Month: May 2002

Tucked away in downtown St. Paul (but then again, what isn’t invariably tucked away down there?), Babani’s is rumored to be the only Kurdish restaurant in the United States. (Quick geography lesson: Kurdistan is a mountainous region occupying 74,000 square miles in southeast Turkey, northwest Iran, northeast Iraq, and northeast Syria—with a population of 25…

Going out for breakfast on a rainy Saturday morning, lingering over those third and fourth cups of regular old coffee, chatting with the pretty young waitress about the smell of the rain in spring and the striking beauty of her just-dyed hair—what could be nicer? Key’s Cafe on Raymond Avenue in St. Paul (at the…

We descended on Hell’s Kitchen on a Monday, the four of us, expecting the hellfire and brimstone and everlasting chaos of a kitchen under siege. Or, at least, we envisioned the antipode to the white tablecloth, fresh-flower breakfast place. Why do we expect Hell to be so over-populated? Perhaps Salvation Sundays, with brunch from 8…

Like all great artists and authors, Jules Feiffer was not a fully formed world-class creator until he’d composed a children’s book. Remember that E.B. White, his brilliant colleague and contemporary at The New Yorker, didn’t really gild his impeccable reputation until he’d composed Charlotte’s Web. This rite of passage separating the great from the legendary…

A few years ago, when Minnesota author Faith Sullivan’s novel The Empress of One (for which she won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize) had just been released, a friend of ours mentioned that Sullivan had recently accepted an invitation to attend her diddly little neighborhood book group as a guest author. How cool is that?…

Summer augurs the arrival of the high season for movies of all varieties. Looking for art-house titles? Why not go to the biggest, baddest art house around? The Walker’s healthy film and video commitments come into full flower in June, and this year is no different. As if to both elucidate and erase the line…