I looked all around Harry Singh\u2019s restaurant kitchen, because I was hearing something that sounded like a little steel drum, a musical pop-bump-a-pop-bump. It was different from the vintage calypso and soca soundtrack that Singh keeps going every minute he\u2019s in the shop. Was there a steel band somewhere down the block from the Nicollet Avenue storefront?\u00a0<\/p>\n
I asked Singh.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt does that if there\u2019s water,\u201d he said, gesturing to the pot of oil he\u2019d set to boil on the stove. The pot was black, iron, and round-bottomed, and sheets of orange flame from the stove were wrapping around the outside. Calypso\u2014the classic West Indian folk music\u2014first emerged as a kind of protest speech in Trinidad, after the British authorities banned drums in hopes of preventing enslaved Africans from communicating with one another. Cooking pots, oil drums, and such were recruited instead. Was this phantom music something that would be familiar to anyone cooking in a traditional Trinidadian way?\u00a0<\/p>\n
We were cooking doubles, the Trinidad fry bread that is simplicity itself and, like a perfect biscuit, the work of a lifetime. Here\u2019s how Singh makes them.\u00a0<\/p>\n
First you set an appointment to prepare them together, then he\u2019s an hour late. Then, while you\u2019re pacing outside, you realize the dough\u2014which looks like a pile of bubbles\u2014has somehow already been made. And you stand beside him while he uses his wiry hands to pinch off bunches of what looks like gobs of lemon pudding and pop them onto an oiled cookie sheet. Then he counts them, his fingers jumping down the aisles of dough blobs. And each time he counts one, he presses a gentle divot into its center, and after a while he has enough pairs formed to satisfy him.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Then he seizes a blob and says, \u201cAnd Dara, this is how you do\u201d\u2014and he claps his hands together as swiftly as a magic trick, slipping the just-flattened double into the oil. He sees something invisible to the untrained eye, flips the bread, sees something else invisible to the untrained eye, and removes a bread-colored cloud that is the loveliest, freshest, most perfect thing you could ever hope to taste.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Typically, Singh serves two to an order (they\u2019re doubled, hence the name) and gives them to you with curried chickpeas. An order runs $4.\u00a0<\/p>\n
They are not popular. Most days, Harry Singh\u2019s restaurant is sleepy, if not downright empty. A few people come to visit and eat, but not many. Sometimes he closes for no obvious reason and opens up again the same way. He\u2019ll be closed during the State Fair, because that\u2019s when he mans his little booth in the Food Building. When he\u2019s there, his days are long. He leaves his house in Coon Rapids at 4 am and typically doesn\u2019t get home again till near midnight. After the fair, he\u2019ll take two weeks off to recover. He\u2019s 74 years old.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I would like to make the case that Harry Singh\u2019s is the best old food at the State Fair\u2014and, moreover, that old food is the best food.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
As I write this, the new State Fair foods have been released. The odds-on favorite to become a hit involves Fruity Pebbles and gummy bears on soft serve, in a nest of cotton candy. It will look great on Instagram. Everything that\u2019s been a hit lately\u2014glitter tea, mermaid toast\u2014makes you do a shocked double-take and stop scrolling on Instagram (for a solid 10 seconds).\u00a0<\/p>\n
Harry Singh\u2019s food is the opposite of that. It\u2019s the color of rice and bread and curried chickpeas. But I would like to make the case that Singh\u2019s is the best old food at the State Fair\u2014and, moreover, that old food is the best food. There\u2019s nothing better than the dishes learned at your mother\u2019s side and then artfully perfected over 40 years of dinner services.<\/p>\n
This story\u2014of Singh and his Minnesota doubles\u2014begins in 1945, when Kissoondath \u201cJoe Flat\u201d and Carmen Singh welcomed their first son, baby Harry, into a small home in a village outside Princes Town, on the island of Trinidad. They were third-generation Indo-Trinidadian, whose parents had arrived as indentured laborers of the British.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The village wasn\u2019t electrified, and the family cooked in an outdoor kitchen. Imagine a small clay volcano, squat and wide. That was the outdoor cooking fire. The round-bottomed pot that Singh still uses would have sat on that clay volcano. Eventually, the Singh family would have seven children, and in 1953, when Harry was seven, Carmen taught him all the tricks of the kitchen.