Cookie-Cutter Dining

If it were a Hardy Boys mystery, it could be called The Curse of the Caesar Salad. Or the oyster martini. Have you noticed that restaurants all seem to offer the same foods? Quick—what’s different about Stone’s, Kozy’s, or Copper Blue besides an address?

I endure restaurant after restaurant serving derivative foods. That gets boring, fast. Our culinary landscape is being dumbed down. It’s curious that restaurants have become so homogenized, given the explosively popular world of food magazines and television, all of which are evangelizing creativity. But here in our backyard the most popular new restaurant style is cookie-cutter.

Two separate Twin Cities food worlds exist simultaneously. In one, 112 Eatery, La Belle Vie, Masa, Chambers Kitchen, and 20.21 grab the attention of the media and the food-obsessed. In the other, the public seems to head for the closest restaurant to their home that most reasonably imitates Redstone American Grill.

Redstone is a nearly flawless concept—it knows who its customers are and it knows how to execute. Chef-consultant Scott Foster, who developed its menu, has been busy over the last few years helping other eateries (Pier 500, Joey Nova’s, Hazellewood Tap) capture some of the Redstone magic.

Or consider chef Tobie Nidetz. First acclaimed at the long-departed American Café, he ran the ill-fated Tobie’s for a few years before hanging up his restaurateur hat in favor of menu consultation. If you have dined at Ike’s, Copper Blue, Jimmy’s, or Stone’s, then you have tasted Nidetz’s food. Even Kozy’s chef Carl Littlejohn is executing Nidetz’s food, which Littlejohn learned to prepare while running Ike’s kitchen.

Nidetz and I recently had a chance to chat about how much things have changed in the restaurant world.

“This is a business,” he told me. “You have to work within the talent in your market. I have thirty concepts inside of me, but price is always a limitation, talent is another, customer taste is a third. I tell owners when we are hiring chefs that we need to hire one who has a head for business, and I’ll teach them how to cook.”

For years, many restaurants seemed eerily similar for three reasons: chefs and cooks hopped from job to job, cooking the same food wherever they went; the world of available ingredients was limited; and consumer tastes were conservative. The first and last remain in play today. But now you can add one more to the list.

In an age when most upscale restaurants are multimillion-dollar gambles, where one small misjudgment of the market means shutting your doors (Louis XIII, Mojito, et cetera), restaurateurs want to serve food that takes as few risks as possible. Safe harbors are by definition not risky, which is why restaurants such as Salut offer burgers and pizzas instead of more authentic French fare, such as seared sweetbreads in brown butter. There’s a lot of risk built into finding the next great young Turk to run a kitchen.

I like Nidetz’s food, but I don’t want to eat it in half of the new restaurants in town. But based on his sense of the marketplace, I’d expect to see more restaurants with cooks—functionaries executing someone else’s vision—instead of chefs. Safe harbors for many, but fewer choices for those of us who enjoy seeing what great chefs can do when faced with navigating the ocean’s open waters. More than ever, we are a food world divided.

For more foodie conversation, tasty recipes, and fun photos, check out Andrew Zimmern's new blog, Chow & Again.