I lifted a piece of gimbap at Minari, then kept lifting it, till it was far too high in the air.
Open since November, Minari is our new world of rich burgundy paint and high soaring arches, of gold accents and small golden lights, of servers pushing carts and rushing with large trays—taken at a glance, it feels like if terrifically sexy, wine-loving 1920s art deco vampires all took a cruise together. Minari!
And then there’s me, in the midst of it all, holding a gimbap roll over my head.
“What’s up?” asked my friend, as I examined the underside of the Korean sushi roll, holding it just right so that the mound of minced tuna on top didn’t topple over.
“Nothing, just a hunch,” I said. A hunch that I would see the telltale hand of a true craftsman, the thing you find when an expert takes time to do hidden work: dovetailing the joints on the foot of an armoire, hand-forging the setting for an opal, or fitting vegetables together like puzzle pieces for the part of a roll that no one will ever see, because it’s mounded high with a pretty mince of tuna.
This gimbap at Minari perfectly exemplifies what’s special about the new restaurant. Chef and co-owner Jeff Watson has been one of the unseen forces propelling the Dani del Prado empire to metro-wide domination. For the DDP Restaurant Group, Watson has been essential to most of the post-Martina menus for DDP in his various roles, first as executive chef and eventually as culinary director. Order the crab ramyeon pasta and you may as well be in Martina or Colita 2.0, that telltale combination of absolute delicacy and absolute strength, pasta as light as tendrils of cloud but as creamy as cream, as intensely flavored with snow crab as if you’re plucking it from the shell. “This is how it’s done, son,” one would be justified in saying while wrapping an arm around their bowl to fend off the curious forks of loved ones. This is Martina-caliber pasta!
The gimbap, however—that’s something new in our world. If you only know gimbap as the quick veggie-roll working lunch of the Korean peninsula, well, that’s how I knew it, too. At Minari, Watson has the rather brilliant insight of using a jigsaw-tight combination of fresh and pickled vegetables as the bright and crunchy counterpoint to a very lush and silky combination of fatty minced bluefin tuna tossed with fermented chili. The lush, the crunch, the bold, the silky—that’s a nice bite.
I spent too much time trying to decide if this particular tuna mince at Minari was more like Korean hoedeopbap, Hawaiian poke, Japanese modern sashimi, or Italian crudo, in the way it balanced rich raw fish and a light but powerfully seasoned dressing. Eventually, I concluded that the dish is best considered Watson’s own particular field of exploration, in which he is finding new ways raw fish can be both innovatively seasoned and presented while remaining elegant.
In fact, the Cold and Raw section of the Minari menu could be seen, in itself, as the most innovative new sushi-adjacent spot we’ve had in years. No, it’s not sushi—no rolls, no nigiri—but Minari uses so many sushi ingredients in such fresh and tasty ways that I predict it will be embraced by sushi fans. Get the toro ssam bap, and you receive a mounded-high bowl of dressed tuna, again in the poke-crudo universe, but this time with a cherry-on-top of uni and a pile of toasted nori sheets for DIY hand rolls—so fun. The hamachi tartare I tried was absolutely glorious, and very much in the crudo universe. Dressed with a squid ink vinaigrette with lime leaf oil and Thai basil, it tasted fresh and light, bold and surprising, unified and vivacious. Just everything you could ever want in a small plate to begin a meal.
Pair a few of the raw fish dishes with a few items from the Charcoal BBQ section of the menu, and you’re suddenly inside the best Korean restaurant in the metro. Order the ssam accompaniment, and you get a professional chef’s handpicked bouquet of interesting lettuces and chicories, including red oak leaves, butter lettuce leaves, Belgian endives, and much more. Order the assorted banchan, and you receive Watson’s reinterpretation of classic Korean kimchi and such through a fine-dining pro’s lens. There might be a fennel kimchi, a traditional napa cabbage one, a perilla leaf one, and several more. The classic sweet soy potatoes banchan are whole tiny potatoes—squash one with your fork to soak up the sweet, buttery glaze for a Korean riff on that farmers’ market treat of spring’s new potatoes. With your Charcoal BBQ order, you also get five or so different sauces and little salads to pair with your barbecue. Perhaps your platter will hold a whipped salsa-like blend of cilantro and jalapeño, different soy-sauced pickled alliums, a salad of scallions and sesame, a fresh chili sauce, or something else to pair with grilled items.