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cGuess the first thing she made me cook: roti and pumpkin,\u201d Singh tells me. You have to start kids early at roti, he explains, because the layered bread is incredibly difficult to make. First you mix up a dough, then you grind a split-pea filling, and then, somehow, you end up with a big old pancake. It\u2019s thin\u2014a few millimeters of stretchy bread dough on the outside, a few millimeters of spiced lentils in the middle, and another few millimeters of bread dough on the other side. It takes most people years to make a good one, Singh says.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He rolls them out and cooks them on a cast-iron tawa, a slightly bowed griddle of sorts. And to see him do it sort of defies the sense of your eyes. Take a ball of dough, a scoop of filling, rolling pin, rolling pin, giant perfect roti!<\/p>\n
\u201cDara! You can\u2019t do it any other how,\u201d\u00a0 Singh says, shaking his head playfully when he sees how confused I am by the process. \u201cIf you don\u2019t know what you\u2019re doing, you\u2019ll burn every damn thing. The trick is, you have to know the consistency of the flour and let it rest. A shortcut thing\u2014I don\u2019t do that.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
In that outdoor kitchen where he grew up, Singh says, he had everything. Green mangoes in the trees for a green mango chutney, different fresh chilies, avocados growing everywhere, chickens for eggs, and a tied-up goat for meat. Everyone in the village knew each other: Singh walked the village kids to school, where he met a little girl called Anne Marie.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Joe Flat drove a taxi, a big black \u201948 Ford, and everyone in the village could hear when he drove toward home, often with a fish he\u2019d picked up in Princes Town. Carmen and Joe Flat would listen to Indian music on the battery-powered Blaupunkt radio. And for some reason, when the battery ran low, Singh could get more power out of it by pressing the connector. As his dad ate curried kingfish, his mother would call out, \u201cPress it, Har!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Then, suddenly, in 1962, independence came to Trinidad. Singh was 17 and feeling like everyone in the world had money and freedom, except people in small villages in Trinidad. \u201cWe had to wash our clothes on a scrubbing board in a tub outside. You try that one day,\u201d says Singh.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He attended college for generals in Trinidad. But when he saw an ad in the newspaper for, of all things, Minneapolis Business College, he applied. When he got in, he kept the acceptance letter a secret from Carmen for eight months, hiding it in the visor of the taxi.\u00a0<\/p>\n
When he arrived in Minneapolis in 1970, the school sent someone to meet him who stashed him in a church overnight, to sleep on a pew. But the school\u2019s minder showed up to collect him the next day, helped him find a Loring Park apartment for $75 a month, and stocked it with Goodwill furniture. Young Singh set out the door and started walking down Hennepin Avenue, door-knocking for something to make money at night. He found a job 15 blocks along, after crossing the Mississippi, at Nye\u2019s Polonaise Room.<\/p>\n
Here he met Minneapolis restaurant legend Al Nye.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAl became my father figure,\u201d Singh recalls. \u201cHe helped me get my first checking account. He showed me how to make pierogi, how to do the big, big steak.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Through Minneapolis Business College, Singh also met Hubert Humphrey, who helped him secure a green card. \u201cHe wanted my birth paper, my work paper.\u201d Singh shrugs at the memory. \u201cAnd then he bought me a car! A \u201960 Chevy. He said, I only paid $50 for this car. Open the trunk. Mr. Humphrey put two boxes of groceries, a battery, and a spare tire in the car! He called me Sonny Boy. He was really a great man.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Singh worked at Nye\u2019s washing dishes for four years, then landed a job in a Northeast foundry, forging wheels for freight trains. On a visit back to Trinidad, the family of his childhood friend, Anne Marie, pulled him aside. \u201c\u2018She won\u2019t marry anyone else,\u2019\u201d Singh recalls hearing. \u201cI said: \u2018Oh cheezers.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The couple married in the village and took an apartment in Northeast, where Anne Marie and Harry soon welcomed two baby boys, David and Robyn. When Singh finally graduated from school, he took a job as a parole officer. But his heart broke to see men separated from their families. \u201cAfter one week I told Anne Marie, \u2018We have got to open a Caribbean restaurant. There is no Caribbean restaurant in all of Minnesota!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The Singhs opened their first place in 1983, on Central Avenue in Northeast. It was called, simply, Harry Singh\u2019s Caribbean Restaurant.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The critic for the Star Tribune, Jeremy Iggers, came and focused, oddly, on the hot sauce: \u201cThe \u2018average\u2019 hot sauce made with mango and papaya is excruciatingly hot. The hottest of the hot sauce defies description, but if owner Harry Singh carries through on his plan to sell the stuff by the bottle, the FDA and the EPA should both be alerted.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
