Archive for the 'Eating' Category
As usual, I’m one of the last people to hear about awesome new places like Brasa Premium Rotisserie. Though to be honest, if I hadn’t been railroaded in for an impulse lunch on Sunday and instead had the opportunity to peruse the menu first, I may not have ever made it through the door.
The meat - dear Lord - so much meat. It wasn’t love at first sight.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’ll eat meat like a starving buzzard in most situations, (sorry Alexis!), but allow me to encapsulate the intimidating menu for you:
Starters:
Beef
Pork
Chicken
Sandwiches:
Beef
Pork
Chicken
Entrees:
Plate of Beef
Plate of Pork
Plate of Chicken
Sides:
Beef Salad
Pork Fries
Chicken Puree
Dessert:
Beef Cake
Pork Turnover
Chicken Pudding
Beverages:
Beef Tea
Pork with Limon™
Fresh Squeezed Chicken Juice
In short, meaty. But guess what? It was effing awesome anyway!
I had a beef sandwich that must have been marinated for about 12 years, because it was falling apart and so sinfully delicious that I started trying to picture it naked. My companion had the chicken sandwich, but I didn’t get to try it because mine was too good to put down and besides she threatened to leave if I didn’t stop touching myself in public. (God, I miss Italy.)
As it so happened, due to fatigue and inadequate blood-caffeine levels, I briefly felt compelled to go off my self-imposed Coke prohibition. When I ordered a Coke, I was flatly informed that they didn’t carry Coke or “any corn syrup-based beverage!”
Meow!
“OK…. So what do you have?”
“Mexican Coke.”
“Does Mexican Coke have caffeine?” I asked digging my fingernails a quarter inch into the underside of the table.
“I’ll check.”
[Five agonizing minutes later]
“It has caffeine!”
So I got one. And it was incredible! So sharp and tasty! Why don’t they serve Mexican Coke everywhere? It tastes like the Coke we had back in the 70s, like Buddha intended! Whoever started putting corn syrup in Coke needs to be lobotomize immediately. I bet the guys in the kitchen at Brasa could do it. They can do anything with dead meat.
Finally, they have an ambitiously-priced $5.50 piece of chocolate coconut cake served with raspberry and chocolate sauces and a pile of whipped cream for good measure. Now, I struggle with purchasing desserts that are this expensive in a no-nonsense place like Brasa, but I’ll grudgingly admit that the cake was rich and wonderful and experimenting with different sauces every bite was a nice little thrill. Also, as my companion handily demonstrated, the sauces can be a standalone dessert in and of themselves if you spend 10 minutes scraping every last speck from the plate. This from the woman that wouldn’t let me touch myself in public. Hypocrite.
Oh and the décor. Well, either the building that Brasa occupies used to be a car repair shop (in which case, kudos on removing the oil stench) or someone went through an awful lot of trouble to build garage doors into the front of the building. When the weather is nice (like it heart-breakingly was on Sunday), they yank open the garage doors and it’s like dining outside, except without crap from trees and bushes falling into your food!
I hear tell that when the weather is not so nice however, like all winter for example, not only are the garage doors prudently shut tight, but there’s nowhere for the hoards of people piling into Brasa on the weekends to stand and wait for a table. Also, table assignment is allegedly done at whim, meaning line jumping is possible and indeed, enthusiastic in some cases.
These minor flaws aside, it’s a great place that I’ll be biking to often this summer. And well, the name is OK I guess, but I bet they’d get way more business if they cut to the chase and called themselves ‘Bralessa’.
[UPDATE: Bralessa was just named "Best Takeout" by City Pages.]
Brasa
600 East Hennepin Avenue
Minneapolis
612-379-3030
www.brasa.us
Eating | 23.04.2008 12:53 | 4 Comments
Have you ever wondered why it is when you’re trying to settle on a restaurant and you ask yourself “what kind of food am I craving?”, you almost never say ‘Kurdish’? Well, as with everything else in the universe, I have some very passionate, thinly-researched theories on the subject.
