Editors Note

So far, brevity isn't the strong point of this blog. We're trying. Be patient, savor it like your favorite drink, don't guzzle.

Chimborazo, Minneapolis

Vin says:

The maniacal, power-hungry editor of this whole thing is right:  I loved those last entries, but, damn, that was too much text. No more background or veiled Holden Caufield references.  The two readers of this blog have demanded more wit and less story, and I am going to do my best. The WTF gang formed a quorum and went out again dreaming that we might find something more and we did:  Chimborazo.

My Achilles heel is a well prepared pork dish, and the minute I saw it on the menu, I knew my whole night would hinge on this dish. If you gave me my choice of a last meal on earth, I would ask for South American roasted pork and somehow find a way to get the pig in every other dish as well. This Ecuadorian roasted pork with hominy and llapingachos was divine; while it maybe was not what I'd want for my last meal, I'd always be content eating this. The pork just melted in my mouth and the hominy surprised me as a worthy accompaniment. Everything here is honestly prepared and straightforward. The other dish that impressed me was the fish and shrimp over rice with a coconut sauce. Again, I would never have put them together, but it tasted rich and wonderful without any overwhelming coconut taste.  And that was what I enjoyed most about this restaurant:  so much of the menu was novel to me and almost all of it I was pleasantly surprised by. Curious about the plantains, yuca croquettes, ceviche, and beef and cheese empanadas with aji criollo (a green hot sauce)? Try them. Without exception, they were all fresh and flavorful. On a whim, we ordered the candied figs and cheese for dessert, and found it a great ending for the meal.

The setting for Chimborazo is what you would expect for a hole-in-the-wall place. The service was reasonable and somewhat helpful. The plastic table cloths on each table are stapled down, and we even had an Ecuadorian flute player and guitar to serenade us. What made this whole environment a little absurd was a random collection of white people in (you guessed it) thick sweaters dancing around us with their children. All the while, the unwatched children at the table kept falling over in their high chairs that were placed upside down on the tiled floor. Despite the odd Hieronymous Bosch scene in front of us, none of this seemed out of place. Maybe it was the Negro Modelos.

Being at Chimborazo reminded me overall of the types of meals I treasure when traveling. The surroundings were a little odd, but the food was memorable, fresh and straightforward. I'd love to go again and I'd recommend anyone search this place out. 3 out of 4 WTFork tines. My only disappointment is that, alas, I wrote too much; in fact, I wrote more this time. The horror.

Trick says:

Even though Minneapolis has become something of a foodie city in the last 15 years, occupying a tier just below meccas like Chicago and New Orleans, I can still remember a time in my youth when Leeann Chin and Guadalaharry's Mexican Restaurant constituted cosmopolitan international fare. So it's always with a little trepidation that I try places like Chimborazo, the little Ecuadorian eatery on Central Avenue in Northeast Minneapolis. Too often such places, whether they be South American, Middle Eastern, or Afghani, seem to think that just adding a touch of cilantro or imitation saffron will get Minnesotans oohing and aahing about the gray mass of sinewy meat that's buried in their rice. But Chimborazo doesn't try such tricks. It offers honest, tasty dishes at a reasonable price, in the process showcasing some of the great Ecuadorian comfort foods.

Since this is a supposed to be a food review and not a Pulitzer Prize–winning disquisition on failing schools or lead-laced paints masquerading as baby formula, let me get right to it. Here are just a few of the many items that my companions and I sampled and that deserve to be highlighted:

Llapingachos: Served as an appetizer or snack, Llapingachos are a distinctively Ecuadorian invention--cheese-infused fried mashed potatoes (sort of like potato pancakes). The ones at Chimborazo were, at least to my taste, as good as almost any you'd find in Quito itself.  They came served over eggs and had a touch of onion, with a side of peanut sauce giving the final twist. You did see that I wrote "served over egg," right?  This dream mix of flavors is what every bachelor wishes he could concoct from the odds and ends left in his fridge. Delicious.

