, though will not be surprised to be delayed to late March. So almost certainly before the St. Paul Farmer’s Market opens in late April—which is of course one of the real-life first signs of Minnesota spring. A perfect time for something new!
