One Great Plate: The Modern Pot Roast at McKinney Roe

It's one of the most legendary dishes in town, and it's back from the dead on Thursdays (and Friday lunch) in downtown Minneapolis.

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I wrote a while back about veteran chef Scott Pampuch taking over the heretofore snazzy but snoozy McKinney Roe in Downtown's East Town neighborhood. Hold on to your hats, people of a certain age—because one of the foundational and most-missed dishes in the recent history of Minneapolis is back. You knew it, you loved it, The Modern pot roast!

“No, I’m calling it the ‘postmodern’ pot roast,” Pampuch told me. Pampuch worked at the venerated Modern Café in Northeast under founder Jim Grell for around four years beginning in 1999. “We went through a couple hundred pounds of pot roast every few days, technically I’d say it’s how I learned to braise meat.” I can practically taste the classic dish now, beefy, tender, with the horseradish sour cream—who’s with me here?

“I’d actually say The Modern pot roast had different stages,” Pampuch told me. “When I got here, Jim Grell had been making it, and the braising liquid was basically an au jus. Then we started getting fancy and throwing in red wine, straining it, cooking it down a little more and mounting the sauce with butter into a sort of thicker sauce or a gravy. After me, Phillip Becht took it over, and went in an opposite direction, taking the jus to a clearer broth, almost a consommé. But the horseradish sour cream always remained, as did the carrot, celery, and garlic mashed potato base.” 

As he went on with his cooking life, Pampuch says, he has always done one version or another of The Modern pot roast. A beef cheek version for Fulton, another take at the Iron Horse in Milwaukee, and now—it’s back! Thursday nights at McKinney Roe, and if there’s any leftover from Thursday night, Pampuch says it will feature in a Friday lunch special, sliced on pumpernickel. 

Pampuch wants us to call it postmodern, but I know no one ever will. And for those of you who have only started eating around here after 2015, when The Modern shut down and turned into the Sheridan Room, let me tell you, it was justly famous. “Tell the kids, before the Internet there was a guy named Jim Grell getting recognized for what he did at The Modern. It was not on Instagram. It was a long-ass time ago.” 

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