Otho Restaurant and Street Lounge In the past two years, the blocks around 10th and Portland in downtown Minneapolis have become condo city, and now there's finally a food-and-drink destination where all those urban dwellers can enjoy a meal and a cocktail: Otho Restaurant and Street Lounge.
Chef and co-owner Otho Phanthavong (formerly of Zander Cafe and duplex) is cherrypicking flavors from across the Asian continent and fusing them with familiar Western concepts: slices of toasted brioche topped with shrimp and a hot-cool jalapeño-mango relish, brightly flavored ginger-pork dumplings, fig-goat cheese puffs, tempura-fried soft-shell crab and a pretty little plate that's billed as a caviar "flight."
Lunch and dinner entrees include a design-your-own stir fry, a fragrant pork Massaman curry and an equally lively green curry blended with shrimp and a half-dozen entrees, from rainbow trout steamed in spring-roll paper to bouillabaisse made with a saffron-red curry broth. Top price at lunch is $13, and all but one dinner entree lands above the $16-or-less benchmark. The urbane setting is quietly contemporary.
Checkered Apron Cafe Just when it appeared as if the downtown lunch counter were an endangered species (I'm still mourning the loss of Hamlin's Cafe), along comes the Checkered Apron Cafe. OK, so this cheery little street-level spot doesn't have a counter per se, but owner Aileen Okey is embracing a short-order mentality, offering approachable, home-style cooking at similarly friendly prices. There's a blue-plate platter ($8) that starts with a warm popover before moving on to either roast beef, meatloaf or freshly roasted turkey and paired with skin-on mashed potatoes and a smooth gravy. The wild rice soup is thick and hearty, there are big sandwiches ($5 to $9), and did I mention that the fudgy, single-layer chocolate cake was a doozy?
Breakfast ($4 to $9) includes farmhand-sized portions of biscuits and gravy, corned beef hash with three eggs and toast, overstuffed omelets, banana-wheat germ pancakes, sticky caramel rolls and more. Service is friendly and fast, just as it should be.
Red Stag Supperclub A venerable Midwestern dining genre is alive and kicking at the Red Stag Supperclub. Sort of. Owner Kim Bartmann (Bryant-Lake Bowl, Cafe Barbette) hasn't exactly replicated the northern Wisconsin supper clubs of her youth, but she's using them as a starting point for this ambitious near-northeast Minneapolis venture.
Chef William Baskin inserts a number of supper club-ish ideas onto his menu, but spins them in modern, big-city ways. For example, smelt is barely battered, deftly fried and served in a paper cup alongside a marvelously smoky ketchup and a snappy onion-laced tartar sauce. His version of Scotch eggs wraps duck sausage around a quail egg before it hits the fryer, and pigs in a blanket mean fantastic pork sausages wrapped in buttery puff pastry. There's a thick pork chop with cheesy grits and a shrimp-bacon succotash, duck (or mock duck) with squash ravioli, firm and mildly sweet lingcod paired with a fennel-enriched oatmeal, a veal casserole, stroganoff, trout and a few steaks.
The room is a feisty, environmentally friendly mix of old (battered tan brick, exposed timber, recycled furnishings) and new (a gleaming display kitchen). Appetizers are $5 to $15, and entrees are $17 to $25, with one $44 steak. Dessert? Why, a hot dish-style apple pie, of course.
RICK NELSON
