Photos by Caitlin Abrams
Viv!r
Can you spot the take-and-bake cookies? Or the sesame peanut mix? Go slow the first time at Viv!r, there’s so much to discover.
March 17, 2020, is a date that will live forever in Minnesota restaurant infamy. For those tied to the industry: Where were you, business-wise, when the shutdown came? Decades into a steady groove? Or newly open, brimming with construction debt, hoping to make a splash? What did you have on hand that you suddenly couldn’t sell—merely a day’s worth of delicate lettuces, or tanks full of live lobsters, or kegs full of beer waiting for St. Patrick’s Day? Where restaurants were and what they did next largely determined whether they’re still standing today. Ask a restaurant person about the day they had to shut down, and you’ll get some version of a personal car crash story.
At Popol Vuh, the fine-dining Mexican spot by chef José Alarcon and co-owner and manager Jami Olson, business in early March looked good. They’d been open about a year and a half, and the fancy live-fire grill—little sister to the attached casual taco spot, Centro—had won top accolades from Mpls.St.Paul. In our Best New Restaurants of 2018 issue, we noted many joys, including a house mole that tasted “like a sweet bonfire at dusk.” Inclusion on the James Beard Awards semifinalist list followed, and the place had become a must-try for every foodie adventurer.
Inside Viv!r
Then, March 17. Popol Vuh shuttered entirely. Centro became takeout-only. Everyone but management and owners was laid off.
“It was complete panic,” recalls Olson.
“We were completely blind, and the path was dark,” recalls Alarcon.
Slamming Centro into takeout-only seems like it would be easy enough, but it wasn’t. “You think you’re just putting things in boxes instead of on plates. No. It’s a completely different flow of service,” says Olson. They had to move everything that a server would do, like explaining dishes or providing extra salsa, into a virtual service experience for customers. That meant IT, digital photography, systems, vendors, files, more IT—it was not the part of restaurants people romanticize and watch a Netflix series about. It was not fire, art, fresh herbs—it was screens and more screens, and all the while never knowing what new incoming catastrophe was about to hit.
I bring all of this up in detail because I think it provides a good reminder of what we’ve all been through this last year, something like driving at night through a storm. Each and every one of us could only see as far as the headlights reached, which, in any of our COVID planning, was often just tomorrow or next week.
By late summer, the tragedy upon this group was obvious. That dream of a full staff they’d hoped would be able to come back in a month, or two, or three? No. The Popol Vuh vision of fine Mexican food, the likes of which the Cities had never seen, unspooling over intimate hours of in-house dining? Also no. But what if…they made a new front door? And turned one dream into six new ones?
They ripped out the fire grill. Turned the bar for margaritas into a bar for coffee and baked goods. Welcome: Viv!r! I don’t want to say it’s a quick-serve elite Mexican spot, because it is not just that—it is so many things. A bakery and café with Mexican-minded breakfast. A grab-and-go burrito spot. An artisan-and-hipster gift shop with everything from Prince candles to baby onesies and potato chip chocolate bars. A grab-and-go deli with cases stocked with cocktail kits, salsa and chips, cake and cookies, and corn nuts. An agave bar. A cocktail bar and restaurant poised for outdoor dining this spring. And more.
Walk in the new front doors—which are across from Indeed Brewing, not back by Centro—and you see baskets hanging from the ceiling, blankets, candles, and interesting stuffed margarita pet toys that will make your friends laugh if you manage to get a pet chewing them onto Instagram.
Three types of Mazcal
A few steps past the stuffed margaritas is the more serious side of drinking liquors made from succulents—behold the brand-new Escondido, the Twin Cities’ first “agave lounge.” This room is run by Todd Mulhair, who puts together flights of tequila, mezcal, bacanora (a regional mezcal), raicilla (a different regional mezcal), sotol (made from a plant that’s a cousin to agave), and diverse other agave-based delights for your educational and drinking pleasures. We’ve never had a specialty agave bar in the Twin Cities before, so that’s fun! As of this writing you can book it for up to six people—though hopefully it will hold more post-pandemic—and sit yourself down at the polished wooden table to learn a few things so that the next time you get to travel to agave country, you’ll know what you’re thirsting for.