The obscurity of this cuisine in North America aside, I’ve hypothesized that it has something to do with the term itself. Say it to yourself - Kurd. Kuuurrrd. Not a particularly attractive word to the anglicized ear. First of all, it sounds too much like ‘turd’. If you can overlook that unpleasantness, the word evokes images of unpalatable globules of bean products, fairytale mush (kurds and whey) and cholesterol-saturated, deep-fried balls (cheese curds) served at the State Fair, prepared by a teenagers making $3.50 an hour that only wash their hands once a day (if that).
In fairness, ‘French’ rhymes with ’stench’ and ‘wench’ among other things that don’t exactly open the saliva ducts, and the word (at least for me) evokes images of hateful waiters, hilarious fashion trends and sidewalks strewn with dog shit. But for some reason there’s 127 French restaurants in the metro area. Goes to show you what endearing accents and lots of butter can do for your P.R.
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Eating | 28.01.2008 12:16 | 5 Comments
I hesitated to write this post only because about a squillion people have beaten me to lavishing praise on Broders’ Pasta Bar. And pretty much all of them had culinary critiquing and descriptive skills that surpass my best efforts (e.g. “some kind of fish” and “topped with green crap” and “The green crap was OK, but you know what really ruled? The red crap.”).
But I’ve been going to Broders’ for like 158 years now and there are so few restaurants in this day and age that can:
- Maintain quality and reasonably affordable prices over a long period of time
- Never fall out of style
- Retain long term serving staff
- Impress a guy that recently lived in Italy for eight months, eating pasta six days a week the whole time and therefore doesn’t usually get all that excited about pasta anymore
- Stay open for 158 years
So taking all that into consideration (and wanting to write off the meals from a recent trip so as to stick it to the IRS yet again), I’ve decided that Broders’ could use one more bump of favorable blogging about their exquisitely prepared red crap.
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Eating | 12.01.2008 12:40 | 5 Comments
Public service dining hint for Midtown Global Market: Bring anywhere from one to 205 friends with you, buy a single serving at each food booth so everyone can get a taste then move on to the next booth until you get to sample every bloody thing in the joint. Do this until you’re all full. Then whip out your laptops and enjoy free WiFi to work/play poker/read my blogs until you’re hungry again. Repeat.
I sprinted through the cold yesterday to lunch in this fashion at Midtown Global Market (MGM) for the third time. Each time I do this, I find one or more awesome food item(s) that make me kind of wish that I didn’t live all the way downtown where my immediate vicinity, out-of-apartment lunch variety hedges solely on how creative I get at the Subway sandwich assembly line.
Meanwhile MGM is an “internationally themed public market with more than 50 independent locally-owned business”, including 12 food stalls slinging lunch and dinner and five places offering breakfast. It’s a work-at-homer’s dream, especially if your home is one of those condos upstairs in the Midtown Exchange, so you can get at all that food without ever having to take off your slippers.
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Eating | 4.01.2008 15:34 | 8 Comments
I will seldom devote precious space on this solemn blog to high-end restaurants. There’s usually no need to trumpet how much I love them, because as far as I’m concerned anyone charging more than $20 for an entrée had better damn well be serving exceptional cuisine and for me to drone on about how great they are would be overkill.
Spoonriver is an exception. My mission was to find a pre-Guthrie show eatery with food (allegedly) more consistent and service less (reportedly) dire than the Guthrie’s own Cue. Anyone who’s been to the new Guthrie already knows that Spoonriver was not only the obvious lateral price-range choice, but that it’s within mid-winter, no-jacket sprinting distance of the G’s front door.
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Eating | 14.11.2007 10:09 | 2 Comments
I spent eight out of the past 12 months in Italy. During that time, I learned a little something about Neapolitan pizza. When I say ‘a little something’, I really mean a little something. OK, I learned like two things:
One, pizza should be thin.
Two, it shouldn’t have 15 toppings.