Now, your barbecue! I recommend the grilled mackerel. It’s a fresh and tender version of the Korean classic, perfectly done. I also recommend the pork jowl, known to fans of Italian cooking as the cut behind guanciale, that lushest and richest of all elements on the charcuterie board. At Minari, Watson marinates the pork jowl and low-temperature-cooks it in a water bath for hours until it achieves the texture of a firm Jell-O, then grills it to order so it has a crisp edge—if you thought pork belly was as rich and indulgent as pork gets, we now have a level-up. Wildly rich, wildly wonderful. There are also a few steaks on the menu. I tried the one Watson said was his personal favorite, a miso-marinated flank steak that was irony, tender, and well charred. Now load up a leaf with a bit of something, add a few sauces, and tell your tablemates, “Oh, you have to try this!” Next, have your tablemates invent something new to recommend—what a fun way to spend an evening.
Watson is clearly a chef who has been and will be part of our world for a while, so it’s worth getting to know him. Originating from Rapid City, on the Deadwood-and-cowboy-hats side of South Dakota, Watson grew up as a first baseman and Ellsworth Air Force Base kid with a high school job at a Chinese restaurant, a Korean mom making plenty of kimchi and traditional Korean dishes, and a dad manning the grill for his favorite food, barbecue. Watson came to Minneapolis to study English at the University of Minnesota. He walked away with a degree and a deep fascination with Haruki Murakami, along with the experience of working at Isaac Becker’s 112 Eatery and pasta-heaven Bar La Grassa to pay the bills. He found he liked the kitchen, firmed up his knife skills and pizza-cooking knowledge with YouTube, and went on to spend five and a half years cooking at dear departed Burch Steak.
In 2018, Watson followed Dani del Prado to Martina. “He’s a mentor,” says Watson now. “I learned attention to detail from him. He’s also very charismatic and funny to be around. I always respected his work ethic and learned how to cook in his palate. With Dani, you always want sharp flavors, that acid and char; that’s a big thing for Dani, and taking accessible ingredients and making them taste good.”
Watson became del Prado’s right hand, helping develop menus at the various DDP spots. He’d open the restaurants, pass on the restaurants and systems to chefs six months along, and then circle back to support the existing restaurants. Minari had been in Watson’s mind’s eye for a while, and when the time came, del Prado helped him open it and is a part owner. Though if flagship Porzana is the sun, in the DDP solar system, Minari’s orbit is a little farther out, perhaps like a Saturn or Neptune, to Martina and Colita’s Mercury and Venus.
I asked the official concept developer and refiner of the DDP empire what kind of restaurant Minari is. “That’s a tough question for me,” Watson laughed. “It’s heavily influenced by Korean culture and cuisine, obviously. But it has a lot of Chinese influence, a lot of Japanese and Italian influence, and everything else I’ve learned in my career. I want to say East Asian, but that term tends to mean something else. Isaac and Dani, they always like big menus, and I like that as well. That’s why the Minari menu is huge and diverse, and ambitious with the dim sum carts.”
Ah, the dim sum carts.
Limit yourself to the raw and charcoal-grilled sections of the Minari menu, and that snow crab ramyeon pasta, and you’d quickly conclude you were at one of the most important new restaurants of our year, where meticulous craft fuels culinary thrills. However, it took me three visits to discover this about the place, because I was so attracted to the dim sum carts. In my defense: They’re dim sum carts! They flow like little boats through the big cruise ship of a dining room. They catch your eye as they get closer—who could resist?