Empanadas: We tried both the beef and cheese empanada appetizers, and although the fillings were a little bland, I loved them all the same. Why? Because sometimes with empanadas you get the perfect moist (sorry, ladies) and juicy center, while the crust falls apart all over your Friday-night chinos. But then sometimes you get a crispy and robust crust, while the center is baked down to char. Yet somehow, the beautiful genius in the Chimbarozo kitchen was able to avoid these pitfalls and hit the elusive crispy-moist sweet spot!  (Now I'm really sorry, ladies.)

Shrimp Ceviche with Plaintain Chips: I suppose you pretty much expect every Ecuadorian restaurant to have ceviche. But we're in the Midwest, not on the coast, and the Ecuadorian highlands, which gives Restaurant Chimbarozo its namesake (Chimbarazo is Ecuador's highest peak), are not themselves the home of great seafood either. Nevertheless, this appetizer was a wonderful surprise. The shrimp were delicately cooked so that the lime was still discernible, and the sauce that often seems to muck up Ecuadorian ceviche was light enough to complement the flavor.

Horneado con Papas: Roast pork is a Ecuadorian staple, and one of the many, many reasons I could never have lived in Old Testament times.  On the evening of our visit, Chimbarazo's pork was cooked to perfection.  It had the juiciness of a cutlet, and was lightly seasoned to bring out the flavor of fat.  It came with a side of llapingachos (tip: if you're looking to sample to llapingachos but don't want to order the appetizer, this entree is the perfect compromise).  There was also a side--more an adornment, really--of mote (white hominy), and this was the only disappointment of the dish. Unlike the salty, sweet, or even roasted varieties of mote you find all over Ecuador, this was basically a mass of white, tasteless nubs. But, hey, that's a small complaint. If you like traditional Norwegian food, you may even like it.

So these are among the many delightful items you'll find at Chimborazo. But it is also what Chimborazo does not have that makes it so special. At Chimborazo you will not find the following:

Cuy (Guinea Pig): It's fun to tell your friends about the time you ate a guinea pig. And who doesn't like the photos of you and your drunk buddies poking the snout with your forks? But honestly, guinea pigs require a lot of work for very little meat and they look like shit. If you want that piece of authentic Ecuador, go there on vacation.

A Flute Band: OK, I'm lying. On Friday nights they do have a band called Ecuador Manta, but they were actually quite good. The acoustic guitar seemed to steer most of the set we heard, and never once did they play Simon and Garfunkel's El Condor Pasa. If it wasn't heaven, at least it wasn't hell.

Ecuadorian Beer: Ecuador doesn't have great beer, and I don't want to pay $6 just to say I drank one in Minneapolis.  No, instead, Chimborazo turns to its Mexican cousins, offering up Negra Modelo. It was, burp, fantastico.

Fake Gringo Communists: There is nothing more annoying than upper-middle-class Americans who come back from Latin America wearing microfleece and open-toed sandals and parroting the refrigerator poetry of Che Guevara. They're also usually very loud in restaurants. We didn't see any of them at all.

I enthusiastically recommend Chimborazo.  On a scale of 1 to 4 fork tines, I give it a very solid 3.

Curtis says:

I'm going to make an honest effort to be brief.

Chimborazo serves fresh, robust, superbly prepared, delicious food. For me, the most impressive aspect was the precision of technique used in the diversity of dishes we ordered. Fried items like empanadas were crisp on the outside, not soggy, and moist and flavorful on the inside. Meats were tender and true to their flavor, not overly seasoned or masked. The llapingachos were mellow and comforting, and the ceviche was a wonderfully garden-fresh contrast to the other items on the menu.

The atmosphere is suited for an intimate date, a group outing, or a family night out. Service has been superb each time I've visited. Chimborazo has also recently started serving wine in addition to beer. You owe it to yourself to get here and enjoy the outstanding offerings. You won't be disappointed. 3 out of 4 tines.

Yarusso Brothers, St. Paul

Drew says:

Yarusso Brothers Italian Restaurant near Swede Hollow Park burned down in February.  According to a poem on a wall inside, and a large mural painted on the outside of the building, a glorious, epicurean Phoenix emerged from the ashes in July.  What actually materialized, though, wasn't the majestic mythical bird with fiery crimson and golden plumage, but an obese, mongoloid Chef Boyardee who has an irrational fear of the spice racks.

