Photo by Caitlin Abrams
J Selby burger
J. Selby's vegan "beaf cheezeburger"
I found myself at Uptown’s new Fig + Farro on a Tuesday night. The room is as cute as Stevie Nicks in an Anthropologie catalog: Everywhere you look you see Moroccan boho this and 1970s Danish that, all pinpointed with the kind of cozy lighting that makes everyone glow. It’s a worthy update of the old and historic Figlio spot, one of the city’s most significant restaurant spaces.
Yet on Tuesday nights, it’s serve-yourself soup, with a bottomless bowl. Options included potato-jalapeño and carrot-cumin. What? My largish party of vegetarians rebelled; they did not want soup and bread for dinner.
Photo by Ashley Camper
Fig & Farro
Roasted squash at Fig + Farro
“In the fall at my house we have an annual soup party,” owner Michelle Courtright explained to me later. “It’s a communal experience, a salon. We hope people are walking around, socializing, talking about climate change.”
Fig + Farro, you see, aspires to something more than average restaurants. “We’re a mission-based restaurant, teaching people how to eat a plant-based diet that can significantly reduce their carbon footprint,” Courtright explained. Serving myself soup and learning about climate change? Is this any place for a restaurant critic?
Maybe? A Harris Poll commissioned by the Vegetarian Resource Group—the best recent survey on the subject—found that about 3.4 percent of Americans today identify as vegetarian. And 15 percent of those—about .5 percent of Americans—are vegan, meaning they eat no dairy, honey, et cetera.
You’d never think the number was so small, because vegan food operations in the Twin Cities are experiencing unprecedented boom times. St. Paul claims J. Selby’s, the home of vegan burgers and vegan corn dogs, and Eureka Compass Vegan Food. Northeast Minneapolis’s pioneering vegan butcher Herbivorous Butcher is expanding with a food truck; Northeast’s vegan creperie Crepe and Spoon offers vegan nut-based ice creams, too. Vegan bakeries, such as new Vegan East in White Bear Lake and the pop-up Totally Baked Donuts, seem to be blossoming like flowers in the first heat of spring. That’s a whole lot of vegan going on.
Photo by Caitlin Abrams
Herbivorous Butcher
Selections at Herbivorous Butcher
So I started eating. That fateful Tuesday, after my friends bailed on soup night, we drove to J. Selby’s. We got a big table and tried: vegan nachos (stale-tasting chips with oily toppings), vegan chili cheese fries (seemingly frozen crinkle fries and what tasted like squeeze-pump cheese), a hummus plate with elderly vegetables, indifferent salads, vegan buffalo wings made of cauliflower (fun and spicy), a vegan falafel burger, a vegan burger, vegan chili (acidic), soybean soft-serve (delicious), and a vegan carrot cake (lovely).
It’s a fun counter-service place with a nice wine list and a friendly vibe. Every table was jam-packed.
Still, I felt like I was eating at a fair. It seemed as if almost everything on the table had been created by arranging processed flours, sugars, and vegetable oils. Is this healthy? In my world we call highly processed foods like these “obesogenic,” and advocate for simpler foods, as did the hippies of yore.
Eureka Compass Vegan Food feels a lot more like that ’70s farm-driven ideal, and became my favorite spot in the new vegan scene. It’s a former pizza place run by chef/social media manager/dishwasher Colin Anderson. When I visited, Anderson made remarkable savory baked goods (his shiitake and shallot scone is a work of art), and served ticketed, non-alcoholic dinners at night. I tried a Caribbean feast featuring a vegan gumbo with perfectly al dente charred okra, and superb jerk-jackfruit fritters given depth by thyme and peppers.
“The majority of my customers aren’t vegan,” Anderson said. “They’re foodies and omnivores. There’s a growing population of vegans, but a lot of us are still stuck on vegan junk food. If the goal is to completely change the food system, you can show people slaughterhouse horror films to the end of time. But you’re only going to get people to eat the food if it’s better than everything they eat that’s conventional.”
