33. Lucia and An

There are restaurants that define cities. For me, Lucia’s and Rice Paper were two such restaurants. They are both closed now, and Minneapolis seems incomplete without them. I dined at these restaurants at least monthly for many years and they were the first places where I’d go after returning from visiting Eric abroad. In many ways those two restaurants were my kitchen table when I was living alone.

I firmly believe Lucia’s deserves a lifetime achievement award. Lucia Watson opened her eponymous restaurant in 1985. She was part of the national slow food movement and sourced local, seasonal and organic produce from midwestern farms. She elevated the straightforward cooking of the Northern Heartland while still maintaining its familiar qualities. Lucia’s expanded slowly over many years, starting from a small dining space, first doubling in size (without losing its intimacy), later adding an adjacent wine bar, and finally opening a side bakery/café called Lucia’s To Go. Generations of local cooks got their start at Lucia’s and many waitstaff stayed for 10-15 years. She inspired that kind of loyalty. Lucia’s was also a gathering place for a subset of Minneapolis residents. It seemed that I always ran into people I knew there or people that I wanted to meet. And it was the place where I would always bring out of town guests and say, this is Minnesota food.

The inspiration for Lucia’s was drawn from the land and its inhabitants, from early explorers, voyageurs and trappers who learned how to live off the land from the Ojibway and Dakota tribes, to the immigrant settlers arriving from Scandinavia, Germany and Eastern Europe. Lucia researched menus from the logging camps of Minnesota and Wisconsin, food that was cooked by farm cooks who fed 30 or more men who traveled to the area to harvest wheat, and from recipes shared on radio homemaker shows that linked women over the vast distances of the region. She carefully observed how her customers’ tastes would change over the seasons, and which dishes were particularly appealing to those seeking genuine regional flavors as well as new interpretations of traditional dishes. In her cookbook, Savoring the Seasons, co-written with Beth Dooley, Lucia writes that her food reflects our need to waste nothing, to savor all that we have and to share the bounty. To me, those are attributes that epitomize midwestern cooking and values. In the cookbook’s introduction there is a reference to a lecture by Sara Tyson delivered in Minneapolis in 1894 that states, “Well-fed people never mind the weather. An inch of healthy fat on the body is worth more in keeping warm than a sealskin coat”. This justifies the 10 pounds that I gain every winter in Minnesota.

Lucia’s menu was always simple and seasonal: four starters, four main courses, four side dishes and no limit to the number of desserts on offer (which is as it should be). The remarkable thing about Lucia’s menu was that no matter how much it changed, and it changed monthly, I was always tempted by everything on the menu. The mains always included one fish, one poultry, one red meat and one vegetarian offering and it was always difficult to choose among them. When it came to dessert, the selection was always displayed on a platter and brought to the table by your waiter. It was next to impossible to narrow it down to one, and sometimes I didn’t.

Lucia sold her restaurant in 2014 and though it lasted for a few more years, it was never quite the same without Lucia herself. For me Lucia’s was the site of many gatherings and special occasions as well as countless meals alone, and at one of her tables I always felt perfectly comfortable and well cared for. When Lucia’s closed, a piece of the city was shuttered with it. I’m still sad when I think of the loss, but I will be forever grateful to Lucia Watson and her staff for giving me 30 years of delicious, nutritious, satisfying, fortifying, heart-warming, and reassuring meals.

An Nguyen was part of a more recent wave of immigration to Minnesota and provided me with my second kitchen away from home. An is the seventh of 14 children who grew up in Huế, a city in central Vietnam that was the national capital from 1802 to 1945 and the site of a beautiful, UNESCO World Heritage recognized citadel. The Hue Citadel encompasses the Imperial City, with palaces and shrines and the Forbidden Purple City, once the emperor’s home. This region in South Vietnam was also known as an area of heavy fighting during the Vietnam War, as it was close to the North Vietnamese border.

The Vietnamese community in the United States was small until the South Vietnamese immigration to the country following the Vietnam War. The War ended in 1975 when Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, fell to North Vietnamese forces. Between 1975 and 2010, 1.2 million people from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia immigrated to the United States. Many of these people came to Minnesota through the combined efforts of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services and Lutheran Social Services of Minnesota.

An’s family originally immigrated to Quebec, but later she came to Minneapolis and became a serial entrepreneur who first helped open two very successful Vietnamese restaurants, Matin and Lotus, in the 1980s. She then opened Avalanche in 1990, a women’s clothing store serving a wide range of women, many of whom were successful and independent and An provided them with a broader range of choices, to express themselves through fashion. She quickly developed a loyal, almost cult-like following in her shop next door to Lucia’s Restaurant. After 14 years she asked herself, “What do I really want to do?” She discovered a small property for sale in the Linden Hills neighborhood of Minneapolis and bought it the next day. In that space she planned to offer food reminiscent of what could be found at food stands in a country village. She envisioned an ideal of simple happiness, protected from the outside world by a forest of bamboo. A place where each dish conveyed a sense of belonging to a story bigger than one’s own. Where the food was personal but not egotistical. This vision became her restaurant, Rice Paper, and each dish was inspired by a childhood memory. Her Monsoon Dumplings came from her experience as a child playing in the rain during monsoon season and the sense of childhood delight. She created another dish called Grapefruit Festivity from the Buddhist tradition of acknowledging the death of a father or grandfather by sharing each family member’s best dish. Her Roadside Smoky Plate came from a woman in her childhood neighborhood who would build a fire at the corner of her house and cook meats to sell to her neighbors.

