It's been two star-studded decades

My, how time flies. Thirty-one years have passed since I wrote my first restaurant review for the Twin Cities Reader, and 22 years since I joined the staff of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune (as it was called then). I had little expertise when I started -- just a love of food and a passion for exploring restaurants. But back in those days, little expertise was necessary: To be a restaurant critic in the Twin Cities, you needed only to be able to detect when food was either frozen, burnt, overcooked or oversalted.

And now this is my final restaurant column for the Star Tribune.

My passion for exploring restaurants began when I was a teenager and set out on a backpacking trip around the world. In remote corners of Turkey and Afghanistan, in towns where nobody spoke English, I discovered that the doors of the local cafés were points of entry into other worlds. A smile and a tradition of hospitality could overcome the barriers of language. I continued my gastronomic adventures after college, in Seattle's International District, where hole-in-the-wall Chinese and Japanese eateries offered authentic tastes of different cultures for $3 a plate.

When I came to Minnesota to start graduate school in 1974, I expected to continue my explorations. But I soon discovered that the Twin Cities had only a few ethnic restaurants: the Café di Napoli, Mama D's and Vescio's; the Nankin, Howard Wong's and David Fong's; Casa Coronado and Boca Chica, Emily's Lebanese Deli and Nye's Polonaise, Fuji-ya and Caravan Serai, plus little chow mein carryouts sprinkled through the neighborhoods. As for authenticity, I had my introduction to Minnesota's unique version of Chinese cuisine one day at a downtown restaurant (not the Nankin), when I ordered chicken chow mein and got a pile of canned fried noodles and a green celery sludge, topped with slices of chicken bologna.

The two best restaurants in the Twin Cities then were Charlie's Café Exceptionale, famous for its potato salad and kitchen-sink roast beef sandwiches, and the Blue Horse in St. Paul, which every year staged Esquire magazine's annual Gourmet Dinner so diners could have a taste of how the swells in New York City ate. In those days, most of us had never heard of pasta, Szechuan, cabernet, free-range, organic balsamic, extra-virgin, tapas, or dim sum. Italian cuisine came in three varieties: spaghetti, ravioli and lasagna, and one color: red. The gastronomic revolution was underway on the coasts, but in the Twin Cities, we could only watch it on public television, on Julia Child's cooking shows.

The beginning of a change

I didn't realize it then, but I had arrived in the Twin Cities just in time for a tableside seat at the gastronomic revolution. Within a few short years, Minnesotans were flocking to fancy French restaurants with names like the Café Royale, Les Quatres Amis and La Tortue, and exploring the exotic cuisines of Vietnam, Szechuan Province and Thailand. Some of the new haute cuisine restaurants, like the short-lived Chouette in Wayzata, and the long-lived New French Café in Minneapolis' Warehouse District, were outstanding, and others merely pretentious, but they opened our eyes to a level of gastronomic sophistication.

Why this dramatic change? My theory is Julia Child changed everything -- or at least, she came along at just the right moment. Before Julia, real Americans ate meatloaf. People who ate fancy foods were snobs, or effete characters like the fictional detective Nero Wolfe, a confirmed bachelor (wink, wink) who lived in a brownstone and grew orchids. But Americans had lots of money in their pockets, and Julia, the consummate Yankee, gave us permission to spend it on vouvray and Burgundy and blanquette de veau.

Since then, we have blossomed into a full-blown consumer society, and at least for a lot of us the brands we buy and the foods we eat have become important markers of who we are. For a certain upper-middle slice of Twin Cities society, making the rounds of the hot new restaurants and having opinions about the chef and the wine list has become an important part of what separates us from them. The pop Zen philosopher Alan Watts long ago warned against eating the menu instead of the meal, but I am not sure how it is ever possible to tease them apart.

The past decades have brought pricier, more elegant and ever more ambitious haute cuisine restaurants: 510 Groveland (later the 510 Restaurant), Goodfellows and D'Amico Cucina in the '80s, and more recently Aquavit, Auriga, La Belle Vie, Cosmos, Five and Levain, as well as two restaurants supervised by celebrity chefs: Wolfgang Puck's 20.21 Restaurant at Walker Art Center, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten's restaurant, Chambers Kitchen, at the Chambers Hotel. But the local market for this kind of high-end gastronomy remains very limited, as the closings of Levain, Auriga, Five, Goodfellows and Aquavit have shown.

