[Pink Pig Time Machine by Wilfrid: April 7, 2008]
Regular readers will have detected that by the end of March, 1998, my patience with the St Paul Grill in St Paul, Minnesota was stretching somewhat thin.
Cunningly, in the first week of April, I made a break for the big city...
Well, I got a cab to Minneapolis, anyway, right across the river (and might I just say that this grey, chill stream is not how I imagined the Mississippi?).
The attraction was the well-reviewed Goodfellows, a restaurant no longer with us, located in the dramatic, high-ceilinged, art deco space which had opened in the 1930s as The Forum Cafeteria.
Goodfellows boasted an all-American wine list, and after a flute of something bubbly, I splurged on a 1979 Mondavi Reserve. The only thing I'd found to spend money on in St Paul had been a pack of batteries, so I thought it was excusable to play the high roller for an evening. I distinctly recall finding some true bottle-age character in the wine, to the extent of distinct funkiness. Ten years further down the road, I am inclined to think it was slightly tainted.
The food was not bad in a rich Franco-American vein. After some smoked salmon on black bread, a buffalo carpaccio opened proceedings, curiously but pleasantly accompanied by a rabbit raviolo.
This was followed by roast South Carolina quail, garnished with sweetbreads. A plate of American cheeses to finish. Maybe not the meal of a lifetime, but a desperately welcome break from pecan-crusted walleye and honey-rubbed brisket, just across the water.
I arrived back in New York very late the next night, and celebrated by pumping the Stooges' Funhouse to appropriately obnoxious volume.
Simply delighted to back home - or what passed for home - I must have spent the next day tearing around the streets of spring-time Manhattan. I picked up a copy of Fred McDarrah's superb photo volume, The Beat Generation: Glory Days on Greenwich Village, and Walter Benjamin's essays and fragments on Baudelaire, and ended up in Winnie's, that curious little pub on Bayard Street where later in the evening you risk exposure to students singing Karaoke.
Supper in the Malaysia Restaurant, down the little alley-way which links Bowery with Elizabeth. It used to offer a long list of duck blood dishes, but last time I checked these seemed to have gone off menu. I ate some duck blood with beansprouts - oh, it's like a dark, savory jelly - and then some poached chicken with ginger. Rounds of beer at Milano's finished the day.
The following afternoon, a show of Paul Strand's New York photos at the Met, backed up by selections from Stieglitz and Steichen, and a quiet dinner at that remote little boîte - vanished now - Alison on Dominick. Hoping for some simple French country cooking, the cuisine turned out, as I should have expected, to be a somewhat fussy New York take on French food.
House-made rabbit sausage, and braised leg, was served with apricot and walnut chutney. The quail again, this time stuffed with ricotta and escarole, and garnished with fingerlings. The wine was a '95 Gigondas.
Home, and almost time to pack the bags again.
