Mara Is a Scene Stealer

How does glamorous Mara, Gavin Kaysen’s latest inside the shiny new Four Seasons hotel, fit in?

by

Open on: The shiny new blue glass skyscraper in downtown, the Minneapolis Four Seasons Hotel on the corner of Hennepin and Washington. Zoom in on two scenes.

Scene one: Inside the sand-and-burgundy glamour of Mara, where everything is Italian blown glass or some species of olive wood or velvet, inside a corner sweetheart booth backed by a handmade tapestry, two gorgeous Japanese girls, hair flowing and summer vacation shoulders out, clicking approximately one zillion selfies as they pose with their fancy brunch cocktails. One pauses to enter thoughts into a phone, runs those through a translation app, and slides it toward a server, who reads and bows away. He fetches croissants lacquered, dipped, and garnished in the new international style of French bones and Instagram dazzle. The girls add the pastries to their self-portraits, one with mouth wide in profile, like a shark.

Scene two: Half-moon driveway in front of the Minneapolis Four Seasons, Saturday night at 8 pm. Pillars out front cleverly designed so that there’s room for cars between them. In the three places now? A black Lamborghini, candy-apple-red Porsche, and sparkling new Range Rover. Zoom past the cars and head inside, past the tumbled-children’s-alphabet-blocks sculpture reading I-M-A-G-I-N-E, into the art deco bar, and in one pocket of the custom-built undulating-S couch backed by booths, find your critic.

The man in the booth behind me dangles a Rolex so close that I can read the time. He has a chic platinum-white-haired woman on each arm and wears a shirt that looks Hawaiian but is probably Italian. There’s not an empty velvet chair in the joint, and certainly not in front of the clever bar, backed by alcoves like inverted pillars, each burnished floor to ceiling with gold, like church naves for saints or organ pipes, but the saints are the bartenders and the music is us. See and be seen inside for people; see and be seen outside for cars.

When the server brings my drink, called an Arpège, made mainly with gin and sweet fragrances, it arrives crowned with a small bouquet of baby’s breath, like a wedding in miniature. I pluck out the bouquet, wondering: Is this drink my bride? Am I the bride? Either way, the message is clear: You’re at the Four Seasons, baby. It’s all money and all glam, race car, lobster dreamtime.

Mara! When I first heard about Mara, my mind received it as: Gavin Kaysen, current king of local chefs, is opening another restaurant a few blocks from his bakery, Bellecour, and his other two restaurants, Spoon and Stable and Demi. Tables at Mara were booked solid for months. Thwarted, I decided to just show up for a Saturday breakfast and found I could waltz right in, for they hold most of the tables for hotel guests, as they should.

I also found a breakfast waffle blossoming with a scoop of fragrant, orange-touched mascarpone butter and scattered with hothouse blackberries of such astonishing size that you instantly know they’re only available to French pastry chefs paying top dollar. I received tea served in a cast-iron teapot heavy as a barbell, stove-heated so hot it maintained temperature for an hour, which is a standard required by many business travelers from Asia. As I was busy being dazzled by my chocolate croissant—which had an interior kelly-green pistachio glaze, an exterior flank dipped in olive-green pistachio glaze, and a band of cocoa nibs—I saw the father of a bride arrive. It turned out most of my fellow dining room occupants were all from one enormous wedding party, and so he worked the room, visiting four nearby tables, asking after this guest’s arrival and firming up plans for golf. And the news permeated my skull: Mara is not so much a Gavin Kaysen restaurant as it is a Four Seasons restaurant.

A Four Seasons! How does this even work? When I was growing up in New York City, a Four Seasons lunch was a very particular thing: You judged how much money you were about to make by the French name submerged in ice in the champagne bucket. Sign the contract and clink the glasses. The particularly powerful have a table. After a few decades in Minneapolis, I have observed that a wildly popular Minneapolis business lunch is a desk salad—which both displays the puritanical virtues of multitasking and allows you to leave early for The Cabin.

Scanning the restaurant’s press, I learned that Mara was a “Mediterranean” restaurant. How does that even work? It’s a big sea. Is Mediterranean Tunisian, French, Turkish? I ate my way to the answers.

I had some wonderful Mediterranean pastries, which all happened to be French, and they were all courtesy of Eddy Dhenin—that sort of elite French baker who globe-hops, opening Four Seasons—who was tapped for this role because there really aren’t better pastry chefs on this planet. If you care about dessert, by all that is holy I urge you to take time to eat through his menu. There’s a bowl of pistachio semifreddo covered in a frozen crumble of another sort of pistachio and sprinkled with real freeze-dried flower petals, real fresh flower petals, and real gold foil. It tastes like a kiss blown to you by the world’s most fashionable pistachio. Everything pastry at the Four Seasons is of this level, as it should be, but still: hot damn.

Gavin Kaysen’s food at Mara is a more human endeavor. The hummus and pita bread is a stunner, with hot little pitas blistered with char, puffy and rich with long-proofed dough the star of the show. Turns out that these double-proof pitas came from Kaysen’s Synergy Series at Spoon, when star chef Michael Solomonov came and taught his pita secrets. Other Mediterranean dishes were less successful. The salt-baked branzino, for instance, pushed by every waiter, is $68 for a piece of Mediterranean fish that to me mainly tasted bland as water, though also a little salty and steamed. Yes, it came with a robust tzatziki, a simple couscous, and a lively fennel slaw, but it’s hard to imagine anyone getting it twice.