Eric and I met An shortly after she opened her tiny restaurant with walls covered with bamboo wallpaper, and we were instantly transported into her world of memories and delighted by the flavors of every dish. We had never tasted this kind of clean, sophisticated and flavorful Vietnamese food in our lives, and were enthralled by the experience she had created. Rice Paper was a place that we and many others returned to week after week as her menu expanded. An shared with us her process of trying and testing each recipe by tweaking each ingredient until she found the contentment of bringing a memory to life, when her tears would flow as the truth of each creation was finally realized.

Rice Paper expanded twice over its 10-year run and An became a dear friend. Through An we have come to understand that Vietnamese cuisine is one of the most sophisticated in the world. The flavors are both complex and subtle, and the incredibly vast culinary repertoire represents one of the healthiest diets in the world. An’s approach is true fusion, not only from her personal experience of growing up in a large Vietnamese family, but from having been exposed to a world of global culinary influences. I still ache as I recall the flavors of her Indochine Salad and Crispy Tofu Puffs. I have eaten at dozens of traditional and contemporary Vietnamese restaurants, but for me none have ever compared to An’s unforgettable kitchen of childhood memories.

Extraordinary people create extraordinary restaurants. They provide us with meals that we couldn’t or wouldn’t cook at home. But more than that, they effectively serve up for us their own history and their personal stories. They invite us to share the food that defines their family and binds their relationships. They welcome us into an intimate experience, and they invite us to enter their world. In the process of partaking in the dishes so carefully selected and prepared for us we also take part in their collective stories, and that in return contributes to our own stories. Lucia and An have done that for me.

Indochine Salad

From An Nguyen’s Rice Paper Restaurant

Rice Paper was the perfect neighborhood restaurant: intimate, friendly and consistently delicious. The star attraction was definitely its owner, our friend An, as beautiful on the inside as she is on the outside. An’s luminous smile always made you feel like she was doing everything with just you in mind. An does this naturally as she has a giving heart and an eagerness to share things she loves. She also paid attention to what we liked, and she would often offer us little extra treats she thought might delight us. They always did.

As we became friendlier with her, we eventually invited her over for a meal. This made me a little nervous as cooking for a chef always feels risky, presumptuous even. Since we invited her for a Summer lunch, I chose to prepare Edna Lewis’ wonderfully chunky chicken salad, with a homemade mayonnaise packed full of fragrant herbs, including chervil, chives and tarragon. It is a recipe that Chris’ mother particularly enjoyed, and one that we like to serve when the weather gets hot. I thought it might nicely represent the mixture of our combined families’ culinary heritage and traditions. As soon as we started to eat, however, I had a sudden, panicky realization that I had not selected the right dish for An, or at least not a dish with her likes and dislikes in mind. Vietnamese food is much lighter and cleaner than most western fare, and though my chicken salad was full of fresh herbs I feared the homemade mayo was too rich and heavy and the overall taste profile far too mild.

An was a gracious guest, however, and she expressed nothing but gratitude for the luncheon prepared. I still worried about it all day afterward, but then Chris reminded me that inviting someone over to eat is as much about sharing as it is about pleasing, and it certainly shouldn’t be a performance to be judged by. Over the years our friend An had opened herself up to us, sharing her history and traditions through her incredible food. I suppose all along An had been teaching us how to appreciate another’s cuisine at the same time as we developed a deeper appreciation of our own. She may not have loved the chicken salad, but it was our opportunity to share our own story by presenting a dish from our own traditions. It was also our opportunity to reciprocate her limitless generosity. I know for a fact that she loved every bit of that.

Below is the recipe for the Indochine Salad that Chris enjoyed for so many years at Rice Paper, and which An graciously gave to us after the restaurant closed. It is as light and clean and fresh as you could ever hope for. ~Eric

The Sauce
5 tsp rice wine vinegar
3-4 tsp vegetable oil
5-6 tsp creamy peanut butter sauce
3 tsp Chinese soy sauce (not tamari)
3 tsp packed brown sugar
2 tsp fresh minced ginger
1 tsp minced garlic

The Salad
5 cups shredded or sliced green cabbage
2 cups thinly shredded / sliced purple cabbage
2-3 medium carrots, shredded
4 green onions, thinly sliced on the diagonal
1⁄2 cup or more freshly chopped cilantro

The Chicken
2 grilled chicken breasts, sliced or cubed
4 tsp crushed fresh-roasted peanuts
2 tsp fresh-roasted sesame seeds
4 tsp crispy shallots

1. Blend the first three ingredients of the Sauce in a blender

2. Add the rest of the ingredients of the Sauce and blend well

3. Cover and chill, or let stand at room temperature

4. When ready to serve, combine all the Salad ingredients into a large bowl

5. Add the Sauce and the Chicken to the bowl and toss to coat

6. Sprinkle with peantus, sesame seeds and crispy shallots

Serves 2 as a main course or 4 as a salad