Bucheron opened last year on the corner of Nicollet and 43rd in South Minneapolis and quickly garnered local and then national acclaim. They are currently up for a James Beard award for Best New Restaurant (in the entire country). That they should have gotten all this attention is not surprising. While the restaurant is not directly a part of the Gavin Kaysen Restaurant-Industrial Complex, the owners and other key figures are graduates of it, having worked at Spoon & Stable, Demi and Bellecour (and doubtless other properties as well). When you have a certain pedigree, attention is guaranteed. But a restaurant still has to deliver on the promise of that pedigree. One year on, on the basis of our dinner there this past weekend, I can say that the promise is being kept. We had a very fine meal. Details follow.
We were dining with friends we eat out with often. We arrived 20 minutes early for our 8.30 reservation to find our table for four was ready. It was still light out when we arrived—and a number of people were taking advantage of the good weather and their limited outdoor seating. We, however, were inside. The dining room is small (some might say cosy), and—once the sun goes down—quite dark (some might say intimate). And the tables are not over-far from each other. There is also seating at the bar (the chairs looked comfortable) and a few seats along a counter by the window next to the entrance. These seats are reserved for walk-ins. While prime-time seats at tables are currently hard to come by—and doubtless will be even more so if they win that Beard award—our sense (later confirmed by our server) was that anyone willing to eat after 8.30 pm will not have much trouble getting a table.
We settled down, placed an order for cocktails and perused the menu. The savoury dishes are divided into four sections: seafood (raw, cured and cooked), starters, second course and mains. They’re not billed as such and while the first lot is clearly more starter’y than the other, those dishes aren’t small per se. Which is to say that it’s hard to imagine someone eating an entire dish from the starters section as an appetizer, then one from the second course before moving on to a main. The dishes in both courses are really built for sharing and that is what we did. In fact, after consultation with our server, we shared the mains as well. We were tempted by the oysters but passed on the seafood section entirely. The order we put together was comprised of four starters (three listed on the menu, one a special), three from the second course, and two from the mains (one of three listed dishes and another special).
This is what we ate. Up first were:
- Pommes dauphines, gruyère, celery, caraway | 15
- Venison tartare, poached egg yolk, spruce tips, rye chips | 20
- Beet salad, green garlic chèvre, pickled radicchio, blood orange, quinoa crumble | 18
- Chicken liver mousse, polenta bread/cake, grilled morels, sugar snap peas etc. | 18
The consensus pick of this round was the beet salad which was composed just perfectly (and left us ruing the absence of bread to mop up the dressing with once the beets were gone). The pommes dauphines were expertly executed and the venison tartare was both pretty on the plate and elemental on the palate (though, as always when confronted with chips/flatbread to eat tartare with, I wished there was some toast instead). We were all less crazy about the chicken liver mousse special (the components listed above are from my unreliable memory). The mousse itself was good but the dish didn’t work texturally for us. The polenta cake/cornbread it was on was too dense and the grilled morel (whose flavor was completely lost) added more chew.
On to the second course:
- Vadouvan curry pappardelle, rabbit ragout, peas & carrots, parmesan, Thai basil | 29
- Nettle & sheep’s milk ricotta ravioli, La Quercia ham, ramps, asparagus, snap peas | 29
- Roasted broccoli, mushrooms, berbere spice, coquillo olives, garlic chips, anchovy vinaigrette | 19
This course had a 100% hit rate with the pappardelle and the ravioli coming in for special praise. I can’t say that curry of any kind made any impression on me with the former but the pasta was excellent and the rabbit ragout worked very well with everything else. The ravioli were likewise excellent as was everything else on the plate—though I thought the ham was surplus to requirements, the rest of the table disagreed. There was a lot going on in the broccoli plate but it all came together very well.
Mains:
- Chamomile-crusted Alaskan halibut, roasted artichokes, watercress, couscous, bacon | 45
- Grilled lamb chops, lamb “meatloaf”, maitake mushrooms, cherry-lamb jus, pea tendrils | 50
The halibut was on the menu and the lamb was a special (our server assured us it was shareable between two people). I thought the halibut was just a touch over but everyone else disagreed; we had no disagreement, however, over the other components of the plate or the composition of the dish as a whole. And we had absolutely no disagreement whatsoever about the lamb chop special which was outstanding in every particular, from the perfectly cooked lamb to the mushrooms (maitake, if I’m not misremembering) to cherry-lamb jus to the pea tendrils on top.
We were full but had to get some dessert:
- Huckleberry clafoutis, oat sorbet, maple crumble, poached rhubarb, strawberry consommé | 17
- Carrot cake, cream cheese frosting, raisin purée, pecans, carrot-ginger sorbet | 17
The carrot cake was very good but I may have liked the orange-ginger sorbet on the plate even more. The clafoutis was excellent (and the unlikely-sounding oat sorbet was very good too).
Ah yes, our drinks. The cocktails we had were: the Hotel Nacional (rum, pineapple etc.), the Vesper, their mezcal version of the Paper Plane, and an Old Fashioned. All were enjoyed, though I thought my Old Fashioned could have stood to be a little less sweet. After the cocktails we moved on to a bottle of a skin contact Viognier. It couldn’t quite stand up to the lamb but went well with the pastas and the fish.
For a look at the restaurant and everything we ate and drank, launch the slideshow below. Scroll down for thoughts on service and to see how much the meal cost.
Service was very good. Our lead server was knowledgeable about everything on the menu and guided us adeptly. She was friendly without being over-familiar and neither hovered nor disappeared. Price? The prices look high when you look at their website but you have to remember that the prices have an 18% gratuity baked in. The check arrives with no expectation of further tip. I will say that I do wish they would just raise that baked-in gratuity to 20 or 21% because if there’s something I don’t enjoy after a nice meal it’s doing arithmetic to figure out how much more I should leave to bring the total gratuity up to 20%. In our case the check as presented to us came to just over $475 and we left an additional $8 or so for a total of $484. That’s $121/head for a lot of food, four cocktails and a bottle of wine. I’d say that’s a very good value for what we ate and drank. I don’t know if we’ll be back this year but we’ll be back next year for sure and if you haven’t been yet, I recommend them highly on the basis of this meal.
Alright, what’s next on the food front? I really do need to close out my Delhi reports from March before more international travel begins in a few weeks. Not sure yet if/where we’ll eat out this weekend. Let’s see how it goes.