The Lexington is Back, Baby!

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Photographs by Caitlin Abrams

The lounge at the Lexington

The lounge in the Williamsburg Room

How big is The Lexington? So big. A few months ago, my lovely partner in food writing, Stephanie March, and I were talking about whether we should put construction pictures of The Lex’s long-delayed reopening on our website. “No—it’s cruel, we just can’t,” March counseled. “It makes people crazy. Give them The Lexington or let them forget.” I agreed with her wise council, and yet the place had become about as forgettable as a 42-week pregnancy. And who even was carrying this giant baby? Every citizen of St. Paul?

The Lexington is big in every sense of the word—in size (20,000 square feet), in age (open since 1935), in historical importance (it was our political “smoke-filled room” for generations), and in centrality. To St. Paulites, The Lex is something like the Eiffel Tower (but less flashy), Carnegie Hall (but easier to get in to), and some distant rich uncle’s house you had some claim to all rolled in to one. It’s so big that when it was missing, it exerted its own gravity, like a black hole. Back in the spring of 2014, new owners Josh Thoma, Kevin Fitzgerald, and Jack Riebel began working on renovations. But they ran into construction hurdles, and one year stretched to three, and the whole city of St. Paul, ordinarily a calm and stolid place, became increasingly jittery. What if it never opens? Did you ever think about what would happen if a huge asteroid destroyed the moon? What then? Would we even have tides?

Deep, cleansing exhales, folks—we made it. The first impression of any longtime Lex-goer is to immediately start cataloguing what is gone (the mildew smell, the ceiling tiles) and what is the same (the art, the chandeliers, the nearly ceaseless acreage of Colonial-revival maple woodwork). Now for the bad news that will bring the next level of St. Paul–related anxiety: The new Lex is actually loads better than the old version ever was.

Did I just disgrace your family’s memories? Sorry, didn’t mean to, but the food is just that terrific. A few words on logistics: The Lex has retained its formal, fancy dining room where you can order off the regular menu, but today has two public bars. The loungey Williamsburg Room, which used to be solely for private events, is now open to all and hosts live jazz combos. There’s also the main bar and a planned rooftop bar to open in time for summer. In the bars you can order off the regular dinner menu or from a less expensive bar menu.

Souffle potatoes at the Lexington

Soufflé potatoes

Eating in the bar has its advantages, because that’s where you can order the greatest thing to happen to St. Paul bar food in a generation: the soufflé potatoes. If you’ve ever been to Antoine’s in New Orleans you know of these fussy miracles—the result of cutting a potato into perfectly similar planks that are soaked to remove starch, fried at one temperature, cooled, then fried at another temperature to get a puffed-up balloon that’s hollow in the middle but crisp as a potato chip on the outside and fogged with roasty baked potato flavor. Tasty? Like heaven smashed a fry into a chip.

The bar menu is also where you’ll find light and crunchy Korean-style battered chicken fillets on sweet Hawaiian buns topped with quick cabbage kimchi. It’s the best fried chicken sandwich in the cities. I’m less sure of The Lex burger, with which Riebel tries to buck the local trend of as much beef, cheese, blood, and comfort as possible by going in a more acidic direction with lots of pickles and a ranch-like sauce. For me, it lacked grounding, but it might work for you if you’re a mustard-on-burgers sort.

The traditional formal dining room now feels like a million bucks, all plush carpets and quiet, with expertly trained servers whispering along in floor-length aprons, bringing you world-beating, destination steaks. Is it ridiculous to discover that chef Riebel knows how to cook a steak? Yes. Riebel has been one of the pillars of Twin Cities food these past 25 years. He was the final chef at Goodfellow’s, once Minneapolis’s finest and most famous restaurant. He helmed the Dakota, birthed expense-account barbecue destination Butcher & The Boar, and loads more. His food at The Lexington is all home runs and triples, pretty much what you’d hope a top chef would be able to pull off given a steakhouse. The beef tartare is a slightly Thai riff on the dish. The raw beef is paired with salted fresh mango, chopped herbs, crisp shallots, pickled shallots, and different hot and fresh peppers, all of it set on a creamy pool of jasmine rice emulsion. Each bite is sparky, sparkly, slithery, crunchy, creamy, hot, and deep—just the sort of thing to make your shoulders tremble with delight.

Pineapple tart at the Lexington

The pineapple tart

Riebel is known for bringing equatorial spice to his food, and the vaunted traditions of The Lex haven’t held him back. A Mexican agua chile seafood cocktail of fresh seafood shivers with fresh peppers. A bold version of steakhouse roast asparagus is glorified with a serrano pepper and herb purée. And a version of collard greens goes electric with cream, jalapeño, and bacon. Will the old St. Paul crew want that much spice? If not, they can order the best onion rings in the cities. They’re thick as steaks, crisp as state fair mini donuts.The expensive grass-raised, grain-finished local steaks are hard-seared on hardwood, and they’re bliss. The rosy and tender Steak Diane, with its beautiful, traditional cognac mushroom sauce, is surely the new standard that affordable steaks will now be judged against. Old-school and new-school St. Paul diners will unite around the pineapple tart—a buttery tart shell filled with fresh pineapple custard and mounded with cubes of roast pineapple, shards of meringue, and crowned with ice cream.

The wine list is guest-friendly, similar to the one Thoma assembled for Smack Shack, running the gamut from ultra-affordable to cult name-dropper to rare European. The cocktails are fun. A tap-served Moscow Mule captures the spirit of the place, which is less Minneapolis eyedropper art than St. Paul getting-it-done (beware the sneakily strong Punch du Lex). My biggest surprise at The Lex was pushing away from the table to realize that the clubby spot was instantly my favorite steakhouse in the cities. And, yes, I do mean it’s better than the regular suspects on the Minneapolis expense-account circuit.

In the eternal rivalry between the Twin Cities, score one for the east. And score another for St. Paul’s VIPs. I’ve learned there are a handful of Lexington “membership cards” that get the holders special perks like priority seating. The mayor of St. Paul has one. So do Jack Riebel’s mom, Danny O’Gara of legendary St. Paul Irish bar O’Gara’s, and Dave Cossetta of legendary St. Paul Italian joint Cossetta’s. How can you get one? Riebel tells me they don’t have any more, but it seems to me that if you live and breathe St. Paul long enough, you might be in the running. Being big in St. Paul is suddenly better than ever.