True Neapolitan pizza only has three or four toppings (five if you wanna risk a raid by government pizza regulators). It took a while for me to adapt to this concept. I’m an American after all. I want an insane, ear-smoking, flavor detonation on every bite of food that I put in my mouth. In this country, since our ingredients are often not fresh or of high quality, the only way for us to get that zap of genital-tingling zest is to deluge each dish with so many ingredients that your tongue short-circuits and sends lively, if confused, endorphins up your spine, rewarding you with a tiny brainstem orgasm. But I digress…
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Eating | 9.11.2007 15:35 | 2 Comments
Further to the breakfast discovery undertaking I teased below, I was taken to Maria’s Café last Sunday and it was totally awesome. I’d actually eaten there twice before years ago, but I didn’t have vivid memories of the food due to the state I was usually in when I rolled in for breakfast back in those days.
Well, last Sunday I was only sleep-deprived from seven days of acute insomnia and stupefied from writing technology reviews for 13 days straight, so I was lucid enough to not only order a great breakfast, but also take note of how appetizing everyone else’s food was at my table.
Actually, I didn’t exactly break new ground with my plate, ordering the three egg veggie omelet and then de-vegifying it with sausage and cheddar cheese, effectively making an Everything Omelet, which is the omelet I’ve been eating every chance I’ve gotten for the past decade. But never mind that, it was a great omelet and I want another one right now just writing about it (and I just ate an omelet like five hours ago - I’m sick people).
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Eating | 1.11.2007 15:39 | 2 Comments
Back when I owned a house with a fully outfitted kitchen, I created and consumed something like five omelets a week. I was an omelet connoisseur. I had a special pan and spatula, ideal for making perfectly formed, thick, Frisbee-sized omelets.
First I’d make the batter using a combination of Southwestern Egg Beaters and real eggs for just the right consistency, mixed with a little black pepper and Kick Ass brand hot sauce.
Some kind of filleted meat ingredient was imperative. I used a rotation of chicken, shrimp, salmon, ham, bacon and sausage – sometimes more than one at a time.
Then I’d yank out the biggest, sharpest knife in my Wusthof-Trident collection, empty the fridge of every vegetable (onions, green peppers, red peppers, celery, shallots, carrots, tomatoes, broccoli, mushrooms, etc), chop up a small pile of each and toss all that in.
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Eating | 30.10.2007 16:20 | No Comments
Though I no longer live within an impulse buy vicinity of a Pinedas, I still think about them first whenever someone says ‘authentic Mexican’.
Back in the olden days, I lived just a short drive from the Pinedas near Lake and Hiawatha. Those were the Wonder Years, kicking a ball around the yard, sitting on the swings at the park, setting off firecrackers in the tunnel to scare old folks, just narrowly missing yet another tender puppy love encounter with Winnie… Never mind that I was in my early 30s.
After my chores, dad would give me the keys to the Honda (”you fly, I buy”) and I’d drive 49 MPH down Hiawatha (before Light Rail, that’s exactly how fast you had to go to hit every light on the green – now you’re effed no matter how fast you drive) and practice my Spanish while ordering my family’s dinner from a guy who seemingly just got off the bus from Guadalajara. They always seemed so happy to be here, as we all were, because their presence meant that our painfully northern European dominated town finally served take-away tacos and burritos that didn’t have the name ‘Bell’ or ‘John’ attached to it.
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Eating | 28.10.2007 15:03 | 2 Comments
The Chatterbox is no secret (though I tried to pass it off as one over at MSN’s City Guides), but it can’t be said enough how lip-smacking awesome this place is.
I used to live within staggering distance of the Chatterbox. I frequented it on those occasions when suckling Strongbow with a three foot, fixed, lip-to-can straw while massacring goons in “GoldenEye” on my Nintendo 64 wasn’t fulfilling enough. But this was in the dreaded days of the Indoor Smoker’s Pox and the Chatterbox had the air circulation of a bank vault. The smoke stench was unbearable, requiring me to burn my clothes and shave my head each time I returned home.
Those days are long gone. Those infernal smokers have been banished to the curbside like the weak-willed dogs that they are (no offense) and I can sip my 20 ounce stein of cider while enjoying more pleasing fragrances, namely me.
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Eating | 26.10.2007 4:35 | 2 Comments