September 2012

This past Sunday night, if you had walked into the ballroom on the third-floor of Solera Restaurant in downtown Minneapolis, the first thing you would have seen was meat. Four kinds of meat, to be precise – coppa, dry cured ham, black-pepper sausage, and fennel sausage – all made by Mike Phillips of Three Sons Butchers in Northeast Minneapolis. An entire table of meat, enough to feed the several hundred people who had turned out for the second-annual Farm in the Cities benefit dinner. And after the meat, the next thing you would have seen would have been the chefs, many decked out in their whites, ringing the table and joking around as they arranged the twenty-something butcher boards of charcuterie.

If you are on any type of local food listserv in Minnesota, you’ve received an invitation, or two, or ten to the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy’s Food + Justice = Democracy national meeting, convening September 24 -26 in downtown Minneapolis.

IATP’s goals for the convergence are lofty; the conference is billed as a national meeting to change the food justice narrative, where “participants will co-create a national food justice platform to push our government and our political leaders to prioritize a fair, just and healthy food system.”

This weekend, a collection of all-star Twin Cities chefs and farmers will be coming together for a good cause. Spearheaded by Jorge Guzman, the executive chef at Solera Restaurant, the second-annual Farm in the Cities event highlights the true meaning of farm-to-table dining, all while benefiting a good cause.

What would you do if you heard about a place called Nacho's in the suburbs? Not a chance right? Sounds like someone's excuse to serve monstrous plates of high calorie, cheese smothered food. Now, what if all you did was add the word Supermercado. Nacho's Supermercado. Ok, I suppose it sounds a bit like a joke, but it is real and it is in downtown Hopkins. We simply could not resist checking it out because nothing about the name and location made sense. I was careful not to research it so that our surprise would be complete. What we found, was definitely a surprise, in more ways than one. 

Were there nachos? Nope. Was it a supermercado? Not really. Did they have a tortilla press, excellent barbacoa and three types of tamales? Well, of course. Lucky us…again.