Is the pandemic over yet?
I’d argue that, with the mid-city devastation after the social justice uprisings and the fact that casual outdoor dining really doesn’t work here for four months of the year, the Twin Cities restaurant scene was far more devastated by 2020 than national peers like Seattle. (Yes, I do mean peers, we’re the 16th biggest metro, they’re the 15th, stop saying bad things about yourself because it’s rewarded by your community.) One thing about the pandemic functionally being over, and arriving at a new normal, restaurant-wise, is: How will we know?
Well, if the James Beard semifinalist list is any kind of indicator, we have some promising signs? Out of the 20 folk in the longlist for Best Chef Midwest, four are from the Twin Cities.
One great national nomination must be recognized. Shawn McKenzie, national treasure, current pastry chef of her own inventive and exquisite Café Cerés as well as head baker for Rustica, and pastry guru at the Walker Art Center’s Cardamom beside her bestie, chef Danny Del Prado, is up for Outstanding Pastry Chef or Baker, competing against the whole darn country. She deserves it. Between her clever flights of fancy at Cerés, her booming and technically precise high-volume leadership at Rustica, and her fine dining dessert work at Cardamom, there’s literally no part of baking excellence she has not absolutely conquered. What a gift to our Twin Cities she is. Celebrate with a slice of her famous roasted banana tart, from Rustica.
Okay, on to the chefs. Nominees for Best Chef Midwest this year are: Ann Ahmed of Khâluna and Lat 14, Christina Nguyen of Hai Hai and Hola Arepa, Karyn Tomlinson of Myriel, and Yia Vang of the food hall spot Union Hmong Kitchen, the new pop-up Slurp, as well as last year’s smash-bang success of a stand at the State Fair. A few things leap out at me.
One, can we get a holler and whoop for our amazing Twin Cities southeast Asian community? Ahmed’s Lao ancestors, Nguyen’s Vietnamese forbears, and Vang’s Hmong family all must be watching with delight as these brilliant, hard-working chefs take their inherited traditions and make them new within their own visions, while the whole country claps. I hosted a famous food editor here once and, as we left Hmongtown, he told me: “You really have food as good as you can get in southeast Asia here in St. Paul. Who knew?” I’d argue it is getting more that way year by year. Do yourself a favor and visit all these restaurants, brilliant chefs all, who have zigged and zagged throughout the pandemic, making the most they could of every bump in the road, and leaving us all so much the richer, in terms of flavors and joy.
The Karyn Tomlinson nomination feels important. A question bubbling at the edge of food my whole career has been: Is there essentially anything different, good, or important about a woman chef? Clichés have always wandered in, obnoxiously: This or that is feminine, subtle, delicate, or in some way… girly, which is a state of being outside the norm, and so bad? I feel like the Twin Cities has been a little ahead of the national conversation, with our founding foremother chefs like Lucia Watson (Lucia’s), Lynn Gordon (French Meadow), and Brenda Langton (Spoonriver, Mill City Farmers Market founder) defining a community where being a woman restauranteur is “normal.”
Karyn Tomlinson’s Myriel feels like an important new step forward in our ongoing cultural conversation. She’s both strong and has a history of throwing, you know, giant hogs around, as she did when she won the national cooking competition Cochon555. But she also has a very clear vision of service to her customers, a calm and nurturing dining space, and a cooking style of maximally subtle and delicate tiny delights on every plate. It feels like a new way of being a chef in this world—or am I overthinking it? There’s that saying about driving at night, you can only see as far as the headlights cast their light, but foot by foot, you can make the whole journey that way. I feel like Tomlinson is driving us to a new, good, important place, and I’m grateful she’s being recognized for her work.
Back to my question about the pandemic: What I see in these nominations are survivors, who with heart and art and vision made it to the other side of something where every day often felt impossible. So it is for all of us?
Raise a glass, raise a fork, Twin Cities—this feels big.