The revolution will be eaten

Another big transformation started with the arrival of Vietnamese refugees and restaurants in the mid-'70s. At modest storefronts like the Phoenix and the Saigon, Minnesotans learned to love lemongrass chicken and crisp spring rolls stuffed with rice noodles, accompanied by a pungent nuoc mam dipping sauce. And the Vietnamese eateries introduced Minnesotans to another less noticed innovation: fresh, tasty vegetable dishes -- until then, virtually unknown on the local restaurant scene.

Then came Szechuan cuisine, introduced by the Empress in Edina, and Princess Garden in St. Paul, and a host of others, and dim sum at the Corner House in south Minneapolis. These were followed by Thai restaurants, then Ethiopian and Somali and many Mexican restaurants, serving a range of authentic dishes rarely seen before in the Twin Cities.

Today, thanks to the increasing diversity of our community, the flavors of the world are at our doorstep. Whether it's Argentine, Cambodian, Cantonese, Cuban, Ecuadorean, English, Ethiopian French, German, Ghanaian, Israeli, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Laotian, Malaysian, Mexican, Middle Eastern, Nigerian, Persian, Russian, Somali, Vietnamese or Thai, you can find it in the Twin Cities. And the world of choices keeps expanding: Uptown Minneapolis now has a first-rate South Indian vegetarian restaurant, Mysore, while the recently opened Tam-Tam African restaurant on Minneapolis' West Bank serves specialties from Uganda. A Brazilian churrascaria, Fogo de Chao, is scheduled to open in Minneapolis' City Center next month.

For me, exploring these restaurants has always been the most enjoyable part of my job. Thanks to globalization, encounters with other cultures that I sought out on my backpacking adventures have landed on our doorstep. And as our world gets smaller, these restaurants offer valuable points of entry into other communities that are becoming part of who we are. If you have strong opinions about Somali cabdrivers or Mexican immigrant workers, but have never had a conversation with either, an hour or two in a Somali or Mexican restaurant probably won't change your mind, but it might deepen your understanding.

Link by link, the chains continue

The gastronomic revolution and the growing diversity of our population have brought dramatic improvement to the local dining scene, but most of that improvement stops at the Minneapolis and St. Paul city limits. Progress has been much slower in the suburbs, especially the newer outer-tier suburbs, where chains dominate the restaurant scene. The independent one-of-a-kind restaurants that play a big role in giving communities their distinctive sense of place have a hard time competing for prime suburban locations.

The most exciting trend I have seen since I started covering the local restaurant scene has been the rise of restaurants that put their values -- social, environmental, humane -- on the menu. Brenda Langton of Café Brenda (and Spoonriver) and Lucia Watson of Lucia's Restaurant and Wine Bar were the pioneers, but today, their creed of locally grown, organic and sustainable food can be found at most of the best restaurants in town, ranging from Muffuletta, Corner Table and W.A. Frost & Co. to Restaurant Alma, Cafe Barbette, Sapor Cafe & Bar, jP American Bistro, the Craftsman, the Dakota Jazz Club & Restaurant and Heartland. Maybe it's a sign of spiritual progress: Instead of getting our identity from what we consume, we make choices that express what we value.

A fond goodbye

Although I am leaving the Star Tribune, I remain interested in eating and ethics, and in bringing people together across differences in culture and belief. In my new job as interim executive director of the Twin Cities Media Alliance, I'll be working to bring together citizens and media professionals to improve the quality, accountability and diversity of the local media. And I will probably post musings on food, ethics and current affairs from time to time on my blog, www.iggersdigest.com.

I never thought my hobby of exploring restaurants would turn into a career, but I am very glad that it did. I have enjoyed many fine meals over the years, I have learned a lot and I have had the chance to explore and express my beliefs and values -- and sometimes to question them -- in my Everyday Ethics column in the Star Tribune's Faith & Values section.

But the part of my job that I have valued the most has been my interaction with readers. Both my restaurant reviews and my ethics columns have been enriched, time and again, by contributions from readers, who have led me to new restaurants and new insights. I am sincerely grateful.

jeremyiggers@earthlink.net.