Spring springs fresh air, fresh food, bad TV

The weather is warm, and a pleasant fresh breeze blows. Even through the bars of St. Paul. Yeah, it’s been covered to death—the smoking ban. It’s remarkable, though, walking into my hangout down the street, and instead of smelling cigarette smoke, I get a snoot full of stale tar, which penetrated the walls for more than a decade. That, dear reader, is not a pleasant odor. And it makes you wonder just what your lungs look like, particularly if you were a smoker, as I was before quitting a few years ago.

Personally, I don’t have a problem with the smoking ban. It’s nice to go home and not feel like you need to be power washed before bed. Even when I smoked, I never lit up in my home, and never smoked while I ate. But I do understand the appeal of sitting at the bar and having a beer and a smoke at the end of the day.

I’ve heard it said and seen it written that the smoking ban is a dead issue, that the bars and restaurants fighting for the right to smoke are dinosaurs—soon to be extinct. Perhaps that’s true. But I don’t think those affected bars can simply be labeled as outdated business models and cast unsympathetically aside. Not that those bar owners want our sympathy. But I think what gets lost in this shuffle is the neighborhood and its culture. Many of these bars invested in areas of the Twin Cities that needed revitalization, and stuck it out through tough times until, finally, that neighborhood became revitalized. In the last few years, they’ve been nailed with higher property taxes, a minimum wage hike and now a smoking ban. All that takes a bite out of already slim margins

Others bars are just neighborhood anchors, that, if they fail, you hope a Panera, Starbucks or Applebee’s doesn’t move in.

What’s most telling about the bans, however, isn’t that they might hurt some bars, but how they reveal just how powerful a habit smoking is (heck, I recently walked passed a man at the bus stop, leaning on his oxygen tanks while smoking a cigarette, disturbing not only for obvious health reasons but for is potential explosiveness). Just from my visits to my hangout and others in St. Paul, business is down since the ban—the loyalty, sadly, isn’t to the hangout, but to the cancer stick. I’m not worried about my hangout, though, and the others around it. There are enough people in the neighborhood that will fill the ranks. But for those on the fringes of Hennepin and Ramsey counties, well, it would be nice if the state legislature grew a spine and passed a statewide ban to make all things equal.

In an ironic turn, where there’s cleaner air indoors, there’s more smoke on the sidewalks—during my walks home since the ban, my lungs get filled with second-hand smoke from all the people lighting up on the sidewalk.


Cooking overload

Has the nation finally reached the peak of culinary interest? We have our international, national and local celebrity chefs, the Food Network, enough professional cookbook authors, food writers and critics to populate a small country, and enough amateur writers, cooks and critics populating the Internet to…well, populate the planet.

It’s now come to Celebrity Cooking Showdown, a program I had the misfortune of watching on NBC. Hopefully, it will be off the air by the time you read this. Near as I could tell in this particular episode, B-list “celebrities” (I hadn’t heard of any of them) team with celebrity chefs (I knew one—Wolfgang Puck) to learn a recipe and then attempt to prepare it in front of a live audience in one hour.

I was most impressed with how the women celebrities managed to avoid burning their amply exposed cleavage while working with hot oil, and with the football player who managed to catch up to the other contestants after spending the first five minutes of his one-hour allotment looking for his main ingredient.

But I couldn’t stomach much more, so I flipped the channel. As much as I like cooking, hunting for recipes, and watching Jacque Pepin on public television, after watching a few minutes of “Celebrity Cooking Showdown,” I couldn’t help but feel a bit of a letdown. And I’m not exactly sure why. Probably because I know a bit more about the industry, and understand what a slog it is—as in any profession—to attain a high degree of proficiency. I thought the whole show cheapened the careers of those “celebrity” chefs in attendance, who probably spent years hammering out meal after meal at a restaurant before getting noticed.

Or maybe it didn’t cheapen anything. Perhaps it’s the most ingenious thing to slow the swelling cult of celebrity chefdom. Yep, these B-list celebrities, with a little bit of training, could prepare a decent meal. Could they do it night after night? Unlikely. Could they innovate or adapt when called upon? Probably not. That is the territory of the well-trained, experienced chef. But, like any skill, it’s important to remember that, well, it is, first and foremost, a skill. It can be taught. It becomes art at the hands of a master, but most everyone else can perform the skill adequately with a bit of practice.

The same goes for writing and writers, of course.


The dining file

Speaking of hard-working chefs, I popped down to I Nonni in Lilydale on a Saturday night with the lady friend to sample Filippo Caffari’s spring offerings. Veal osso bucco for me, halibut for my friend. Caffari was named one of our Top Ten Chefs for 2005, and it’s easy to see why: Simple, masterfully crafted Roman food. Caffari wasn’t schooled as a chef, he was a butcher in his native Rome, and only became a chef after he moved to the United States. His humble explanation to me for the Top Ten interview regarding his cooking skills was, “Everyone in Rome is a good cook.”

With that kind of humility, it’s no surprise that while I Nonni is definitely a fine-dining establishment, it’s about as unpretentious a restaurant as you will find. That’s high compliment to Caffari and I Nonni’s owner, Frank Marchionda (who also owns the adjacent Italian market, Buon Giorno). Both were working the floor when they had the chance, talking with guests, sharing good humor and, generally, making sure everyone was having a good time. Which, it appeared, everyone was. From what I’ve experienced, I Nonni has a firm grasp of the simple—but difficult to attain—formula: great food, great service and great attitude equals a great restaurant. Everyone I saw dining, from the impeccably dressed party of four, to the more casually attired folks (me among them) felt like they belonged, and were savoring every bite of their meals.


New columnist

You might have noticed last month a new name in Foodservice News: Rebecca Lunna. If the name sounds familiar, well, it should. Read on.

A Vermont native, she moved to Minnesota about 11 years ago. “Though I grew up with an abundance of great, fresh food courtesy of family farms and the fact that my grandfather owned a dairy, I cut my teeth on great food and wine while waiting tables—for a long time—at restaurants in the Twin Cities,” she said.

She wrote for Mpls/St.Paul magazine for about six years before she became a content manager for a dot-com company (or “dot-bomb,” as she called it). Currently, she’s a marketer working on retail and restaurant accounts. Sounds qualified enough for me.