All in Artful Living
My first encounter with anchovies was a caper, anchovy and olive pizza that was so eye-wateringly salty that it ended my relationship with anchovies before we had a chance to get acquainted. Generally, a food accepted as edible by some fraction of the human race is something I can find a way to eat. But I couldn’t finish that pizza.
It was generally understood, growing up Catholic in St. Paul, that you ate fish on Fridays as a form of sacrifice. For one day, you were to set aside the self-indulgence and the faintly sin-sullied physical satisfactions of dripping hamburgers and bleeding steaks for the prim virtues of a fillet of fish.
There were still dangers, even then. There was a smell we called “fishiness,” with distantly poisonous associations. And there was, of course, the widely acknowledged scourge of asphyxiation by tiny translucent bones.
Winner: 2019 James Beard MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award
Consider this: In the past two years, 23 James Beard Award semifinalists have come from Minnesota. Their names are Boemer, Brown, Malone and Roberts. Their names are Guzman, Kim, Nguyen and Yang.
When the Super Bowl came to Minneapolis earlier this year, Esquire called the city “the food world’s best kept secret.”
In an article entitled “Where to Travel in 2018,” the Wall Street Journal suggested 10 destinations to its readers. Go to Shanghai, it said. Go to Montenegro. Go also, it said, to Minneapolis.
Why Minneapolis? For its food.
Danny King asks me to button the top button of my sports coat, which I inherited several years ago from my father-in-law, a barrel-chested man approximately two inches shorter than I. I’m standing in the middle of the studio floor at King Brothers Clothiers, surrounded by racks of expensive-looking fabric, leather furniture, and a drink cart stocked with amber whiskey.