Dining: The view at Loring Kitchen & Bar
Minneapolis has far too few eating and drinking venues that capitalize on the city's much-vaunted park system. Which is why I'm hoping that the Loring Kitchen & Bar will be the start of a trend.
It's a shame that the restaurant, a much hipper sibling to Birch's in Long Lake, didn't open in, say, May, because it embraces its surroundings in a big way. The long rectangular dining room flaunts its Loring Park views from just about every table. (It's quite a view, too: the 126-year-old park, originally called Central Park but named for Charles Loring, the "father of Minneapolis parks," in 1890, has never looked better).
The bar goes one step further, splitting its imprint between indoors and outdoors, where it faces a table-lined, open-air loggia. There's a second patio, nicely sheltered in the courtyard of the swank apartment building above the restaurant. The whole shebang might be the city's new standard in outdoor dining venues.
Chef Eric Strathy puts a modern twist on classic American comfort food. Entrees ($15 to $29) include a pan-fried half chicken with fries and coleslaw, seared tuna with wasabi-laced whipped potatoes, beer-braised short ribs and butter-baked walleye. Oblong pizzas ($10 to $13) get the liberally covered treatment. Along with a half-pound burger ($10) served with a long list of mix-and-match options (fried egg, caramelized onions, bacon, five different cheeses, each $1), there's a Sunday church picnic-inspired burger ($13) made with cornmeal-crusted ground chicken and topped with a layer of mashed potatoes, sweet corn and coleslaw.
Strathy puts his heart into a series of small plates ($5 to $8) done up in share-able portions: blinis topped with smoked chicken and roasted sweet corn, a corn pancake dressed with smoked trout, layers of roasted beets and sliced scallops, crab cakes and grilled meatloaf. Weekends turn into a casual breakfast-lunch service, and the simple desserts (cheesecake, caramel-drizzled chocolate layer cake) are produced by the Salty Tart in Minneapolis.