I suppose we should acknowledge that a large part of being a master craftsman is trying to do things that are not just hard but infernally difficult. We put madly complex inlaid chests of mixed woods depicting medieval battles into museums not because everyone should try it but because once every few centuries someone pulls off an earthly miracle and humanity marvels, forever.
As of now, that’s how I think about nighttime dim sum. I love dim sum; who doesn’t? The delicacy, the lightness, the fun little blossoms of edible fantasy—I could go on. So, on my first visit, when I saw dim sum carts racing through the dining room, stacked with steam trays, I was all in. However, after four visits, I found the dim sum to be, at best, uneven. Most of the time the dumplings I received were sticky, semi-warm, and long past-prime. I’d pick up one; it would arise attached to two others and the paper below it. I’d wrestle it free, taste it, and think, Salty, probably good when fresh. Then I’d get a different one. Five plates of shumai and dumplings later, I’d be full, and sad.
On that first visit, I remember thinking, I’ve never seen anyone successfully serve a full prestige-restaurant cooked-to-order dinner menu as well as fresh dim sum. Four visits later, I still haven’t. In my early visits, I filled up on dumplings because the carts are right there and it seems so fun. The fried chicken, too, seems so fun—it’s fried chicken! But when I tried it, the chicken was very dry and under-seasoned. All this made me think, Minari is a young chef’s restaurant, trying to do far more than is reasonable to achieve. Then I reconsidered: It took the Wright brothers years of crashing gliders off dunes before they managed anything resembling flight, so why would I expect anyone to pull off good dim sum in a 180-seat full-dinner-service restaurant so swiftly?
In other meaningful ways, evidence abounds that Minari has not made the cardinal first-timer’s error of trying to be master of everything. Arenas, carved out for other in-house talented professionals to run, exist to great effect. The cocktail program by Megan Luedtke, the bar director for DDP writ large, is tremendous: The Sunchang, for instance, is a tall tulip glass half-glazed with gochugaru, then filled with a blend of mezcal, bubbly wine, and a rainbow of tart flavors, including ume-preserved plum, grapefruit and lime juice, and a kumquat soju—it feels festive, it tastes zingy and lively, it’s the perfect drink when you want to be absolutely sure you couldn’t pull this off at home. All the cocktails are like this. The Minari Old Fashioned is built with half a dozen rare ingredients, including an Okinawan koji-fermented spirit and umami bitters, but it comes off tasting like an Old Fashioned seen through very cool new smoked-lens sunglasses.
In another arena, the desserts, by Beard semifinalist, DDP house pastry chef, and Rustica baker Shawn McKenzie, are delivered from Rustica daily and finished in-house. While there are only two options, each is a notable event in local plated desserts. The yam roulade is a spiced sponge cake rolled around a yuzu and poached pear cream, the whole thing topped with a scoop of Little Bird vanilla gelato and dusted with honeycomb candy—think the general flavor profile of pumpkin pie but aired out and made new. The caramel miso tart is made with Korean dalgona coffee and served with a sauce of winey-tasting poached strawberries. It’s a deep, dark chocolate treat for lovers of smoky scotch and espresso, and I adored it.
One way to think about Minari would be it’s the most ambitious Korean restaurant we’ve ever had in Minnesota. Another way would be it’s the first DDP restaurant where a solo chef has gone off on their own. When you keep in mind that DDP is now the Cities’ dominant restaurant player, with more than a dozen restaurants under its umbrella (Porzana, Martina, Colita, Cardamom, Rosalia, etc.), the latter is certainly an experience we will share again.
If I had one piece of advice for Minari, it might be: Do less. Except I can’t say that—it’s terrible and stupid advice. What if you say this to an ambitious person in any field, craftspeople especially, and they listen? And then what if they do less, and stop, right before they were about to master the next breakthrough that would let them achieve flight?
323 13th Ave. NE, Mpls., 612-259-8914
Dining and Cooking