A bold, rich, flavorful red sauce is one of the most powerful, curative, life-giving elixirs on earth.  I'm convinced that the perfect bolognese can cure cancer, stop hurricanes, get Jews and Muslims to have non-stop tickle-fights, and make Margaret Cho funny.  A great one is worth its weight in gold.  If you find the perfect gravy, treat it much like you would the perfect boyfriend or girlfriend...grab it and hold on as tight as possible, don't let it go out, and jealously guard it from seeing others. (I'm single, Ladies!)  Yarusso's sauce, however, needs to be set free.  I think we should see other pastas.  It was bland, pale red or slightly orange, and had a strange sickly-sweet flavor I thought might be in the cardamom family (clearly, an abusive family).  The banal sausages and meatballs added to the confusion.  Why has this place survived since 1933?

Perhaps it's the people.  The staff were friendly, helpful, and took time to answer our myriad questions.  The prices were low, too.  Cheap food, and LOTS of it.  I recommend Yarusso's for chemical plant workers, glue huffers, and others whose taste buds have been burned out by years of inhaling solvents.

Curtis says:

Without exception, everyone loves classic Italian-American food. Your bratty 3-year old nephew who thinks his beige Matchbox Camry is cool, your crusty old uncle who makes Sid Hartman seem likeable, and even your food snob friends who pretended to be outraged when Chicago banned foie gras (Mon Dieu!) – all of them love slurping up sloppy spaghetti and dipping fluffy bread into a sweet and tangy tomato sauce. It's in the human genome. Anyone who tells you they don't love it is lying straight to your face. I wanted to love Yarussos. Great part of town, rich history, rising literally from the ashes, friendly staff, In-This-Economy prices, etc.

Remember the news reports of the Exxon Valdez disaster? Remember all the little wildlife struggling in vain to free themselves from the petroleum goo? They always had footage of some volunteer scrubbing a freaked out cormorant with a toothbrush. Or worse, the lower level do-gooders were scrubbing rocks. That was their assignment. Scrubbing rocks. 

Unfortunately all the flavor in the food at Yarusso's is trapped under a goo of bland sauce and shredded cheese. All the dishes we ordered were smothered in the same tasteless blanket. Even the frozen, unsalted pizza dough had toppings smothered under cheese and were unable to be cooked. The only dish that seemed to burst out a little flavor was the Italian-style fried catfish. And I'm guessing that's because the fish breading had some built-in salt and pepper before frying. Yarusso Brothers needs a Prius full of gustatory do-gooders to scrub the sauce-cheese off the food and set the flavor free. 

It's no fun ripping a restaurant. People are usually working their asses off to make a living and provide a product to make customers happy. On this visit, it seemed like the product was longevity and reputation - not the food.  If I'm craving some old-timey Italian-American delights, I'm heading down the street to DeGidio's.

Trick says:

Yarusso Brothers Italian Restaurant is a St. Paul institution.  It sits near the south end of Payne Avenue in the heart of Swede Hollow, an immigrant enclave for more than a century and once a miniature version of New York's Lower East Side, teeming with dry-goods stores, garment workers, and day laborers.  And as the Yarussos are quick to tell you--on their storefront, on their menu, on their Website--they have been serving up the same family recipes since 1933.  With a homegrown working-class pedigree like that, you're almost guaranteed delicious food and an authentic experience, right?  Not exactly.

Let's start with the lesser of my two gripes, the ambience of the place.  I think that like most people, when I go to an old-school Italian restaurant, I expect the kitschy homages to the homeland--you know, the self-consciously mismatched wine glasses and the place mats bearing a map of Italy--but why do we need TVs running all three Godfather movies simultaneously or autographed photos of the Sopranos cast?  Isn't this like a Mexican restaurant showing Slowpoke Rodriguez cartoons or a sushi bar hanging photos of Japanese toddlers doing calculus?  Add to that the palsied paintings of Doric columns and the Roman Colosseum that adorn the dining room, and you've got yourself Vito Corleone's idea of a sports bar: the TVs show mob shootouts instead of football games and the walls are decorated with marble ruins instead of license plates.

