Cant Get It Here

Have you had a craving recently for skirt steak? How about hand-sliced smoked salmon or fresh veal leg, cut for scaloppine? For all the talk about the Twin Cities being a great restaurant town—which I think it is—we are still a ways from becoming a great food town.

If you disagree, then consider the list of ingredients that regular people can't buy locally—items that are commonplace in Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston. This is the stuff that keeps me up nights, along with the embarrassing question of why Kansas City has a Dean & DeLuca and we don't. I am not talking about obscure ingredients only die-hard food freaks want to source. For crying out loud, just try to buy a fresh duck in a major local grocery store if you think I'm crazy.

I get more e-mail on sourcing problems than any other topic. We taste tri-tip sirloins, osso buco, sea urchins, lomo, raw cheeses, foie gras—and even things as simple as tree-ripened pears and peaches or calf liver—in restaurants, but when we want to serve them in our own homes, we can’t. We live in a town where you can buy fresh basil 24/7, no matter the season, but can’t buy hanger steak because the butcher shop of yesteryear is no more, and supermarkets will only stock items when they reach a tipping point of demand. It’s a Catch-22—how does anyone build demand for food when supermarkets don’t sell it?

A year or two ago one of my colleagues became preoccupied with the scarcity of skirt steak in these parts. Skirt is one of the tastiest steaks around, and it’s inexpensive—but in the Twin Cities, it’s only popular in the Latino community, where it’s most notably used in fajitas. For years, the only place that regularly carried this product was El Burrito Mercado in St Paul. Whole Foods Market says it began stocking skirt a few months ago because customers requested it, but efforts to find it in the two local stores elicited mixed results.

Ryan Puckett, spokesperson for Whole Foods Midwest, and Paul Bolton, his meat guru, explain why they’ve made the cut available in Chicago for years, but rarely in the Twin Cities. Over the span of a week in July, Whole Foods in St. Paul sold $110 in skirt, versus the $2,000 sold in one Chicago store alone. “We listen to our customers and can do flatiron and tri-tip on special order because we tailor to demand,” Bolton and Puckett say, though the special-order option has never been offered to us at the meat counter.

Bolton, a twenty-year veteran of the meat game, says, “Over the course of the last seven years, the demand has increased tenfold, but there are only two skirts on each animal . . . . What used to be a steak you couldn’t give away is now a gourmet choice.” Voilà! Customer demand!

Julie Griffin, who heads the culinary team at Lunds and Byerly’s agrees that sourcing certain food can be challenging in these parts. “In Minnesota, people are reluctant to try new things, but skirt is not strange, so you see it in our stores from time to time. Greek yogurt is something we see appearing in food publications and restaurants, and we will start carrying it as customer demand increases. It will take [Minnesotans] longer, but we get there eventually.

“Look at [artisanal] cheeses,” says Griffin. “First restaurants popularized them, then they went into markets.”

Pomegranate is emblematic of this process. For years, it went unsold in the produce section; then chefs picked it up as a glam ingredient, and five years later the California Pomegranate Council threw significant dough into advertising and promoting it. Many Twin Cities lifers have relied on our local markets and purveyors to tell us what’s worth eating, but oftentimes they are the last to the party.

Now that the party is in full swing, skirt steak—the meat that you couldn’t give away a decade ago—costs more than $11 a pound at Whole Foods. (It’s $5 a pound at El Burrito Mercado, but it’s cut paper thin and hard to cook and eat as stand-alone steak.) That’s the cost of progress. But I’m still looking for my duck. I guess I need to quack louder.

Reach restaurant columnist Andrew Zimmern at azimmern@mspmag.com.