Tour de Force

Bob and Sue Macdonald may be the most famous and well-connected local foodies you’ve never heard of. They dine the world over in the best restaurants, collect wines of the highest order, and are on a first-name basis with more top toques than Pearson’s has Nut Rolls. The consensus around town is that they do more to keep our restaurant community vibrant than any other local luminaries. In a year when the Twin Cities may have finally cracked the glass ceiling and become a real restaurant town, it’s time to out the humble, self-effacing couple who live the food life we wish we could.

The Macdonalds are almost professional eaters. What else can you call a couple who has eaten with every three-star Michelin chef from France and Spain, many of them twice. The Macdonalds collect restaurant experiences, wines, and chef friendships like some people collect art.

Clutching three bottles of wine and strolling into Krua Thailand, a small no-frills eatery on University, Bob and Sue Macdonald look like many other affluent Minnesota couples: a tad conservative, maybe even prep school chic. Carrying a simple white and an easy red for dinner—and a more precious bottle of dessert wine as a Christmas gift for Krua’s owners—is typical.

The scene is sweet, like the wine itself, but not half as much as the tears that well up in the couple’s eyes when given an antique set of tea cups by Krua’s staff. “This is the best Thai restaurant between San Francisco and New York. The only truly authentic Thai place in town,” Bob says, pulling out a chair for his wife as she begins to give me the short list of the local food world they introduced to Krua. Goodfellow’s Jason Robinson, Levain’s Steven Brown, Five’s Stewart and Heidi Woodman, Star Tribune critic Rick Nelson, and this magazine’s reviewer Peter Lilienthal have all dined with the Macdonalds at Krua.

“When we find a place and like it, we like to take our chef friends and writers because we love chefs and we feel we have a responsibility to advocate for all local chefs and restaurants,” Sue explains. The Macdonalds are insistent that most local diners underappreciate how good we have it here. As Lilienthal, their friend and frequent dining companion, told me one day, “Bob and Sue will be the first to tell you they love the relationships with chefs, but as far as championing great food in this town, they genuinely feel that if they don’t, then who will?”

The couple grew up in Chicago, in families who loved food. Bob first visited Paris at fifteen and remains in love with the city; Sue’s epiphany came when she married Bob thirty-eight years ago and moved to New York City. “That’s when we got into wine,” Bob says, neatly dipping spring rolls into chili paste. Château Lafitte was available in shops for $15, and they ate out almost every night. In 1971 they moved to Singapore and fell in love with Asian foods. Bob published a dining guide to Singapore’s best restaurants and, using the name Roland Girth, penned wine articles. After a stop in Seattle, they transferred here in 1975 with two sons in tow. (Macdonald is now area manager for corporate recruiter Russell Reynolds Associates). For their anniversary dinner, Bob and Sue went to what had been recommended to them as the best restaurant in town—the late Blue Horse. Shocked at how bad the food was, Sue remembers Bob remarking, “Honey, it’s gonna be a long winter.”

With that perspective came a mission—what if they created an atmosphere for restaurants and chefs to bloom? What could the chefs create in their own restaurants if they could visit great restaurants around the country, perhaps working for a day or two in a famous New York City restaurant? What if the chefs could accelerate their culinary vocabulary by dining in great restaurants around town or around the world? And so the Macdonalds set out to make it so.