Meanwhile, several dishes with a nonlinear connection to the Mediterranean were nothing short of spectacular: a pasta made with Atlantic lobster, Minnesota flour, tomatoes, and butter was so rich, so fresh and robustly flavored, so accomplished in every way that I started texting friends to alert them of its existence. A Peterson Farms Minnesota rib eye with Minnesota-foraged chicken of the woods mushrooms and a spiced beef jus was maybe the best locavore steak I’ve ever had, gamy and winey and delicate. If you’ve ever sat on the sidelines of the Minnesota burger-chef tournaments and wondered where the filets mignons from this sought-after farm end up, now we know. Mara’s Chermoula Spiced Chicken, featuring Wild Acres Farm chicken—which lived out of doors wild-foraging beneath eagle-guarding nets in Pequot Lakes, and which were never frozen—is the best Minnesota chicken in my living memory. The meat is so pheasant-like and subtle, the skin crackling with a chermoula spice blend of pepper, cumin, paprika, and a dozen more ingredients that make it novel but still comforting.

I phoned Kaysen for more detail. “A lot of what you’re tasting at Mara is trust,” he says. “When I got here, nobody knew me; no one expected me to make it. They didn’t know me. Every day, I try to be responsible and respectful about paying farmers on time or early. It takes time to build, but now I have a farmer growing 10 acres of beets just for me. I have a tomato grown that is only for Spoon. And when I tell someone I will take this many chickens, this many steaks, they build it into their own business plans. No one could open with that Wild Acres chicken except me. So, it’s been fun, creatively, to come up with food that’s Mediterranean in a place that is not Mediterranean. To cook like a place where everything is on a warm sea, when we are not. So for me, Mediterranean is what I want to do, with olive oil, vinegars, and spice blends.” (Many of the spice blends come from Kaysen’s friends at the importer La Boîte.) If Mara was relying so heavily on Spoon and Stable suppliers and ingredients, and the word Mediterranean is not much more than a sleight of hand to combine French pastry with whatever Kaysen feels like doing now, I found my quest to understand how Mara fits into the Kaysen restaurants, or Minneapolis generally, increasingly blurry.

Which led me to realize I hadn’t been to Spoon and Stable since before pandemic, so I popped in and found, slam-packed, elbow to elbow, bartenders and patrons greeting each other like family, the whole space a box of laughter. I sat next to a couple who each ordered the bone marrow—they didn’t like to share, they explained; they did this all the time. Well, I got the bone marrow, too. Both dewy-trembling and hard-charred, it was perfect. A sweet corn ravioli was chewy and biscuity because of the good pasta, nutty because of the ground huitlacoche filling, sweet with a sauce of sweet corn, and cheffily clever because of the underlying botany—huitlacoche is a mushroom that grows on corn. Spoon and Stable struck me, here in 2022, as a restaurant at the height of its powers, completely in a rush of happy conversation with its community, buzzy, on point, everything a restaurant should be. Except: Why are there so many items still from the opening menu? The Spaghetti Nero, for instance. Is that even Kaysen’s dish? Wasn’t it from his last restaurant, New York City’s Café Boulud?

“I created that for Iron Chef in 2008,” explained Kaysen. “For Battle Octopus, which won the show. I came back from Iron Chef; I told Daniel Boulud, ‘Chef, let’s put it on the menu at DB.’ Then I brought it here. I tried to take it off once, for a week! I’ve never had more complaint letters and calls. I had one guy walk back to the kitchen: ‘Chef, what happened? What did I do to you, that you have done such a terrible thing to me?’ I said, ‘Fine, it’ll stay.’ But honestly, we’re bored. We’d like to do what we’re capable of today.”

Finally, some clarity on one way that Mara fits in with existing Minneapolis and Kaysen’s growing stable of spots with spoons. Mara’s bucatini with lobster, roe, and local tomatoes is truly wonderful. The pasta itself is fresher, nuttier, livelier, made as it is with local, fresh-ground Baker’s Field flour and brought to life by a chef team who understands how to use it. The pasta is burnished with local Hope Creamery butter as well as the best lobster, roe, and Espelette pepper money can buy.

I suddenly felt a little bad for the King of the North Loop. Are we, the audience at Spoon and Stable, yelling “Free Bird” so much that we don’t let the artist play anything from the new album? And now, to extend the analogy, the artist has to go play on another stage under another name so he can do the new stuff?

Spaghetti Nero–heads, make the journey to Mara. You may find that new pasta is actually better than the Nero and displays what Kaysen is capable of now.

Will the Nero-heads walk the three blocks? Will Minneapolis find its inner power lunch? Will we all come to accept that Mediterranean is a thought playing in the soul? I can only give the most frustrating of answers: Now we wait.

I did discover through my Mara explorations that restaurants are, in some ways, a species of community theater. For Mara, Four Seasons built the spectacular sets and peerlessly flattering lighting, it put some eye-catching stars in key roles, and now we all wait to see if the community fills in the rest of the show. Ask yourself: Is this a scene in which you’d sign up for a cameo?

245 Hennepin Ave., Mpls., 612-895-5709 

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