Eating local, Midwestern style

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

There are several restaurants in Philadelphia and the surrounding areas that feature locally grown ingredients - FARMiCia, White Dog Cafe, and many more.  With the ‘locavore’ movement still in its infancy in many ways, I’m always curious to see what the restaurant culture around eating locally is like in other cities.  I recently had a chance to find out - I was in St. Paul, Minnesota last week for a work conference and met up with some local friends for dinner.

We chose Heartland, a restaurant recently featured by the Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmer.  Not that Heartland really has a lot of bizarre food on the menu - it was featured because it endeavors to use all of an animal - from tail to snout.  On the night I was there, there were no testicles in sight, alas.

Heartland bills itself as ‘contemporary Midwestern’ and sources many of its ingredients locally.  It’s obvious from looking at the menu, which changes nightly, that it’s seriously thought out and very seasonal.  There’s an a la carte menu, as well as a vegetarian and non-vegetarian prix fixe menus.

The amuse bouche the night we went to dinner at Heartland was a slice of venison prosciutto.  I went with the non-vegetarian prix fixe, which was veal liver with mushroom and onion sauce, grassfed beef with cranberries and yams, and a butterscotch tart with peach coulis. The menu was more specific about ingredients, but when I think about the meal my eyes just gloss over and I remember how fantastic everything was.  There wasn’t a speck of anything left on any of the plates.  It was just....tremendous.

I was also able to steal bites of everyone else’s dinner.  I have never had better onion soup - I actually don’t really like onion soup...until I tried Heartland’s onion soup.  The beet salad was great, and don’t even get me started on the wild boar chop.

I understand that St. Paul and Minneapolis have quite a few restaurants devoted to locally grown ingredients, although I wasn’t able to get to any of them in the limited time I had in town.  I can honestly say, though, that I’m jealous - totally jealous of anyone who lives in the vicinity of Heartland.  Around here, Restaurant Alba comes closest to Heartland, but none of the restaurants here seems to do ‘eating local’ with the kind of daring and detail that Heartland does.  Still, I have hope.