This review would dictate the coverage of the restaurant, essentially till this day.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe never encouraged people to eat this thing hot, but. . . \u201d Singh shrugs. Camera crews came with gallon jugs of water to set around on-camera tasters, should fires need to be dampened. It turned into something of a sensation. The restaurant relocated to Lyn-Lake, and they strung chili-pepper lights through the dining room. Those were the good years. Prince was dating Apollonia 6 star Susan Moonsie, whose parents came from Trinidad, and they would send a white limousine for roti and curried kingfish head, a delicacy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Singh bought his mother and father a stove, a refrigerator, a bed. \u201cEverything we had in America.\u201d When he went home, he was puzzled to find his mother still cooking eggplant on the outdoor stove, but she told him it was sweeter that way. In time, Harry and Anne Marie made a spot in their home for his youngest sibling, Marla\u2014later of Marla\u2019s Caribbean Cuisine.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Until this point, Singh\u2019s biography sounds a lot like an archetypal American success story: Man comes to America, Hubert Humphrey buys him a car, etc. But at this point, things got rough. Anne Marie struggled with alcoholism. The family\u2019s savings evaporated, time and again, as the family paid for her to enter rehab. Singh, in turn, would shut down the restaurant to care for the boys.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In 1997, Singh\u2019s wife died in his arms. \u201cThe dream shattered!\u201d he says. Her picture hangs in the dining room. A lot of the customers who come in still remember her, and they stand near her picture and talk about how much they miss her. Ultimately, Singh will conclude, \u201cI always forgave her anything. But a sickness is a sickness.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
This is not where you go for Instagram glitter tea.<\/p>\n
When I was visiting with Singh, a customer popped in. He had biked 12 miles to get here, and when Singh told him it wasn\u2019t a good time, he said he\u2019d come back tomorrow.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I went to Trinidad, the food isn\u2019t as good as Harry\u2019s,\u201d the patron declared.<\/p>\n
Part of the reason I wanted to write this story now is that I feel like we all, as a restaurant scene, don\u2019t appreciate Harry Singh enough. Maybe we think because he\u2019s been here since 1983, he\u2019ll be here forever. All of south Minneapolis was shocked and appalled when a massive rent increase caused Marla\u2019s Caribbean Cuisine to shutter its doors. Possibly to relocate, possibly not.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a sense of loss we diners feel when something we\u2019ve counted on\u2014something we took for granted, even\u2014vanishes. But I am here to tell you that Harry Singh has five years left on his lease, and his landlord has been frank with him about the ever-increasing offers she\u2019s getting for his building. A six-story high-rise, which will hold 80 brand new units beneath a rooftop patio, is going up across the street.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI get offers, I get offers,\u201d Singh tells me, shaking his head. \u201cBut the general idea is to keep busy. What am I going to do, watch TV?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
We sit down in a booth, and I drink some of Singh\u2019s homemade ginger beer, and he gestures to a mural on the wall that a friend painted for him. \u201cYou see that donkey carrying the coconuts?\u201d I glance up. \u201cEven in the rain, he\u2019s slipping, slipping, but he don\u2019t give up! In our time, those poor donkeys, they had to carry everything. But that gets in your blood, and you work, work, work.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
And you fry doubles and roll roti, whether or not the world is wise enough to pay attention.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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