Great, I’m in. I believe that inventing a new dish materially contributes to the happiness of humankind, and Anderson is doing that. Then, at press time, Anderson suddenly announced Eureka would return to its origins as a pizza parlor, this time vegan, with ingredients like nut-based cheeses, such as those from local Punk Rawk Labs. During the daytime, he’ll cook at St. Paul skyway spot Evan’s Organic Eatery, soon to be vegan, and move the ticketed dinners to Evan’s, too.
He’s a talented baker—yet the vegan pizza I tried at classic south Minneapolis spot Parkway Pizza was dry as dust, and sampling it I longed for real cheese. From cows—or even goats. But don’t get Anderson started on goat cheese, because apparently that stuff will kill you. “Don’t try to say it’s different from heroin,” Anderson started. “It’s probably more dangerous to your body than heroin. Unless you overdose on it, you could do small amounts of heroin your entire life and have better health effects than you’d get from goat cheese.”
I asked Anderson if he wanted to be quoted in a magazine saying that, and he said he did.
Typically, I recognize sentiments like this to be essentially religious—that is, matters of creed—and not appropriate for debate. I’ve talked to other people over the years who have told me that pigs are the food of white devils; people who insist health comes from eating colloidal silver; people who believe the ideal diet is pre-agricultural.
My feeling about all these personal takes has been: Live and let live. Fine for thee, not for me. But what to do when these restaurants, clearly grounded in very specific ideologies, go mainstream?
I returned repeatedly to Fig + Farro and discovered a lot to love. All the wines by the glass are delicious, and served from kegs, reducing the carbon footprint. I particularly like the silky Grüner Veltliner from Pratsch, in Austria, and I suspect the neighborhood will adore the weekend bottomless mimosas.
The best items are the traditional Middle Eastern ones, like the Israeli shakshuka: here, a spicy tomato base set with eggs baked until just runny. Try the housemade sumac paan, a cute and puffy disc of just-baked bread, served with fresh baba ghanoush, and a creamy hummus. Don’t miss the spiced nuts, they’re peppy and fun.
I found a few of the other dishes baffling. Entrée mashed potatoes with three curries, for instance. It delivered good flavor, but I simply don’t understand mashed potatoes for dinner. There’s a lentil stew featuring the mashed potatoes on top as a shepherd’s pie variation, and as dinner, that starts to feel like a lot of starch. The carrot osso buco struck me as oversweet and missing a center. Livelier were the charred Brussels sprouts. Still, I often had the sense that I was eating the Thanksgiving sides and skipping the turkey at a nice family meal.
“This isn’t about animal rights; we are laser-focused here on climate change, climate change, climate change,” Courtright told me. “We are living, breathing our mission. You can reduce your carbon footprint 70 percent if you go with a plant-based diet. This is not a place you go and eat, and, by the way, you’re going to learn about climate change. When you come here, it’s a cultural experience. A social experiment.”
To that end, Fig + Farro starts all servers at $15 an hour, offers health insurance, and puts all employees on a path toward ownership stake and travel stipends. Climate change and labor justice, great shakshuka, and good wine. All right.
Reverie is a Minneapolis plant-based restaurant that lasted two years, lost its lease, and now seeks a new space. I called up co-owner Kirstin Wiegmann to ask what a restaurant critic should make of this new world of vegan corn dogs and truthy personal ideologies.
“I hear you. At what point in anything do you stop asking questions?” said Wiegmann, as I asked about all the contradictions, like, how can vegan almond-eaters scorn the beekeepers who pollinate the crop? “This self-investigation you’re talking about, for me, is what’s new and interesting,” Wiegmann said. “That we’re starting to have this conversation in a more public space.”
We sure are—all over town.
Sign up for our newsletter to get inside access to the latest local food and dining buzz.
- Page 1 (Results 1-10)
-
1
Photo by Caitlin Abrams
J. Selby's
St. Paul's new vegan restaurant has everyone excited about non-beef Cheezeburgers. The counter-service spot is playing with casual plant-based menus.
- Page 1 (Results 1-10)
