Photography by Caitlin Abrams
The bar at 510 Lounge and Private Dining
The classic bar at the 510, now serving the most classic of cocktails.
Like a white and gleaming banquet cake, like a cruise ship steaming us away to only the best continental capitals, 510 Groveland has stood grandly on the hill that marks the split between Minneapolis’s busy downtown and its leafy residential neighborhoods for nearly a century. For most of those years it has been the site of a top—or the top—restaurant in town.
It began merely as a Jazz Age “residence hotel,” when wealthy people did things like live in apartments in hotels. The F. Scott Fitzgeralds did this, and that’s what storybook Eloise was up to in Eloise at the Plaza. Post-war, the elite 510 turned into co-ops. (Peep at 510-groveland.com to see what a $945,000 Minneapolis co-op looks like.)
The dining room began its contemporary influence in 1978 when, under the name 510, the great Austrian chef Klaus Mitterhauser led the kitchen. Restaurant reviews noted the food was simpler than what had been in vogue, praising delicate dishes like a “citrus-glazed salmon, coated simply with a lemon-herb beurre blanc.” The 510 was where Lucia Watson, who went on to become one of Minneapolis’s most important chefs, first trained, before opening Lucia’s in Uptown. Later, for the most notable part of the two decades running up to its 2015 finale, the 510 was home to La Belle Vie, the showcase of our first James Beard Award–winning chef, Tim McKee (now opening Almanac, a fish market, and Octo, a fish restaurantin St. Paul).
The chefs who came out of La Belle Vie are now themselves legendary, like Jim Christiansen of Heyday, pastry chef Diane Yang of Spoon and Stable and Bellecour, and Michael DeCamp of Monello and Borough. Josh Thoma, who opened La Belle Vie, now owns Smack Shack and the Lexington. Other chefs who passed through Tim McKee restaurants can hardly be counted, so numerous are they. The rest of the country can amuse itself with six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon; here in Minneapolis restaurants, we have one degree of separation from 510 Groveland.
This is why chef Don Saunders (who cooked at La Belle Vie in Stillwater at one point) taking over one of Minneapolis’s most important restaurant spaces is news of the highest order. So first, the headline: Our history has been prettily and well-preserved. The old dining rooms are no longer open for regular dining; they’re for pop-ups and private events. But the lounge—with its lavish curlicues of ornate plaster pirouetting from every cornice, and its baroque bronze chandeliers casting the golden lamplight that transforms any harried homemaker into Lauren Bacall—is looking much the same, though now with darker-painted walls and small lamps with plaid shades on the bar. Paintings by local artist Shelly Mosman lend the space a contemporary, more casual sense. It all feels fashionable, as flawless as ever.
Mussels at 510 Lounge and Private Dining
Mussels in pistou broth.
The mussels are flawless, certainly. Plump and clean, served in a classical French preparation of wine and shallots cooked just to the edge of al dente, the whole thing is then splashed with Pernod. Each bite of mussel is mineral with an edge of herb and licorice, and if you order the fat, roasty French fries, be sure to smash them into the broth, because that is a spectacularly delicious thing to do. The cheese plate is similarly exquisite, featuring highly allocated, difficult-to-get cheeses like Landmark’s Petit Nuage, a whisper of delicacy, and good local options like the Bent River Camembert served sensitively, at the right temperature, melting and sensuous. There are also a half dozen accompaniments with the five cheeses—a compote of figs, a green tomato relish, pickled cherries, and more. It’s beautiful, smart, lively, intelligent—this is as good a cheese plate as anyone could ever expect or imagine. For around $30 to serve four, it’s a bargain. The tempura shrimp, with Gulf-caught, sustainable shrimp that really taste like something, are vaporously light, and the accompanying basket of tempura vegetables and green goddess dressing are smart bar food. The Duck “Three Ways” is similarly accomplished; a foie gras disc of gossamer silkiness, a few pickled peaches in the prettiest herb-flecked truffled honey, a crisp pastry cigar filled with savory and tender confit duck, and a slice of smoked “duck ham” as red as wine and nicely chewy.
