South 12th

Anthropomorphizing holiday party smoked mackerel with a dollop of sour cream and a dried blueberry, then taking a photo of it just for you. Happy Christmas Eve, reader.

In regards to fourings, I forgot to mention: when you bring out the meal at 4 p.m., you have to introduce it by saying the name of the dish in a sort of drawn-out bellow, like:

VIIIIIIICCCCCCTTOOOOOOOOOOORIA SPPPPOOOOOOOONNNNGGGGGE.

No exclamation at the end. You know what I’m talking about. Anyway, that’s what you’d say if you were eating Victoria sponge. Like I said, we’re still feeling out what exactly constitutes appropriate fourings fare.

Also, if fourings gets a little manic, it’s a good idea to serve the dish by screaming “YOU GET A SCONE! AND YOU GET A SCONE! AND YOU GET A SCONE!” Everbody at the table screams along, too. Jumping up and down, crying maybe. Fourings is like that sometimes.

Look, I don’t like it anymore than you do. But the fact is, Oprah still rules 4 p.m. There have to be concessions made initially to get our foot in the door if this is going to work.

“Humans were not designed to spend their entire waking lives stumbling through an unending succession of cakehole-stuffing opportunities.”

…And so begins the Ragbag’s epochal Word Idol Week. All week long, Raynor has charged several of his semi-professional acquaintances with taking up the cause of an obsolete F-word and re-introducing it back into the wild.

I am one such acquaintance, and I have chosen ”fourings.” A four o’clock meal. Proletarian high tea. Post-work happy hour chowtime. Eating your feelings about Oprah’s imminent disappearance from daytime TV. Yum.

Stick around, consider carefully what I have written, enjoy the other entries, and then vote for fourings at week’s end. Or, better yet, consider adding fourings to your meal schedule. I will be posting fourings-related content much of this week in an attempt to begin moving my readership in that direction. You eat at 4pm anyway; might as well make a ritual out of it.  

Fortune cookie from lunch today. South Minneapolis!

The Guardian recently ran an interesting list of the best foods in the world by category. Nothing too surprising (the best place in the world to eat a pastrami on rye is Katz’s Deli, a fact very few people would dispute), but this caught my eye:

19. Best place to eat Nordic food:

Olo, Helsinki

“When I’m back home in Finland, I always visit Olo in Helsinki. The chef, Pekka Terävä, has created a brand in its own right, cooking modern Nordic cuisine with the best seasonal ingredients.”

Kasarmikatu 44, 00130 Helsinki, Finland. 00358 9 665 565, http://www.olo-restaurant.com/

Of course it makes perfect sense that the best “Nordic food” (very broad category!) would be found in Finland. But here is something that has always confounded me, reader. Why can’t you find a high-end Nordic restaurant here in Minneapolis?

I’m not really talking about an Ole and Lena-style cafeteria serving lutefisk; I’m talking about a bistro with outdoor seasonal seating and white tableclothes that steals a bunch of ideas from whatever high-end Old World eateries the urbane aesthetes of Stockholm and Copenhagen frequent. That sort of chic, blonde, egalitarian social democratic Northern European ideal that Minneapolis sometimes flirts with as a civic identity when it’s not busy trying to be Cold Portland or Chicago’s More Responsible Younger Brother That Went Into Advertising Instead of Forming Big Black. 

So listen up, investors! Wouldn’t it make sense for some enterprising resteraunteur to open something along the lines of Olo here? Maybe in one of the historically Scandinavian enclaves, like East Lake Street or Cedar-Riverside? It seems like such a can’t-miss idea. Listen to this blurb from Olo’s website:

Olo’s kitchen represents the modern Nordic cuisine, where traditional raw materials of the North are well-respected. In our cuisine, we like to offer clarity of design and generous flavours as known from our grandmother’s times. Our menu follows the yearly cycle of the Nordic nature, bringing to the table only what is at best at a given time. The natural and clean flavours of land and sea reign in Olo’s kitchen.

Just scratch the word “sea”, and look at all that emphasis on “raw materials of the North” and “grandmother’s kitchen” and ”the yearly cycle of nature”. Are these not the exact same concepts that fuel our best local kitchens here? So there’s no natural “sea” flavors here, but we can just fly the fish in from the coasts, right?

The bleaching of Minneapolis’ Scandinavian roots is such a fascinating topic. I am certain that there were people living in my building that spoke Swedish as a first language just three generations ago, but besides for Ingebretsen’s on Lake Street, you’d never know it. For all the all the Petersens (hi, Sarah and David!), Olsons (hi, Chris!) and Jensens (hi, Libby!) around, there just doesn’t seem to be the same kind of deeply rooted urban community identity that other early 20th Century immigrant groups established and still maintain elsewhere. Scandinavians, once reviled by the WASPs that preceded them to Minnesota, have blended into the WASP identity almost entirely, and in a way other “white” ethnic groups did not. At least that’s the case in the urban core; I understand it’s different in rural parts of the state.

Which is all a roundabout way of saying that Minneapolis could use a little first-hand urban Scandinavian flavoring. One of the great cliches about Minnesota politics is that if a voter is confronted with two unfamiliar names on a ballot, he or she will pick the more Scandinavian one. Wouldn’t a full-out Stockholm-styled bistro have a similar effect among wealthy corporate clients? You know: “Where are we eating tonight, Lindgren? You want to go to the 112 Eatery or Jag är Nyfiken?”

The 112 Eatery is an outstanding restaurant, but I think a lot of Lindgrens and Petersens would go for the latter on principle.

(P.S.: Sorry for the gratutious Swedish poster art. I have been noticing that people don’t like these long posts unless there’s a crazy-ass photo of some kind attached to them. Jump, Lena Nyman, jump!)