Heartland Restaurant & Farm Direct Market -- and its menu -- survived the move intact from Mac-Groveland to Lowertown St. Paul. What's new is a spacious lounge that specializes in imaginative cocktails and a shop and deli. As a package, there's nothing else quite like it in the state.
The restaurant's diners and the market's shoppers clearly benefit from the years that Lenny Russo has devoted to nurturing ties with family farms and small producers. The day the doors opened in Lowertown, the market became the east metro's top butcher shop, if only on the basis of the extraordinary house-made sausages, pâtés and terrines. But the counter is also the place to find the pristine meats, poultry and freshwater fish that Russo serves next door in the restaurant.
Along with a small assortment of baked goods, the deli counter produces a handful of sandwiches, and they're so good that it's difficult to resist the impulse to dissect them and discern their contents. Another reason to climb the market's lovingly restored cast-iron staircase? A few hot grab-and-go items, including a moderately priced daily entree.
Russo's cooking style has always been to put the ingredients front and center. At their best, the straightforward preparations bounce flattering flavors off each prized ingredient. A richly porky pork chop, seared on the grill but coyly pink inside, tasted even better against the teasing heat of a jalapeño pepper-apple jam. A slaw of seasonal vegetables was the exact foil to succulent walleye in a delicate cornmeal crust.
I love how Russo features ingredients that get little or no play elsewhere. He buys magnificent whole wild boars from Money Creek Ranch near Houston, Minn., then deftly converts one of the state's premium proteins into a bevy of one-of-a-kind dishes. The results could be a ruddy braunschweiger or a speckled headcheese, or it might be a slow-cooked shoulder, paired with duck sausages for what Russo dubs "Midwestern cassoulet."
Veal, goat, elk, pheasant all have a place of pride here, alongside basics like a grilled-to-order steak with potatoes, crisp-skinned roast chicken, even a terrific burger. One night I dropped into the lounge and dug into the kind of autumn meal that wraps you up like a treasured hand-me-down blanket: cracklingly good grilled chicken sausages served over a rich potato-celeriac purée. Not bad for $14.
Heartland is not without its issues. The occasional dish, often of the vegetarian persuasion, can taste not quite fully formed, and the hyper-seasonal desserts are more earnest than indulgent. The highly polished service staff sometimes feels a little thin for the big-ticket price tag. Because the lounge lies in the well-worn path between dining room and kitchen, it can come off more like a corridor than a relaxing hideaway.
Naysayers may ask, "But isn't four stars synonymous with perfect?" Nope. In this bell curve, four stars means "exceptional," and, frankly, there isn't a more fitting word for this urban-rural nexus.
