Month: February 2002

You want Russian? This place is real Russian (or as Russian as you can get in the old Robbinsdale American Legion building.) Russian owners, Russian cooks, Russian wait staff, Russian décor, Russian music, Russian customers, Russian food, Russian vodka. Lots of Russian food. Lots of Russian vodka. We’ve been there three times now and have…

On the eastern edge of Minneapolis, in the beautiful, aging-hippie enclave of Prospect Park, stands the witch’s hat tower, a landmark known to anyone who’s lived here more than five minutes. Two blocks to the west is another neighborhood landmark known mainly to the localest of locals: the Signature Cafe. Since 1999, Mahmoud Arafa and…

The Loring Pasta Bar—the second coming of owner Jason McLean’s original downtown success—is as fantasmic as anything Disney could have dreamed up (after his third martini) for a night of debaucherous eye candy smothered in gorgonzola and crimini mushrooms. It’s high theatre and nobody in town heaps it on like McLean. No stone—or tile or…

To fill the Sunday night void following the third season of The Sopranos, HBO launched Six Feet Under, created by the Academy-Award winning writer of American Beauty, Alan Ball. That Ball boy happens also to be a recent winner of the Golden Globe for best drama series, thanks to this new gig. The show follows…

Let’s just get this out in the open right away: Is Xena a lesbian, or merely bi-curious? Even if it’s been twelve months since the series ended its five-year run on network TV, it’s important to dwell on these questions of ancient history, rather than the soft issues of “female empowerment,” say, or “historical accuracy”…

It began with a simple question: “Kirk or Picard?” No sooner had our lips formed the letter P than the wretched geek leaped from his barstool and set upon us with his Palm Pilot stylus, jabbing us repeatedly in the left kidney and unleashing a spit-drenched litany of Klingon epithets. Only hours later, laid up…