Photos by Caitlin Abrams
Green bean salad at Hyacinth
The green beans in this salad just came from the farm; the china came from the chef’s great-grandma decades ago.
The green beans on great-grandma’s gold-rimmed china were flabbergasting. Half were yellow wax beans, half were green. Half of each had been char-grilled and blistered, the other half blanched and shocked till dewy and pliant. Recombined, they bathed in sunny, buttery-yellow olive oil, freshened with broad leaves of parsley, and bejeweled by golden spheres and hemispheres of chickpeas, long cooked with herbs, then confited, then crisp-fried. There, beneath the beans, lay an ultra-creamy purée of the chickpeas’ former brothers—the half left in the broth and herbs. A dusting of fennel pollen slid right into the lemony mix, and added yet another element, the way a couture jacket might include an extra bit of trim inside the collar. A secret to be seen by no one but you.
In one sense, this bean salad was nothing: some end-of-summer garden vegetables and a few things from the pantry. And yet, on careful inspection, these lowly beans began to feel like a geometry professor’s first-day lecture: How many halves make a whole? A half and a half and—pay attention!—I’ll pull nine more halves from this circle!
It was quite a salad.
At first, I hesitated even to tell you about it, as it will certainly be off the menu by the time you read this. As Rikki Giambruno, chef and owner of Hyacinth, St. Paul’s new 40-seat restaurant in Summit Hill, told me, “If you’re really eating seasonally in Minnesota, you’re eating some things maybe a week a year.”
But a few weeks later, after bewitching adventures with watermelon and roast squash, I concluded that there would always be a salad at Hyacinth like this. And you should know about it, because a truly riveting salad is a rare phenomenon, and worth paying attention to. In fact, Hyacinth is worth paying attention to, in total.
The first thing you notice on walking in is how white and bright and elegant the space is. A bank of windows and a line of lamps, like giant glowing soap bubbles, send light bouncing off the stainless steel kitchen that fills a quarter of the room. It’s a vessel of light. The next thing you notice is the tableware: chunky Depression-era pressed-glass tumblers, grandma-style fancy china, swirly and gilt-edged. How can it all feel so fresh?
It turns out there was a real great-grandma behind that: Her name was Kit. Her great-grandson Rikki Giambruno grew up in Victoria, Minnesota, west of the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. His mom was a passionate and busy gardener, who sometimes cooked professionally at the General Store of Minnetonka’s café. After a college stint studying journalism in Nebraska, Giambruno headed to New York City for cooking school. There, he fell into the Michelin-starred kitchen of the British chef Paul Liebrandt at French-oriented Corton. Meanwhile, his older brother, Joe, opened Bad Weather Brewing Company in St. Paul.
Hyacinth chef and owner Rikki Giambruno
Chef and owner Rikki Giambruno: “This is us, this is our stuff.”
After several years at Corton, Giambruno leapt to a pizza parlor in Brooklyn called Franny’s, where he cooked Italian food, which he calls his favorite food in the world. This is where he met Paul Baker, a fellow Minnesotan. “Our chef called us Team Minnesota,” he said.
Well, Team Minnesota got to talking: about how Giambruno’s favorite restaurant in town is Broders’ and all its offshoots. About how St. Paul supports a business when they love it. About how much Giambruno loved growing up on Hyacinth Avenue in Victoria, where his mom’s crabapple and peach trees flowered in the spring and fruited in the fall. About how Giambruno’s dad, a serial small-business entrepreneur, would retire one day, and could help them do their own thing.
Well, you see where this all went. Brother Joe’s beer appears on the menu, Rikki’s mom grew the flowers that filled the vases on opening day, and great-grandma’s china sits on the gray-and-white marble counters.
The restaurant is destroying this stuff day by day, Giambruno explained. “I did have the family’s blessing to do that. It’s stuff that’s been in boxes and cupboards, and no one was using it except sometimes at Christmas. We wanted everything about the place to tell a story, our family’s story.
“This is us, this is our stuff,” he continued. “We hope you love it. But even if you don’t, we’re being true to ourselves.”
Those stories can be read on the menu, too. Giambruno discovered his love for cacio e pepe, that classic Roman peppered pasta, when his parents brought the family to Italy. The Hyacinth version is the best we’ve ever had in Minnesota, made through a sequence of Corton-perfected techniques. This includes toasting in oil specially sourced Zanzibar pepper, adding the oil to Hope Creamery butter, then adding more fresh Zanzibar pepper. All this goes onto a specially imported pasta. It’s a stunner.
I didn’t love everything I ate at Hyacinth. Some of the entrées I found, of all things, overseasoned. The roast prawns with a sweet corn and pepper salad seemed far too bright, as if the prawns had been swamped in a tsunami of acid. A spice-glazed hen, with a sort of Moroccan honey-barbecue glaze, lost the taste of the bird.
The desserts can seem odd, too. A fried ring called a siringate tasted like little more than air. A panna cotta came across as homey and charming, while a chocolate crostata had a funny yogurt tang to it (and hardly any chocolate).
More consistent is the wine list, by general manager Beth Johnson, which feels like an affordable art gallery you get to play in. Here, you might discover the obscure and lusty Susumaniello from Puglia, a delicate berry-bright Lambrusco to pair with the silky Italian prosciutto, or a dozen other delights.
Sometimes in the restaurant-reviewing game, where we must necessarily care about what’s new, a review can feel a bit too early, like looking into the clear plastic bassinets in the newborn ward and picking the future stars. Something about Hyacinth adds to that sense, with the abundant light making the space feel like a nursery.
Maybe that’s why on my last visit, my mind turned to the way families grow, forming the story of the Twin Cities itself. You know the dynastic family names: the Daytons, Pillsburys, Cargills. In restaurants the names are the Broders (of the Cucina, Pasta Bar, and Terzo) and the McDermotts (founders of Chi-Chi’s in the past, Rojo Mexican Grill in the present, and Lucky Cricket with Andrew Zimmern in the future). Now with Hyacinth up on the bluffs and Bad Weather down below, do we add to the St. Paul families the name Giambruno?
790 Grand Ave., St. Paul, 651-478-1822, hyacinthstpaul.com
