Dave Wood
By Dave Wood
My wife Ruth and I have spent more than half a century traveling this country and the world in search of good things to eat. For the most part we’ve been successful, depending on tourist guides and books about cooking that might lead us to another great meal.
Tops on our list was probably Casa Botin, a centuries old restaurant in Madrid, Spain, where we dined on spit-roasted baby lamb baked in ovens carved out of rocks centuries ago. In Great Britain, not normally known for its cuisine, 0ur Temple Fielding guidebook ordered us to dine at an old Georgian style restaurant and order roast saddle of mutton and ask the waiter who looks just like the old British actor C. Aubrey Smith to be sure to make the mutton fat “extra crispy.” We did so and presto, I became a fan of that much maligned meat called mutton! Magnifico!
Stateside? Lots of places. Hillside Fish House, the 150-year-old restaurant specializing in batter-fried walleye perfected by longtime owner Leonard Losinski, who once refused to serve us the walleye because his head chef was on vacation and the sous chef Leonard was described as “inexperienced.”
For steak, nothing could top Austin Johnson’s White House in Eau Claire; for French cuisine The Café de Paris in Minneapolis, both no longer with us.
Italian? “Get thee to Cent Anni in Greenwich Village,” ordered my friend humorist and gourmet, Calvin Trillin who lived next door to the place.
So we spend hours dissecting the menus we have enjoyed. Turns out that all six restaurants stick in our palates because their managements stuck with tradition; they didn’t alter their menus to conform to the current fashion. Unfortunately, at present the restaurant boom has slowed due to high prices and inexperience on the part of chefs to honor their tradition and hard-won reputations.
Case in point: The beloved Hillside recently served me a cornmeal crusted Lake Superior whitefish, over which even the maître d’ tore up the check. As for the White House, it relocated to the Hillside Golf Club, where Johnson’s successors refused to serve hashed browns because it was “too much trouble.”
Recently we turned to the Minnesota Star Tribune which raved about a new French restaurant called Manger (pronounced Mon-zhay) in nearby Bayport, Minn. We raced over with hope in our hearts to find a crowded bar and dining room, undoubtedly filled with a little help from a glowing review. It didn’t take long to have our curiosity quelled.
I began with its specialty Manhattan. A generous portion appeared, surprisingly BLACK, a tar-like liquid that obscured the sumptuous purple cherry hiding somewhere at the bottom of the rocks glass. It was a jumble of various vermouths and cordials (identified as distilled by River Falls very own Tattersall) and, as an afterthought, a dash of whiskey. Sixteen bucks.
Our young waitress was wonderful though somewhat harried. Only she and the bartender. No chef stopped by to ask us how we were finding the fare, the usual mode in many fine dining spots. My wife’s rabbit (which must have hopped all the way from Marine on St. Croix until it struggled to get into the Manger pot) was virtually unaccompanied by appropriate garnishes. Thirty-nine bucks. Our friend dropped another third of a C-Note on a chicken stew, which she said was tasty, but short on veggies.
I opted for the burger, obscured by two types of French cheeses and a kittenball of caramelized onion, served on a Brioche bun, the only thing Frenchified in the whole mess. I ate the crispy edges of the brioche and burger until I reached the interior, which was RAW, or cru, as they say in Paris. The best fare on the menu, which also turned out to be the worst bargain was an appetizer called “Gravlax Alsacienne,” no resemblance to Norwegian gravlax, salmon belly cured in salt, sugar, fresh dill and aquavit. These were scraps of raw salmon slathered in lemon cream. It made us wonder why Hitler wanted to re-annex Alsace Lorraine after the Versailles Treaty. Fifteen bucks.
Wonder if we just ordered the wrong things? We had little choice as the menu only offered six entrees. Top choice was called Steak Frites. In Paris that meant a slice of “butcher’s cut strip steak served bloody, superb French fries and an endless basket of baguettes and a half liter of wine, one of the cheapest dinners you can buy in Paris.” If you want to tie steak frites onto your feedbag at the Manger, it costs 60 bucks because it’s prepared with expensive Wagyu beef! That’s like pouring catsup on a hot dog, which is the epitome of culinary incivility. Are we angry? Yes. Disappointed? You bet.
Keywords
Woodworking Again,
Dave Wood,
Manger,
Bayport,
Minn.,
restaurant review,
column
Dining and Cooking