Icon, Renewed: The New Scenic Café

Talk about a refresh. The New Scenic Café is practically unrecognizable after riding the pandemic waves and creating new ways to share fan favorites.

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What is a restaurant? A year and a half ago, we all knew the answer. A restaurant was a building with places to sit and tables inside of it. You sit at a table and someone brings you food and wine in fancy glasses. Often, there’s a chef whose sensibility dictates that food and wine, and after a couple hours you leave the building filled up with the food, wine, and chef’s sensibility, and you’re happier than when you showed up—easy-peasy, that’s a restaurant. The word comes from the Latin restaurare, “to renew.” If you had been pressed to stick a picture of a restaurant into an encyclopedia, many Minnesotans would have picked the New Scenic Café—the tiny roadside building just north of Duluth on scenic Highway 61, overlooking Lake Superior, open for 20 years, run by the sensibility of local-minded and locally raised chef Scott Graden, with its signature tuna sashimi. 

But then came the pandemic. 

Drive to the site of the New Scenic Café now and you find as many as three sparkling vintage aluminum Airstream trailers serving champagne, oysters, salmon burgers on squid-ink brioche buns, and chocolate babka (among many other things). The Airstreams are distributed throughout the grounds, which now hold trees, lawns, and gravel parking areas along with newly created picnic tables, a carpeted yurt, a groceries-and-meal-kits market, a Finnish towering chimney fireplace, a bocce court, a place to play horseshoes, a place to play kubb, a spot to try four-season curling, and an area for outdoor movie watching. 

Is this a restaurant? Is this a café? 

In 2021, this is a restaurant; this is a café. Obviously, every restaurant still standing in 2021 has pivoted, bobbed, swerved, reimagined, rethought. But I think New Scenic might have changed the most, morphing from a quiet and pretty Minnesota-local version of California cuisine to a full-blown haute all-in-one lakeside festival. It’s a transformation worth paying attention to beyond paying homage to the spectacular salmon burger. 

Though that salmon burger is the best I’ve had in my well-fed life and worth a detour of its own. Hand-cut from fish caught by an Alaskan fisherman the café has worked with for years and years, this burger is brought to life by tapping all the fine dining tricks Graden has long used to make his little lakeside spot famous. The brioche bun, made moonless-midnight black with squid ink, is speckled with inky-black sesame seeds to drive the point home and make it look that much more riveting. A cucumber salad on top of the burger gives it saucy glory by uniting several distinct culinary rivers. First, there is the Japanese influence you always find in California cuisine, here in Kewpie mayonnaise and the subtlest note of wasabi. Next, there’s Swedish influence through the quick cucumber and fresh dill pickle that make the most of the topping. Finally, there’s an undeniable Minnesota summer-picnic spirit to the whole thing, in the sense that everyone likes the picnic table bowl full of something white, crunchy, and mayonnaise-y all over. Get this salmon burger, take it to your yurt (handmade by the chef), Finnish-inspired fireplace (designed by the chef), or picnic table (also handmade by the chef, who would like you to know you can buy one), and take a bite. Fresh and light salmon, saucy sauce, rich ink-black bun—this is fine dining, handheld and outdoors. 

A few other treats I tried that you are likely to find this summer (though they aren’t guaranteed, given the changeable nature of food trucks and life, as we have all experienced lately): mussels! Lightly curried, finished with cream, tossed with handfuls of fresh cilantro, served with a small personal loaf of warm bread to sop in the broth. A smoked-salmon pâté sandwich, very Swedish, with dill and pickled red onion and a side of pickled beets. A muffuletta sandwich, with layers of ham and salami tightly wrapped up next to a side of extra olive-muffuletta giardiniera before being packed up with an orange in a box—it all but insists you take it on a hike to a waterfall farther north before you sit back and enjoy it. And, oddly, perhaps the state’s best chocolate babka? 

Chocolate babka, of course, is that Jewish American yeast bread evolved from Polish and Ukrainian traditions: It’s swirly, it’s rich, it’s not easily made, and it’s the basis for life’s most decadent French toast. You may happen upon a loaf if you just blunder up to New Scenic to see what’s going on (that’s how I found mine), but you’re much more likely to get one if you find your way to the website of its new Mise en Place Marketplace. The market is many things. It’s a bakery with airy sourdough loaves with great depth and rhubarb tarts with great springtime energy. It sells eat-cold-at-home dinners like Spanish tortilla, smoked salmon and accompaniments, or an olive tart and charcuterie. MEP also offers an ever-changing and astonishingly ambitious array of chef-made kits, some simple (a loaf of cardamom bread, cream, and eggs to make cardamom French toast), some more complex (ready-to-blanch carrots to pair with pre-marinated miso sea bass), and some so popular they’ve been the miracle keeping this restaurant icon alive through a very hard winter (Swedish meatballs). 

