Birthday Dinner, Grand Cafe

So yesterday was my 35th birthday (I know! Weird, huh?) and to celebrate Julie, my mom and I went out to Grand Cafe on Grand and 38th, here in Minneapolis. In warmer weather it would be walking distance from our house, but the idea of combining walking with such a wonderfully decadent meal seems positively bulimic.

My mom and I had been there this summer, and had an absolutely fabulous meal, elements of which I later tried to recreate, with mixed results. I won't be attempting such a feat with last night's meal, not because it wasn't great, but because it's elements were either beyond me or more decadent than I can usually bring myself to cook at home.

Before discussing the individual dishes, let me give our overall impressions. This place is fabulous. The space is really nice combination of fancy and unpretentious: small neighborhood restaurant setting (in that converted-retail-space-of-some-kind way), with white table cloths and silver (the bill arrives rolled in a silver egg cup). The food is French-American with an emphasis on seasonal and local ingredients. I know. It sounds like I just described nearly every newish restaurant, but these folks do it up right. By contrast, last year at this time we went to Corner Table and found it decidedly underwhelming, at least from a vegetarian perspective, because their winter seasonal offerings just weren't all that flavorful. Grand Cafe is by no means a vegetarian place, but is insanely vegetarian friendly. How friendly? The soup of the day was prepared with vegetable stock. It's one of those small touches that most restaurants can't be bothered with even when, as in this case, it just makes more sense with the dish. The service was friendly and wonderful: attentive without being intrusive and gracious in answering all of our questions. The wine list is nice and has a number of good reasonably priced bottles for us less wealthy folks (we shared a bottle of a nice Côtes du Rhone). We got a number of dishes (the soup, a salad, the one veg entree, two starters, and a de-fished special) and shared around, which was an advantage both because it gave each of us the chance to try a number of different dishes and because a number of dishes had such intense flavors that they would have become overwhelming if that were the whole of your meal (this is how I always feel about a dish like szechuan eggplant -- I love it when it is part of number of dishes being passed around a table, but don't enjoy eating an entire plate of it). Finally, everything was delicious, but evidently butter is also a seasonal food (I remember our summer meal as being lighter), so by the end of the meal we did start to feel slightly bloated from all the richness. OK, onto the food.

The soup of the day was a sweet potato and apple base with gruyere folded in and bay leaf oil. The soup was really nicely seasonal, both in it's ingredients (winter seasonal produce up here on the tundra presumably being things that keep well in cellars) and in the feeling that it gave: warm with a hint a crispness in the background. The gruyere was fine, but didn't add a lot, and the bay oil was disorienting, but a really interesting way (I felt the same way about the chili oil that floated atop our delicious cantaloupe soup this summer). We also shared the warm beet salad: circles of sweet red beets that sandwich Stickney's goat's milk cheese (so creamy and good) which are served with caramelized pears and greens tossed with toasted walnuts and a really rich vinaigrette (our one complaint was that the greens -- mostly frisée -- were overly salted).

The two starters that we shared as entrees were the leek and mushroom gratin and the potato gnocchi. The gratin was rich and wonderful, really well balanced with the toasted baguette. The gnocchi were among the best I've every had -- light, soft inside, slight crispy outside and flavorful, and I don't think I've ever had celery taste better than in the celery and onion confit that it and the wild mushrooms (black trumpet? I'm not sure) were tossed with. I could have eaten the gnocchi with a salad as my meal and been incredibly happy.

The crispy polenta cakes entree was Julie's favorite, and something of a revelation for her, as she's been generally suspicious of polenta up til now. The polenta cakes were creamy and savory inside, and the sweet-sour sherry and golden raisin sauce nicely complemented the accompanying roasted carrots and onions (I don't think I've ever thought of pearl onions as a flavor element before, but they were really fab here). Our final dish was the vegetable elements of the steelhead trout special (my mom sweetly decided to fore go meat in order to facilitate veggie sharing with us): dill risotto with chickpea puree and roasted brussels sprouts. The brussels sprouts were perfectly prepared and like a much more butter intensive version of what we prepare at home, and the chickpea puree was a nice accent, but the risotto was something of a revelation. It had the full flavor of fresh green dill, so that the first taste hits you in this incredibly herbal clean way, and later bite reveal other aspects of the dill flavor. I can only believe that this would be amazing with the trout. As it was, it was really nice to have a couple of bites of this and savor the tasty and surprising combination of flavors, then go eat something else for a while, and then return to be struck by the flavors anew.

For dessert we shared gingerbread bread pudding with white chocolate cream and sour cherries. It was good, in keeping with the warm, rich clean flavors of the evening, but not fabulous. We would not get it again, but happy for a sweet end to a sweet evening.

I'll be excited to back to the Grand Cafe during the summer months. It's a wonderful place, but the combination of richness and price mean this is a twice a year sort of place.