Photo by Caitlin Abrams
Charcuterie Board at Kieran's Ktichen Northeast
It’s not just a cheese board with the best pretzels and charcuterie. It’s a proof of concept for Minnesota foodways.
We finally have it, Minnesota. The local sandwich that can stand head-to-head with national legends like John’s Roast Pork in Philadelphia or Al’s Beef in Chicago. The sandwich you can bring tourists to and build a life around.
The sandwich is the NE Italian at Kieran’s Kitchen Northeast, and here’s what you taste when you bite into it: really good bread; some of the world’s best charcuterie, including woodsy salami, gossamer veils of ham, and buoyant mortadella; and the creaminess of just-made fromage blanc. Each bite adds a feeling that this isn’t merely a sandwich but an event, a landmark, a mountaintop.
Well, that’s how I feel about this sandwich, anyway. I’ve been back to get it three times. I even had it one time when it was too saucy, but I loved it nonetheless. It reminded me of Italy.
More precisely, it reminded me of a particular butcher shop, Antica Macelleria Falorni, which has been open since 1806 in the Tuscan hilltop town of Greve, between Florence and Siena. I was there to write about wine, Chianti specifically. However, I was also on a local-meats kick. In every Chianti cellar, I would ask two questions: Who had the best salami, and what was the correct way of making it?
The answer seemed to change every 20 miles: Here we use wild fennel, there they use too much pepper. But they are a people without judgment . . .
The Tuscans take salami very seriously. While Americans call our darlings sweet pea or honeybun, Tuscans say ciccio: a lovely little bite of meat. I’ll never forget a second of my time inside Falorni: a cave of meat, with hams and salamis clustering overhead like fat bats. Old butcher tables bowed by centuries of meat cutting, now used as retail displays, heaped high with meat. The sensuous way the fat of wild boar salami dissolved in my mouth, leaving a lace of game and oak woods behind. Divine.
More divine? Here at Falorni were a people who’d come to a definitive answer about how to eat with their values. They did not spend all their time squabbling about whether it’s good and right to raise pigs in ammonia-clouded warehouses with a manure lagoon outside that flows into the nearest river after every big storm.
In America, for my whole eating life, we cooks and shoppers and diners have lived inside a never-ending flimflam game, in which the human and pollution costs of our food are externalized to surrounding communities. And we fight about whether we’re allowed to regulate or object to any of it: indebted farmers, exploited and undocumented workers, consumers receiving an unhealthy product made as cheaply as possible.
Photo by Caitlin Abrams
Kieran Folliard
Kieran Folliard lent his vision, his money, and his name to Kieran’s Kitchen.
That is, my whole eating life except when I’m engaging with the band of Minnesota visionaries who are trying to make values-driven food happen here. We have many such visionaries, innovating in fields such as fair-trade coffee, pollinator protection, co-ops, and farm-forward restaurants.
Over the past decade, hardly anyone has delved as deep in the fight, or put more skin in the game, than Kieran Folliard, founder of the Local and affiliated pubs. Folliard, who lives in south Minneapolis, took the money he made inventing and selling the 2 Gingers Irish whiskey brand and used it to found the Food Building, in Northeast. Today this production facility hosts three of our state’s top values-driven food makers.
First, there’s Red Table Meat Co., by Mike Phillips, a salumiere with a national reputation and particularly enthusiastic markets in Los Angeles and Chicagoland. Still, Phillips struggles to get enough Minnesotans to understand that his mortadella is not only lush and succulent, but worth paying for.
The Food Building also hosts Baker’s Field Flour & Bread, by Steve Horton. You may recognize Horton as the baker who founded Rustica and then sold it in pursuit of a flour that’s fresher, tastier, and more exactingly milled. He sources all his grains from local farmers and mills them himself, as you can see through the big glass windows just past the Kieran’s Kitchen dining room.
The last maker on site, also visible through windows, is Alemar Cheese, which relocated this summer from Mankato. Alemar has become famous for Bent River, a soft Camembert-style cheese sourced from organic Minnesota dairies. The operation came north to take advantage of the Food Building’s state-of-the-art production facilities.
Once Folliard had all the makers on site making meat, bread, and cheese, he wanted to create a proof of concept, in edible form, for Minnesotans to value and support our food systems. The concept is this: Minnesota makes the best food in the country. Come see and taste how it’s done. Connect the dots. Take pride in it. Appreciate the values and value. Buy it and enjoy it.
“These products are getting lost in the crowded marketplace that’s out there,” Folliard told me. “These products might be crafted and artisanal and so forth, but until people see these can be your everyday provisions, until they taste it, see them come to life, how can they understand? It was not the easy path, I tell you.”
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To pull off this mission, Folliard hired chef Ian Gray, formerly of Gray House and farm-centered food truck the Curious Goat, and established an all-day restaurant, deli meat counter, bar, and bakery. Most of it is counter service, though there are also a handful of seats at the backbar, which functions as a table-service restaurant. Get one of those seats.
Every single thing I’ve tasted in Kieran’s Kitchen has been phenomenal. There’s that sandwich. Or try the pierogi-like dumplings, filled with cream cheese made just for Kieran’s by the Alemar cheesemakers. So rich and melty is this stuff that it makes boxed cream cheese taste like glue.
Photo by Caitlin Abrams
Baker's Field Flour Pasta from Kieran's
Fresh pasta made from Baker’s Field flour.
In the morning, order the breakfast sausage sandwich. It’s made with Red Table sage maple breakfast sausage, an egg, and Alemar fromage blanc, and sits on a light and sweet Baker’s Field bun, and it all comes together like my most florid fantasy of what American farmhouse cooking might have tasted like in a world before dough preservatives and factory farms. Wonderful.
Dishes like this feel like a triumph of American cuisine in that Italian model I talked about before: Just real farm foods, created by people who’ve spent decades becoming absolute masters of their craft. That breakfast sandwich, I’ll note, cost $13 and came with a side of new potatoes. Roasted, smashed, and fried, each little crinkly bit tasted good enough to make your toes curl.
The palmiers, those filigreed French cookies made from croissant dough, are the best I’ve ever had. The fresh nutty grain adds a layer of flavor to what’s ordinarily merely sweet and crisp. Similarly, the hot soft pretzels, naturally leavened, represent my new high-water mark. Again, the fresh-milled grain delivers new flavors and depth to the most familiar of foods.
Were Kieran’s Kitchen merely a place that serves Ian Gray’s handmade pastas (made with Baker’s Field flour), it would still warrant a drive across the city. Trofie—a hand-twisted noodle, tender as kisses—joins with roast mushrooms, Red Table bacon, and sage to form a kind of fragrant Thanksgiving-in-a-bowl.
I won’t list all the marvels, though I dearly want to. I will say that nearly everything in the restaurant is priced well south of $15—a price that’s possible because it’s using flour ground in house and meat purchased directly from farmers.
Is this what food will taste like after the end of America’s industrial food culture, all the branding and swindling? If so, it’s electrifying.
Kieran’s Kitchen, 117 14th Ave. NE, Mpls., 612-354-5093, kieranskitchen.com