But maybe when you walk in the new front doors at Viv!r you won’t notice Escondido, because you’ll be so distracted by the gorgeous pastries. Friends, everything I’ve tried both sweet and savory from Viv!r has been delightful, but the bakery deserves special attention. Ngia Xiong, formerly Popol Vuh’s pastry chef, has now turned her talents to taking the stars of the Mexican bakery and putting some fresh spin or twist or oomph to them to make them new. Her polvorones, Mexican wedding cookies, similar to those cookies known as Russian tea cakes, are light as clouds and both distinctly spiced and crunchy with nuts, making them taste a bit savory and totally new. Her mole chocolate cupcakes take Alarcon’s distinctive mole and translate it into a buttercream frosting and midnight-black moist cake. Her grab-and-go 12-packs of brown butter chocolate cookie discs, ready to bake at home, are delightful—a little savory and toasty from oats, and so fun to cook up at home for a little aromatherapy and charm.
That said, I predict Xiong and Viv!r will chiefly gain fame as the home of the newest great donuts in town. I tried her blueberry, vanilla, and cardamom sugar donuts, and they’re all sturdy poufs of a shell containing the lightest, freshest cream filling, like the best aspects of whipped cream and traditional custard cream, fused. Pair one of Viv!r’s donuts with the thunderously dark, tangily winey, irresistible fermented cacao, and that’s an afternoon!
The non-pastry food at Viv!r is everything your mind leaps to when you input the phrase “James Beard–nominated chef making burritos and breakfast tacos.” The breakfast tacos are created with house-made tortillas, and the burritos are layered with flavor, from the well-spiced beans to the green chiffonade of lettuce and herbs tucked in with the fillings. There are a few fine-chef touches here and there at Viv!r, if you know where to look. Its version of a veggie burger, the cemita, made with braised mushrooms and cheese on a light sesame roll, is easily the best meaty-tasting veggie burger in town. With umami-packed mushrooms, hot and chewy against salty panela cheese, it triggers every bit of your sensory system usually hit by a gooey smash burger. Chefs! They get the palate singing.
I tried the half chicken with mole, to-go for old times’ sake, and got a terrifically moist bird with that distinctly pheasant-ish taste of a Wild Acres free-range bird, which it was. Dipping it into that dusky mole in my own kitchen, beside a prickly pear margarita from a Viv!r kit (plus tequila I had at home), I could feel the great gift to cuisine that was Popol Vuh, like a thoroughbred racing horse helping out by pulling the family carriage.
“As a chef, sometimes you have to put away what you want, put your emotions away, because it’s just not the right moment,” Alarcon explained. “You have to adapt to the circumstances. You make it or no, based on what’s working or not working.”
For this moment, Alarcon took solace in the nobility of feeding people who are hungry and keeping roofs over everyone’s heads. He also made a little secret tribute to life in his hometown growing up in Morelos, Mexico, where the shopkeepers of all the Mexican markets seemed to wash their stoops every morning with a mixture of Fabuloso, the Mexican detergent, and water. There’s a little shelf of Fabuloso in Viv!r now, beside the toilet paper. It’s there in case anyone needs to buy any, but even more, it’s a reminder that community is the thing you have when the chips are down and when the chips are up, when you can see far into the future or only to tomorrow. “That Fabuloso smell, this is probably a little cheesy, but to me it’s the essence of a street where everything is OK,” says Alarcon.
And that fine-dining wood grill from the Popol Vuh days? It’s in storage. “We can’t part with it,” says Olson. “Maybe a space for it will pop up? If there’s one thing we learned this year, it’s you never know what life’s going to bring.”
1414 NE Quincy St., Mpls., 612-345-5527, vivirmpls.com