The cooking of ducks is the arena in which elite chefs in Minneapolis compete against one another most explicitly for private honors, and in this plate, Saunders proves he can hit a home run and round the bases with a stylish saunter anytime he likes, before a crowd or all by himself for fun. Saunders has long been like that, maybe from his early career cooking with Vincent Francoual at lamented and gone Vincent, and certainly at his own places, the too-fine-for-its-time Fugaise and the smash hit The Kenwood, which serves huevos rancheros to those with both money and taste.
In fact, it was The Kenwood that inspired the co-op board at the 510 to reach out to Saunders and see if he could do something with their historic dining rooms. I can only imagine they must be delighted with the result. The wine list is well chosen and offers excellent options from $9 a glass. The cocktails, all but two being textbook classics, are well made. Desserts, by pastry chef Jo Garrison, formerly of Heyday and once a pastry chef at La Belle Vie, are of the moment and charming. I particularly enjoyed a fennel granita, which was agile, unsweet, and unafraid, with sugar-slicked plums and a sunflower brittle upon a sunflower financier cake, the different earthy flavors playing confidently together. A chocolate semifreddo with apricots will have wider crowd appeal, and the pistachio cake and its faint chocolate flavors were well met.
What’s a flawless restaurant like? It looks like this—except one thing. It’s such a distressingly conservative bet. The menu looks ordinary at first glance. Look closely and you’ll realize each cheese gets its own billing, and bread gets a line—order the cheese plate and the charcuterie plate and you’ve ordered going on half of what the 510 has. The caviar service takes up a good chunk of menu real estate, and I tried an ounce of Snake River, Idaho-farmed caviar because when else do you get the chance? It was very good, briny and rich, and served on warm, pleasant blini with a bit of crème fraîche on the side, pretty and textbook correct. Flawless, even!
But what is accomplishment without risk? This new 510 is so safe you can feel like you’ve learned all its secrets in a night. If you’d like a perfectly classic old-fashioned, the 510 has it. If you’d like an old-fashioned that will surprise, like everywhere else has these days, it hasn’t got one. How old-fashioned! The original 510 Groveland beurre blanc salmon with vegetables is on the menu, but in 2017 it’s both flawless and the exact dish you’ll find in room service at a top-tier hotel. Not that there’s anything wrong with the very best room service, but who leaves their house in their hometown for top-tier room service?
Which is easy for me to say, as I don’t have any skin in the game. So I talked to Don Saunders about the 510 and the restaurant scene of the moment. Over the years, he told me, he’s changed his idea of what a restaurant ought to be. “To me now it’s about finding the space and creating the concept that fits the place, instead of creating the concept and opening wherever I get a lease. That’s what I did with Fugaise; I was cocky and young and thought, I want a 50-seat French fine-dining restaurant and it won’t matter where I am, the foodie base will find me. The reality is, you need a concept that fits the audience and space that’s already there.”
It all makes sense, particularly considering that the 510 has never, in fact, been an ordinary restaurant, with a landlord and tenant both seeking the highest possible profits. The 510 is leased by the co-op, the landlord is the co-op board, and they have certain expectations of the spot—the lounge must be open, and it will never be a Hooters. In retrospect, it seems that the Minneapolis restaurant scene since 1978 has owed more to the co-op board’s taste and largesse than any of us ever realized. A formal fine-dining restaurant is a bad bet these days, as we’ve chronicled in these pages relentlessly, and so the new 510 has adopted a business model similar to the one being used down the hill at Loring Park’s Early Bird, with the nighttime dining room for private events and pop-ups only. This is our new world, for now—dinner for special occasions only. What would the wealthy residents of the 510 in the 1920s make of the fact that the dining room is now for pop-ups and selling out well for Super Bowl 52?
Of course they wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of it; they wouldn’t even know the words. The present captures all of us, with its necessary limits of perspective. In truth, we’re really just lucky to catch the butterflies of flawless joys as they flit by.
