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Dining With Dara: Voyeurism, Lobster, & Great Music

Posted at 7:59 AM on July 27, 2011 by Steve Seel (1 Comments)
Filed under: Dining with Dara

Our food and dining authority Dara Moskowitz-Grumdahl checks in for her regular Wednesday segment:


In honor of the Walker Art Center and the Current's Movies and Music In The Park series which kicks off this coming Monday, let's talk: Voyeurism and lobster! And Richard Lloyd from Television. It's going to be a good month. Of course, the Movies and Music series is a Minneapolis tradition, it's a free series of concerts and movies that happen in Loring Park, and this year it's happening the first four Mondays in August.

The four week schedule: August 1st, Haley Bonar and the Hitchcock movie Rear Window; August 8th No Bird Sing and Fritz Lang's creepy 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse; August 16th Buffalo Moon and Antonioni's Blow Up; and August 22nd sees Dark Dark Dark headline followed by the Fritz Lang film Spies.

Now, the good food news for this year: The Smack Shack will be setting up in front of Nick and Eddie every Monday for the rest of the summer, to sell their lobster rolls. I know this because Nick and Eddie general manager Doug Anderson called me up to tell me how thrilled he was. Why would an established brick-and-mortar-restaurant paying brick-and-mortar rents, salaries, utilities, and taxes invite a food-truck to park out front? Doesn't that contradict what everyone knows to be the natural antagonism between trucks and architecture? No, says Anderson: Nick and Eddie is typically closed on Mondays, and this arrangement is a win-win, allowing the chef and cooks to keep getting a night off every week, while allowing Nick and Eddie to make money on alcohol and dessert sales. (If you go, don't skip dessert, pastry chef Jessica Anderson is a local legend, if they have anything with peaches get it, and miss the butterscotch pudding at your peril!) So: This food truck / land-restaurant pair is allowing Nick and Eddie to be a better employer to its employees, and it also gave Doug Anderson a new night to program music into, which he is now doing in partnership with First Avenue's legendary former booker Steve McClellan. To wit: Do you recall the seminal punk band Television, and Television's guitar hero Richard Lloyd? He'll be playing at Nick and Eddie on August 1. (And also tonight, July 27.) So, on August 1 you could potentially eat the best lobster roll this side of the Mississippi River, watch Haley Bonar, have some butterscotch pudding and a bourbon, and then watch Richard Lloyd from Television! That ain't a bad Monday night. Anderson tells me they're working out details for another amazing Monday, with McLellan's deep contacts, and it's a weird one. Remember the 1980's new-wave band "Men Without Hats"? Of course you remember their song "Safety Dance." But yes, I'm told Men Without Hats will be coming to Nick and Eddie sometime before the snow flies, likely on a Monday lobster roll night.

Finally, all this talk of voyeurism inspired me to make a list of the top voyeuristic restaurants in the Twin Cities:

1) Crave, the new downtown location. It's in the old Palomino space and you can see directly in to the ritzy penthouse suite at the Chambers! Don't think of misbehaving, rock stars, people eating sushi can see you!

2) Gather, the new restaurant in the Walker Art Center. You can look right down into the laps of about 30,000 cars as people drive past, you can see what people are eating, what they're reading, what they're wearing... or if you're paranoid about distracted driving, skip this one.

3) The 1029, in Northeast. Foodies know it as the weekend home of the Smack Shack (Tuesday through Friday nights after 5 p.m., and all day on Saturday and Sunday, from 11:30 on.) But most everyone else knows it as a die-hard cop-bar, with ladies undergarments attached to the walls. How do the ladies undergarments get there? Become a regular and find out.


Dara Moskowitz-Grumdahl, veteran Twin Cities food and dining authority, is a five-time James Beard Award-Winning food writer who is also Senior Editor at Minnesota Monthly and author of Drink This: Wine Made Simple.

Comments (1)

Dara: I feel so betrayed. I've loved your writing since back in the City Pages days, and I respect your depth of knowledge about food and the food biz. Now, you've stooped to giving a shout out to Crave? How could you?

Posted by Craig Kepler | July 27, 2011 8:52 AM

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