Good Real Food

Russo is downstairs in his office typing up the day’s menu. Earlier that day he had done his provisioning. He has ordered, among other things, some lake trout and perch, a box of chard, and a quarter pound of cinnamon basil. He checks his email, looks at the weather forecast to see how it might affect his farmers—and tonight’s crowd—and personally returns calls asking for reservations. Earlier today, when the staff was trickling in, one of the first questions everyone asked was, “How many on the books?” The answer for this Wednesday night in September is sixteen, and, after taking into account drop-in business, they are expecting to cook for twenty-five, thirty people max. “That’s not going to pay the bills,” says Russo. “We really need to do fifty on a weeknight.”

Heartland was originally intended as a much larger project in downtown St. Paul. Russo was going to build a two hundred-seat jazz lounge and bistro, with a sixty-seat haute cuisine restaurant like Heartland, plus a full-service bakery and a grab-and-go counter to serve the lunch-time crowd. “When the stock market crashed, the money went away,” says Russo. The lease on the property was two million dollars, and according to Russo the landlord wanted another two million on top of that as a guarantee. “I said, ‘Get a national chain,’” says Russo. “They said, ‘We don’t want a national chain.’ I said, “You can’t have it both ways. Either you go with a lease that’s not guaranteed or you get yourself a national.’” In the end, he had to walk away and settle for a forty-eight-seat fine dining restaurant. Russo, his wife, Mega Hoehn, and her family did almost all of the build-out themselves. Hoehn sourced decor for the Prairie-style interior, and her brother did the tile work.

Russo is the first to acknowledge that one of the reasons he is struggling is because of his location. The intersection of Fairview and St. Clair in St. Paul is only going to get so much traffic, and since he has a tasteful, adult sign on the window rather than, say, a two-story neon guitar, there is a chance you could drive by Heartland and not know what you’re missing. But it would be unfair to criticize Russo for his choice. He is stubborn and willful about what goes on the plate, but he’s not striving for obscurity, and would much rather be downtown. “I don’t understand the city council,” he says, speaking in this instance about Minneapolis. “We’re not like New York where you can walk down any street and see a restaurant that’s been there for years. You can’t intersperse chain restaurants downtown and jack rents up and require small restaurateurs to spend that much money.” JP Samuelson has a similar story. He toyed with opening JP downtown, but found a cautionary tale in his last days at D’Amico Cucina, which he left in 2000. “Ninety-eight was an incredib
le year, but you could sense it already,” he says, speaking of the change when the business market trailed off. Samuelson didn’t want to be downtown, because he didn’t want to depend on business travelers on expense accounts, nor did he want to be perceived as a special-occasion restaurant by locals.

The cumulative effect of these decisions—and Russo and Samuelson are by no means alone—is to atomize fine dining, pushing it into neighborhoods, but also perhaps diluting creativity. Not all restaurateurs agree, but we may be seeing the end of the celebrity chef in the Twin Cities. “You can only have so many star chefs in town,” says Mojito’s Chris Paddock, who uses Solera as an example. “Even [founding chefs] Tim McKee and Josh Thoma have done what I have done, and that’s come up with a concept. It’s about branding something.” Samuelson and Russo, however, believe that the chef’s vision for quality ingredients and sustainable agriculture and other larger concerns are still vital. “I think it’s become the symbol of getting back to simple things, of being connected to that food source,” says Samuelson.

The question is whether consumers will support that vision, and at what price. While Russo was tweaking his menu, he had to change the price on the antelope rib eye that had been reborn as a pork porterhouse. He quickly erased the thirty-five dollar price, typed the number two, and then stalled. He was doing the kind of restaurant calculus that independent chefs have to do every day, one of a hundred small decisions that add up to success or failure. Eventually Russo typed a seven and moved on, but in that pause was the weight of always having to translate your heart and soul into dollars and cents.