Run for the Border

Chef-driven restaurants have opened in great numbers here over the last decade, but the vast majority are in the west metro. Just since 2004, Corner Table, Tryg’s, al Vento, Fugaise, Emma’s, Five, The Craftsman, Town Talk Diner, Patrick’s Bakery & Bistro, 112 Eatery, Masa, and La Belle Vie have debuted. Then there are the more mature entrants such as Modern Cafe, Lucia’s, Auriga, Biella, jP, Figlio, Levain, Cosmos, Cavé Vin, Pane Vino Dolce, Café Lurçat, and Solera, to name some.

Look east and there’s Margaux, Zander Café, Heartland, 128 Cafe, A Rebours, W.A. Frost, and Muffuletta. Stop. Only one of those is a product of the last two years. St. Paul has roughly 60 percent of the population of Minneapolis, but only a tiny fraction of the chef-driven restaurants.

According to Tanya Spaulding, business development guru at Shea—the area’s most influential design and consulting firm specializing in restaurants—not only do rents tend to be cheaper in St. Paul, but it’s easier to build there because licensing and permits are easier to obtain. Yet there are fewer chef-driven restaurants in St. Paul than at any time in my memory.

Full disclosure: I’m New York born and bred, I live in St. Paul, and I don’t subscribe to the us vs. them biases that divide the Twin Cities along the river banks. To me, this isn’t about St. Paul as much as it is about why nearly half of the upwardly mobile diners in the area live in such poor proximity to a critical mass of interesting restaurants.

Despite everyone’s insistence to the contrary, there must be a provincialism at work that no one cares to acknowledge. But is it the west metro’s or the east’s? I think many Minnesotans, and quite a few of them live in St. Paul, care less about food than they say they do. And many Minneapolitans look at the evidence and believe St. Paul only supports chains and steak houses.

I ran my conundrum by Kathie Jenkins, longtime St. Paul Pioneer Press restaurant columnist and critic. She denies there is a culinary affinity that divides the two towns and rejects the idea that Minneapolis is a more vibrant scene; she believes it’s a bias left over from a different era. But when I look at Jenkins’ east metro reviews and discoveries, they are far more likely to be meat-and-potatoes dives than serious restaurants. Much of the stuff she visits in St. Paul could never get hers or the Strib’s attention if it were located in Minneapolis.

Consider Grand Avenue, the city’s premier shopping street, sandwiched between its most affluent neighborhoods. The last chef-driven restaurant on Grand was Table of Contents, which closed nearly a decade ago.

St. Paul is hardly unsophisticated. It is home to and supports many of the metro’s best and most interesting ethnic restaurants. And I’m not saying St. Paul is cheap either—Kincaid’s and St. Paul Grill are two of the metro’s most expensive restaurants, and they pack ’em in.

So what’s going on? Tim Niver, a partner in food-forward newbie Town Talk Diner, told me that he and his partners considered opening in St. Paul at one point, but decided against it, opening in a transitional part of East Lake Street, next to a Mexican nightclub and across from a Denny’s. The challenge for food-forward restaurateurs is to open where they believe their potential customers live. That’s how uncertain the restaurant community is about St. Paul.

You can’t argue with facts, but you can puzzle over the cause. Niver’s choice leads me to believe that there is an almost irrational fear that St. Paul will not support creative cooking. Is that fear rooted in a nuanced understanding of the two towns? Or is it a Minneapolis–based provincialism that makes all such considerations a fait accompli?

I don't really know the answer—but if it's the latter, that's truly tragic.