The Rake Magazine

jP American Bistro didn't open for dinner tonight. A sign on the door says "jP American Bistro will be closed the evening of September 30, 2008."

That's all I know for sure. If you know more than I do, please write me at iggers@rakemag.com, or post a comment.

Meanwhile, in other news, I have a couple of books to recommend:

After I wrote (unfavorably) about a book called Where the Locals Eat: Minneapolis St. Paul, written long-distance from Nashville, Tennessee, Rake publisher Tom Bartel sent me a note suggesting that I might want to mention The Rake's own city guide, Secrets of the City: 2008-2009 Guide to Minneapolis St. Paul (Loquamur LLC, 12.95).

I hadn't actually seen the guide at that point, but Tom sent me a copy, and I am pleased to report that I like it a lot. (What a relief!) The restaurant listings are smarter, better written, and include a lot of good restaurants that were left out of the Tennessee guide - like 20.21 and Café Levain and Café Maude and Peninsula Malaysian. And there's a lot more to Secrets than that: tips on shopping, arts and entertainment, architecture, theater and even day trips. And the introductory essays by Neal Karlen, Brad Zellar and Nick Coleman are worth the price of admission all by themselves. It's available at Barnes & Noble and independent book stores, or directly from the publishers here.

In a more literary vein, I can't remember a culinary memoir that I've enjoyed more than Steve Lerach's Fried: Surviving Two Centuries in Restaurants (Borealis Books, $22.95). Like I wrote in the blurb on the back of the book, "Fried is a feast for foodies, a fast and funny ride through Twin Cities restaurant kitchens in the heyday of meat and potatoes. Steve Lerach confesses that he 'wasn't much of a chef,' but he's one hell of a storyteller."

Lerach will be reading from his book at Magers & Quinn bookstore, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Minneapolis, 7:30 p.m. on Monday, October 6.

Strictly speaking, I am not sure the dishes I sampled the other day at Mango Thai Cuisine at Selby and Dale in St. Paul really qualify as authentic Thai cuisine. I don't remember seeing any western-style broccoli the last time I was in Bangkok, and I am pretty sure I never saw a seafood salad served over baby field greens in an oversized martini glass, or raad na noodles topped with curled strands of carrot. Ditto the crab avocado rolls, and the mango spring rolls, and the pan-grilled tuna wasabi salad.

But then again, this whole notion of authenticity is over-rated. The real problem with a lot of the Thai restaurants I've visited locally isn't that they aren't authentic; it's that the flavors have been dumbed down - either by adding too much sugar to spicy dishes, or by skipping some of the ingredients such as galingal or lemon grass or kaffir lime leaf, that give Thai dishes their complex and memorable flavors.

To judge by the dishes I've tasted, the cooks at Mango Thai don't dumb down Thai cuisine, they smarten it up, combining traditional flavors with a sophisticated sensibility. The baby field greens may have been untraditional, but the flavor of the seafood salad ($10.95) was authentically Thai. Same for the raad na noodles, wide noodles tossed with seafood ($12.95, we substituted tofu) in a savory brown sauce. The menu is limited, compared to most Thai restaurants - only one red curry and one green curry are offered, (plus a Massaman beef curry), and many of the traditional stir-fries are missing, but the kitchen seems responsive to special requests: most dishes can be ordered vegetarian.

Mango Thai is actually a sister restaurant to Chai's, the popular little storefront on the Minneapolis West Bank, which has a virtually identical menu. As at Chai's, the décor achieves a very stylish bistro look on an very tight budget - tabletops of varnished plywood, lamp shades from Ikea. (Just guessing.) The one essential bistro feature that is missing is a wine and beer list.

Mango Thai Cuisine, 610 Selby Ave., St. Paul, 651-291-1414.

When the publishers of Where The Locals Eat - Minneapolis St. Paul (Magellan Press, $14.95) asked me to tell my readers about their new dining guide, I told them I wanted to see a copy first.

Good thing I asked. They sent me a copy, and if this book were ground beef, it would be illegal to sell it as hamburger: too much filler, too little meat. Where The Locals Eat is 240 pages long, but only about 30 of those pages are actually listings of Twin Cities restaurants, and this is one of those long, skinny books (like the Zagat guide) so it's really more like 15 pages of content about local restaurants. The rest of the book is padded out with lists of top ten restaurants from 49 other metro areas around the country.

As for the local content, a lot of it is stuff they could have gotten from a phone book. There are 100 restaurants listed, but more than half of those listings are just name, type of restaurant, price category, address, phone number and website. And some of those listings are inaccurate: La Belle Vie, one of the best and most expensive restaurants in town, doesn't rate a review, but it's listed as a $$ restaurant, while the modestly priced Cave Vin is rated $$$. (I assume that $$ means moderately priced, and $$$ means expensive, but I am just guessing - the symbols aren't actually explained in the book.)

The authors claim to have consulted with local gourmets, and perhaps they did, but to judge by the names I googled, the book appears to have been written long-distance from Tennessee. For the most part, the restaurants they included are reasonable choices, though there are some oddities: only two Chinese restaurants are listed, and one of them (Azia) isn't really Chinese, and the other one (Relax) is out of business.