Scallop Crudo Meets Hip-Hop

Traditional fine dining restaurants are dropping like flies in the Twin Cities, but what’s carrying forward is surprising.

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The Twin Cities’ finer dining scene is unrecognizable from itself five years ago. Our vanished great restaurants include La Belle Vie, Heartland, Vincent, Piccolo, Strip Club, and, just this month, nationally acclaimed Brewer’s Table. You can’t eat thoughtfully in the Twin Cities today without asking, “What is finer dining, now?” Answer: It’s experiments. All over town. These are the ones to watch.

Tenant 

New Tenant, run by a sous chef from the restaurant’s former inhabitant, Piccolo, gives the Minneapolis restaurant-goer déjà vu. As my friend said, looking through her wine at the young men who were passionately constructing and delivering Tenant’s food: “I guess people were clamoring for Travail south?” Like Travail in Robbinsdale (and Chicago’s Schwa before them), Tenant is going for exquisite food without servers—and an aesthetic of full-blast rock ’n’ roll. 

Step in the door and you find four young chefs—and not a single other employee, not a dishwasher, not anybody—led by co-owners Cameron Cecchini and Grisha Hammes, who met while cooking at Borough in the North Loop. These chefs joyously deliver the exquisite plates created in the open kitchen to a thumping soundtrack of hip-hop and pop-rock. A scallop crudo was as pretty and perceptive as food gets, the scallop cooked lightly over charcoal to capture it in a state of dewy sweetness, the fragile morsel then served in a bowl that was half an emerald-green coulis of asparagus and herbs and half a smoky golden XO sauce with charred onion. Atop it curled fresno chilies and borage flowers adding fireworks and flavor in layers. A tortelloni made from fresh, eggy dough and stuffed with a whipped taleggio spiked with Calabrian chili flakes—all of it served in a mushroom roast onion stock decorated with scallions—hit that rare territory where voluptuous refinement meets onion and cheese. 

“We don’t necessarily want to put ourselves in the fine dining box,” says Cecchini when asked if he considers Tenant an experiment in fine dining. “We want people to come in because it’s Tuesday and they want to have a nice dinner.” 

And yet, at $50 for six courses (served at two seatings and secured by a credit card in advance), plus a certainly excellent $25 wine pairing and a 20 percent tip, that’s $96 a head. Isn’t that fine dining? With Guns N’ Roses at full blast and a smallish single slice of duck for the meal’s apex, it can feel discordant. If this was a very nice dinner, wouldn’t it be more stately? If this were just folks sitting around drinking and listening to loud music wouldn’t it be cheaper? Travail spent years laboring in the à la carte manufactories, selling appetizers and sandwiches piece by piece, earning the trust of patrons before debuting its pricey tasting menus. It’s hard to recall, but Father Time and I put our heads together to recollect that La Belle Vie and Alma began à la carte, too. I wonder if Tenant would benefit from similar trials. Or is that impossible because the only way this can work is as it is? 

Ideas are easy, implementation is hard, and payoff in the marketplace is hardest. Tenant is a well-crafted experiment every chef in town will be watching. 4300 Bryant Ave. S., Mpls., 612-827-8111, tenantmpls.com

Rabbit Hole

Opposite in approach from Tenant, chef Thomas Kim’s Rabbit Hole is a popular restaurant that’s suddenly pivoting to incorporate dishes straight out of fine dining. For instance, there’s a new Rabbit Hole variation on Hawaiian-Pacific Rim master chef Roy Yamaguchi’s salmon poke. The sushi-grade salmon, the candlenuts, the small-diced mangoes and pears—if there’s a more quiveringly delicate, more balanced, finer poke between Chicago and Seattle, I’ll eat it and the plate it comes on. 

Kim worked for Yamaguchi for many years before moving to Minnesota, yet his own original dishes, like the Wu Tang Clam, are an even sharper joy. For this, Kim takes baby clams, sautés them with shiitake mushrooms and a sort of compound butter he makes from abalone, tucks them into a romaine leaf dressed with a coconut caesar salad dressing, and wraps the whole thing in a sheet of toasted nori. The result is strangely wonderful. The sweet minerality of the clam is expanded upon and given contrast by the coconut caesar, all of it made familiar by the sushi envelope of seaweed. 

A charred broccolini with a housemade XO sauce, served beneath a snowfall of grated, miso-cured egg yolks, hit every meaty umami note in ways that made my knees weak—which isn’t always a response one gets from broccoli. Kim says he recently began swapping out Rabbit Hole’s worst sellers for the fine dining heights of technical prowess he grew to miss. “We have regulars, and they’re really an educated base—they get the high-low thing we’re doing and they’re ready to jump to the next level of culinary experimentation.” He plans to keep adding items heretofore only found in Yamaguchi-type elite kitchens. Turning a popular restaurant into a finer restaurant mid-life may be the most surprising trick yet pulled from this Rabbit Hole. 921 E. Lake St., Mpls., 612-236-4526, eatdrinkrabbit.com

Peeps Hot Box

Chef Jessi Peine was one of our young great up-and-comers, cooking at a Mexican spa, Alma, and Corner Table before landing at Birdie, the brief-lived exquisite little south Minneapolis fine dining spot. When Birdie flew off, Peine decided to try top-level cooking from a truck. Her Peeps Hot Box is “in residency” at Bang Brewing Saturdays in August, and at Tattersall Fridays in September. It’s worth finding. I tried Peeps’ asparagus fried in a vapor of golden batter, light as sky, and a shredded green papaya salad covered in flowers and peanuts. She makes fruit plates arranged in impeccable geometries and works a jaw-dropping cheese plate that reflects her time as a cheesemonger trained at Neal’s Yard Dairy in England. 

I ask Peine how fine food in a food truck is being received. “It’s a real challenge,” she says. “A lot of people don’t want this from a food truck. We never have a line as long as the Philly cheese steak franchise, where they buy all their food pre-made and are basically heating it up. I’ve just really been trying to push it and push it, trying to find events that appreciate craft. I can prepare elegant dishes on the truck—it doesn’t have to be seated in a dining room and cost a lot of money.” peepshotbox.com

Heyday

Heyday won chef and owner Jim Christiansen a Food & Wine Top New Chef in America prize when it opened in 2014, and while the food has always been exquisite, lately there’s a $10-and-under happy hour menu served all evening Sunday through Thursday in the bar. Bargain gourmets: activate! The deboned pastrami-cured and smoked duck leg is a marvel of elite cooking tactics. The skin is crisp and peppery, the flesh tender as confit and salty like pastrami, the whole thing layered with elusive scents and flavors. The $4 bowl of pork rinds are crisp and light as a cloud that’s been captured and turned into porky crunch, served with a bright-green jalapeño, parsley, and lime mayo that both cools and heats in an instant. Add a $3 tallboy and you’re living a white tablecloth life at fast-food prices. 

Why would one of the Cities’ finest dining chefs go so low, as it were? “I’m slowly panicking,” says Christiansen. “All these spots are closing, and we need some restaurants to try something other than burgers and fries—yes, I know it’s more expensive. But as a culture, as a community, we need it. You can’t just have television. You need books and theater, too.” 2700 Lyndale Ave. S., Mpls., 612-200-9369, heydayeats.com