A horseradish cream could’ve saved the day, but it was spiritless and lacked zip. It’s Panera-style cuisine - mild, soft, and dull. This is a sandwich you can forget before you’re done chewing. Still worse was the natural Angus pot roast sandwich ($10, above), which came on a squishy multi-grain looking bread that lacked character and chew.
By comparison, the pork chop - while adequately moist - was bland and lacked spice or heat.
A chili spiced pork chop ($13, two photos up) was outclassed by its sides, a pleasant toasted barley risotto and sweetly gingered carrot slices. Becca Dilley / Heavy TableĪ bison meatloaf ($13) was dry and oversalted, but had a pleasant smoky / mushroomy umami - it was halfway home, a valiant attempt. Overall, first and foremost, it’s profoundly safe. The idea of compromise or wavering commitment is a good one to dwell on when talking about the food. Go on, freak out the squares! Let ’em riot!
But why not celebrate it on the menu? Why not actually do farm-to-table whole hog? That’s what’s perplexing: The marketing and organization of the restaurant is a toe dipped timidly into the water of local sourcing, when the whole point of experimentation is to jump in, head first. This is super stuff, and proof that Twisted Fork isn’t a malicious front. In fact, if you count up sourcing referencing on the menu, you have six local dishes or ingredients (counting the Minnesota chopped salad) and six distinctly not local (pomegranate, ahi tuni - mentioned twice, Avery Brown Ale sauce, PEI mussels, and Atlantic salmon).Īvery? Seriously? How hard would it be to do a Summit-, Surly- or Lift Bridge-based sauce?Īt any rate, the restaurant’s website credibly cites copious local sourcing - Ames Farm, Faribault Dairy, Venison America, and many others. The dinner menu makes only a few mentions of local food (“North Dakota Angus beef,” “Nueske’s bacon,” “Minnesota pork chop”) and, with the exception of Nueske’s, doesn’t bother mentioning where anything specifically comes from**. If you walked into the Twisted Fork, you wouldn’t know that it was meant to be a locally focused farm-to-table restaurant. When you don’t, it looks like you’re trying to hide something, and when it looks like you’re trying to hide something, you make people suspect your good intentions.įurther compounding suspicion: the menu. It is, however, something to disclose and talk about, particularly somewhere as crunchy granola and generally transparent as the Upper Midwestern farm-to-table scene.
A lot of good things can come out of corporate experimentation, and the fact that this joint has experienced owners who do casual dining throughout the Midwest isn’t something to be ashamed of. If the Twisted Fork is - as it seems to be - an attempt on the part of Green Mill’s owners to dabble in farm-to-table and possibly launch a major commercial initiative in that direction, mazel tov. When you’re trying to figure out what a given establishment is all about, there are few things as essential as understanding who stands to make money. The attached Twisted Fork Grille fact sheets skip over this, too, dwelling instead on the biographies of chefs Keven Kvalsten (former co-owner of The Green Room, chef de cuisine at Corner Table) and Stephen Trojahn (former executive chef at Graves 601). Nowhere in the restaurant’s initial, highly detailed press release is this mentioned. The newly opened Twisted Fork Grille is billed in its press materials as focused on “farm-to-table freshness.” Yet it’s interesting to note that it’s owned by some of the same people who run the casual dining chain Green Mill *, which is primarily focused on “thin n crispy pizzas.” (The Twisted Fork is, in fact, physically carved out of the Green Mill on Grand Ave. Editor’s Note: Twisted Fork Grille is now closed.
0 kommentar(er)
