The New Second City

The view from leafy, sunken Peavey Plaza is big-city America, towers all around, but at street level it’s like a country fair. Hundreds of office types, cooled by singing waterfalls, are grooving to the music from the band shell, clapping hands. People are brown bagging with friends or queuing up for ribs and roasted sweet corn, butterfly shrimp and whitefish sandwiches. I’m not local, but as I head up the pedestrian-friendly Nicollet Mall a little while later—overflowing patios, no litter—Minneapolis has already seduced me into its rhythms and made me feel like I’ve been here before, simply because it seems to work so well.
I’m not the first person to have this kind of reaction. Plenty of people are suddenly warming to Minneapolis these days. In fact, this town is taking city-rankings buzz to a whole new level: Popular Science’s numer one Technology City, second-ranked Smart Place to Live, eighth Best City for Young Professionals and even a Food Network Most Delicious City nominee.
The people doing the “friendliest cities” list might want to check it out too. “Spare change?” a man says to a passerby. Instead of a brush-off, she offers a polite, “Pardon me?” The man explains,
“I need some change for bus fare to get to Iowa.” “Oh,” the passerby says. “I’m afraid I don’t have any.”
Pretty cordial for a formerly blue-collar town they used to call Mill City. With the mills came the immigrants from New England and New York, from Ireland, Germany and across Europe. So many that even today you can sit in the neighbourhood of Old Saint Anthony at the Kramarczuk Sausage Company, eat a Polish sausage with sauerkraut, sip a Russian Baltika and hear the grand bell of Our Lady of Lourdes pealing on the same spot where, 330 years ago, a priest dedicated the city’s famous waterfall to the patron saint of lost things.
Something lost, something found. Once a timber, flour, railroad and manufacturing boomtown, then suddenly part of the rust belt, Minneapolis has reinvented itself so often that it has taken on rebirth as a culture. And reinvention is surely in the air again today.
You can judge it pleasantly enough from the restaurants alone. The old places are still well loved here, like Kramarczuk’s and old steak joints like Ike’s or Murray’s, where the waiters still tread the creaking boards in long white aprons. But Jean-Georges has arrived. So has a place doing fancy Daniel Boulud-style burgers, minus the expensive foie gras and truffles. And the local culinary stars are surely rising, including Tim McKee at La Belle Vie, and Alex Roberts at Restaurant Alma, who have both been nominated for James Beard Awards.
A friend and his wife show me the foodie stops in Uptown (the party zone around Lake and Hennepin) that have become the pivot around which festivities are choreographed. Stella’s Fish Café and Prestige Oyster Bar for mussels in champagne sauce and spicy squid. Chino Latino, its candlelit darkness packed to overflowing on a Monday night, some weird and slightly frenzied dovetail of Cuban and Filipino, south sea and barrio. I surf the enormous menu. I find: Fidel’s Capitalist Pig Roast, Belafonte’s Banana Boat Chicken, Baha Beach Shack Fish Tacos and CIA Black Ops Black Pepper Beef.
“Let’s have the pupu platter,” my friend suggests, a very senior foodie happily absorbed in the anti-pretension local zeitgeist. We drink sangria with dinner, which works nicely. Although something called a Reverse Cowgirl might work just as well. I never would have believed I could eat so well in a restaurant where they were cooking marshmallows at the next table. Which is the thought I carry with me the next day on my tour of the city’s much-vaunted architectural revolution. Not marshmallows precisely, but there is a sense that in the city’s architecture, too, a certain playful strut prevails.
Iconic buildings have existed here for decades (Philip Johnson’s IDS Tower, the Minoru Yamasaki building that is now ING Bank). But in the past decade a whole new high-architectural bravura has shaped the skyline. The metallic, insectile wing atop Cesar Pelli’s public library. The glinting blue-black machine of Jean Nouvel’s Guthrie Theater. The aluminum billows of the Gehry-designed Frederick Weisman Art Museum.
It’s interesting that all this architectural flash and pop should be in service of the arts. On the far side of the reedy lakes and flowered beds of Loring Park, I lose myself for hours in the Herzog and de Meuron-designed Walker Art Center. The crumpled metal building impels you to fall down through its enamel white hallways, sloping through a labyrinth of galleries and exhibition spaces, Richard Prince’s sculpted muscle car hoods opening onto the eclecticism of Joseph Beuys, giving way to the serenity of Donald Judd. All this eventually spilling out onto the grass, where you’re confronted with an artist-designed mini-golf and a sculpture garden including the famous “Spoonbridge and Cherry” and a scrawny majestically cast in bronze, mid-flight. All energy and verve, whimsy and play.
“There’s a Damien Hirst cow’s head in the Chambers Hotel,” someone tells me, eager I should know, I should see. And so I go and look, of course, which is when it first occurs to me that this whole combination of new haute everything—food, architecture, culture—might otherwise be a bit much, like too much foie gras, were it not toned down with something. Some folksy back flavour it takes me a long time to put my finger on. Something past the civic zing and flash, the hyperkinetic super-city building.
I ask a local: what’s the personality of this place? And she responds with a careful, candid appraisal: “We’re open, fairly quiet, and philanthropic.”
That got me thinking as I ate dinner later at the Red Stag SupperClub, a rec-room chic restaurant with tabletops made out of old doors and battered timbers overhead. It looks humble, but is in fact the first restaurant in Minnesota certified for its green building and energy-efficient practices. As I peruse the vintage holidays snaps on the walls of kids holding just-caught fish, I contemplate that of the total cost of the last four big cultural institutions completed here (around $278 million), nearly 90 percent was raised from private sources. It’s an astounding statement about what the cultural richness of the city means to people here; enough that they would pony up to make it what it should be.
Here at the Red Stag, an updated version of the old supper clubs that used to be found through Wisconsin and Minnesota, the openness part makes sense. Tables with families, couples, groups of old friends. And a simple, tasty, unpretentious menu right out of my fantasies: smelt fries, heirloom potato salad, whole fried trout, liver and onions, flatiron steak.
I have that warm feeling again: Have I been here before? Have I been coming here for years?