The French figured out a long time ago that it isn’t just what you eat, it’s how you eat it: Slowly. In small courses. One course at a time. That might sound smart, but in the Minnesota marketplace, it can be a tough sell. The logic of the local restaurant economy is that if you’ve got to raise prices—as restaurants often do—the best way to make diners feel like they’re getting value for money is to dish out big portions. Enormous portions. The result? Diners eat too much, pay too much, and still take half of their meals home in a doggy bag.
The French solution to enhancing perceived value is to give the customer several smaller courses for a fixed price that is less than what they would pay if they ordered the same courses à la carte (off the menu). Voilà! The prix fixe. (That’s “pree feeks,” not “pree fee.”) There are lots of variations on the basic idea, ranging from two or three courses to gastronomic extravaganzas of nine courses or more; many restaurants offer several.
The more affordable prix-fixe menus aren’t always well publicized, and typically they come with some restrictions. The $40 prix-fixe bistro menu at Vincent – A Restaurant is served Monday through Thursday, while Cosmos’s $35 three-course pre-theater menu is only available from 5 to 7 p.m. nightly. North Coast’s five-course tasting menu is only available during the Wayzata dockside restaurant’s off-season, when business slows from up to seven hundred diners a night to two hundred or fewer; it’s a great value at $35 ($29 on Sundays). But the prix-fixe menu isn’t just a way to bring in customers. “It also is just a chance for me to play with food,” says chef Ryan Aberle. On the tasting menu, Aberle can serve courses that won’t sell well on the dinner menu, such as locally produced foie gras, or a confit of pheasant. The prix-fixe menu also lets Aberle experiment with the trendy hybrid practice of chemistry and cooking known as molecular gastronomy. Inspired by avant-garde chefs like Ferran Adrià (of El Bulli in Spain’s Catalonia province), and Grant Achatz (of Chicago’s Alinea), Aberle has surprised diners with such concoctions as foie gras-flavored Pop Rocks and fruit caviars.
One recent prix-fixe menu at North Coast started with a salad of mâche with sesame dressing and duck prosciutto, accompanied by a tempura-fried poached egg and a wedge of Cabrales cheese with honey; following that was a vanilla-scented squash and lobster bisque. Next came a lamb chop with spiced figs, then braised boneless beef short rib with horseradish spaetzle, and a sweet-and-sour finale of mango poached in black vinegar with coconut ice cream and a butterscotch pudding. Not every course was as memorable as the first, but the batting average was pretty high.