Speaking of miracles, let us turn our attention to the sashimi tuna tacos, which made this whole foodie-festival-on-the-lake concept possible. It all started, as so many good Minnesota stories do, at the State Fair. Graden was invited to sell his restaurant’s iconic dish on the fairgrounds in 2020. If you’ve never had it, the dish is a living legend: a fried wonton folded around a rectangle of ruby-red raw ahi tuna resting on a bit of avocado, and to one side, a bit of Thai peanut coleslaw. It’s a very California-cuisine dish, East-meets-West from the time before the pork belly excesses of the early 2000s or the austere fermentations and obscure grains of the 2010s were the dominant trends. 

“They told us we’d be in a new food trailer area, one of three trailers, and to assume we’d sell 4,000 items a day,” Graden told me. To prepare, in 2019, he fabricated and updated a 1969 shiny aluminum Airstream and hired a company to outfit it with kitchen mechanics. That is how the New Scenic happened to have a 20-foot Airstream food trailer on hand the day the governor ordered all restaurants to close in March 2020. And even though the State Fair never happened in 2020, as fate would have it, this trailer just might have saved the day. 

It was a worrisome time, though. On top of the trailer expense, in 2019, the New Scenic happened to undertake a raft of capital improvements, like making the series of hodgepodge roofs into one, erasing the legacy of various additions over the years along with their inherent roof problems. “In 2019, we had just celebrated our 20-year anniversary,” explains Graden, “and we were kind of at a high, in terms of popularity, stability, my being able to work on my business and not in it.” 

As March turned to April in 2020, Graden saw bills arriving with no pandemic end in sight, so he decided to try his hand at an Easter meal kit—and sold 200 in a flash. How did he get the word out? Social media, a mailing list? Nope, just the northland way, he told me. He experienced it all the time as a local kid, growing up around Duluth, Superior, and Hermantown. “My sister was always angry that if she did something wrong at school, by the time she got home my mom would already know—someone told someone who called someone who texted someone who ran into someone. That same system is still deployable in small towns. If there’s a message that you want shared—or you don’t—everyone just shares it.” 

And out of this confluence of bad and good—an investment in the future, a State Fair plan delayed, an Easter message passed around—Graden could sense the beginning of a shift. “We had people buying gift certificates just to keep us alive,” says Graden. “It was a huge lesson in what it means to be part of a community.” Finding that the community wanted to be outside all summer, Graden gambled on serving as many as he could by getting the Airstream up and running, adding picnic tables, and amping up every little corner of his property to create a festival feel. 

This year, New Scenic is adding two additional Airstreams, bringing the total fleet to three. One will spend all summer in the heart of Duluth’s tourist area, Canal Park. One will live with the restaurant, and the last will be anchored on the grounds unless it’s out making excursions to breweries and festivals, and, God willing, the 2021 State Fair. Is this expanding and contracting entity a restaurant? It is now. As of this writing, Graden doesn’t know if the historic restaurant at the core of all this will open in 2021. It might! It requires staff and investment, which he’s working on. But it’s a risk, especially if another shutdown or outbreak arrives. Is a restaurant something that stays locked up for two years and simultaneously thrives? Maybe? 

“I remember being asked in Bible study as a kid, ‘What is a church?’” recalls Graden. “You were supposed to say, ‘It’s a building,’ or whatever. Then the Bible study leader would get you to: It’s not the building; it’s the congregation; it’s faith; it’s what we do and how we act. So if you ask me, ‘What is a restaurant today?’ I’ll tell you it’s sure as hell not a building. I own a building. I’m paying a mortgage on a building. But the restaurant is what it provides. It provides customers with a place to commune, with food and drink. It provides the people who work here with jobs. It provides my herring fisherman with a place to sell his herring and my salmon fisherman with a place to sell his salmon—if I can’t sell their fish, they can’t fish. It provides my farmer with a way to sell his tomatoes. When you pull all these experiences together and share them, that’s how I now define a restaurant.” 

When the New Scenic Café was first named, in 1999, it was to distinguish it from the former café on the site. Graden lived in the garage of the restaurant for five years, listening to the wolves howl on the hill, listening to the ice boom and crack on the lake, living that American dream of sweat equity and a better tomorrow. How could he have known, how could any of us have known, that “renew,” found inside the root meaning of the word restaurant, and the “new” in his restaurant’s name would be the most important part? 

New Scenic Café and Mise en Place Marketplace, 5461 North Shore Dr., Duluth, newsceniccafe.com, mep-mp.com