Now all of this would be easy to overlook (hell, it might even be charming) if the food was special.  But here was the real letdown.  My companions and I ordered almost all of the restaurant's signature dishes, and with only rare exceptions they came up bland.  The baked Manicotti and baked Mostaccioli were so covered in cheese that they were virtually indistinguishable from each other.  The other pasta dishes came in a speciality sauce whose bits of green pepper watered down any hint of basil, oregano, or red pepper that might have been there.  Most disappointing of all, the rigatoni was overcooked and flaccid (that's what she said).  The few items that partially redeemed the meal were the fried catfish with pasta and red sauce--a clever Minnesotan-Italian fusion--and the meatballs and sausages, which seemed to have a hint of anise and were mind-blowingly massive (that's what she said).

It's that comment about portion size where my review should conclude.  For before I considered food quantity, I was left puzzling over how Yarussos could be successful with such mediocre quality.  But then it occurred to me; it probably had something to do with the way they kept harkening back to 1933.  When you think of 1933, what are you left with if you take away George Burns radio programs, the loving family life of the Waltons, and guys in jaunty hats saying "Hold on right there, buster"?  Labor unrest, FDR's fireside chats, and that dude selling 5-cent apples on Wall Street.  That's right, the Great Depression, and it sucked.  For those few Depression-era Americans who could afford a meal out with the family, they demanded predictability and quantity.  And that's exactly what you'll get at Yarussos.  Maybe that's all a lot of people are looking for in these tough times as well.  But if you're looking for a neighborhood Italian restaurant that will do more than fill you up, this isn't it.

Vin says:

Like most pretentious folk, I spend hours railing against the dreadful food and artificiality of the suburbs.  You know the place: Ye Olde Hamburger Shoppe, in a faux brick mall with the world's greatest chicken wings.  Enough.  So, how could I not be happy at the thought of going to a place like Yarusso's?  The history of being St. Paul's oldest family owned Italian restaurant and tradition carrying through three generations draws me in like a black hole.  Then there is overcoming the recent destruction from a fire.  According to its owners, there was never a doubt this place would come back, and the customers have responded in kind.  The reverence for this place is legion;  Yarusso's has a claim on its neighborhood and generations from St. Paul. 

The loud, gleaming interior is what Bucca tries to be but never manages to pull off.  This is kitchy, but an earned form of it– murals to Swede Hollow, Soprano's pictures, bad poetry and all three Godfather movies playing at the same time.  It's one thing to have a butter bust of Elvis to be cute, but you're entitled to a tacky mural to Swede Hollow after you fed its denizens.   The owners are sincere and lovable, and the servers kind, if somewhat inept.  Yarusso's somehow retains its charm with all its enjoyable distractions. 

So what is there not to like about this place?  Well, the food comes to mind.  Oh, there was a lot of it.  It was the kind of spread you wished for after a stint on "Survivor."  The only problem is that it was mediocre.  The Pasta Supreme and the Dago Supreme were indistinguishable though one was served on bread- both were just a mass of peppers, onions, mushrooms, meat and starch.  I was more hopeful turning towards anything with red sauce on it.   This was the first thing Yarusso's started simmering once the new restaurant passed code.  The mostaccioli and rigatoni with its mighty red wouldn't let me down, right?  It did.  Again these were colossal dishes where overcooked pasta was paired with a red sauce that couldn't stand on its own.  The first few bites were enticing, but then it went on longer than "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida."  About the only thing I found myself going back for were some of the smaller dishes we had ordered: the fried catfish, eggplant and sausage.  While not brilliant, these were a welcome refuge from the pasta.

Despite its faults, I still have a hard time trashing Yarusso's– there is more going on here than just the food.  Bring your kids and your appetite as you might not need to eat for days.  Going to Yarusso's and hoping to find fine Italian food is like going to Cancun and hoping to see Mexico.  You might like what you find, but you'll be disenchanted if you were expecting more.

What is this What The Fork?

What The Fork is about food and restaurants in the Twin Cities that are not part of the D'Amico cabal and are not the overhyped places with massive PR machinery and what seems to be a little-too-cozy relationship with some of the local food writers/bloggers/fanboys (see Black Sheep Coal Fired Pizza.) The four tines of What The Fork are dedicated to celebrating good food, hopefully alerting you to some unsung goodness around town, calling out the poseurs, and boosting their own already inflated egos.