La Vida Torta

Sometimes when I'm not wasting time chasing squirrels around the yard with sheets of chocolate fondant, I'm reading food articles about Los Angeles. Oh, Los Angeles. It is so big.

It is so big that the main theme in its food articles always seems to be: My God, this place is so big, and did you know that all the people who live in this two percent of it eat every day at Chinese Ships? (Really, a closed restaurant name. Also the name of a certain chocolate-enrobed squirrel I know of, but that's another story.) Food writing in Los Angeles seems like a constant effort of letting the few-hundred-thousand people who read newspapers know what the 20 million people around them are up to--and the 20 million are up to such a highly specific, radically different thing than we are up to that it really makes me miss Loretta's Tea Room.

Remember that place? It's long gone, but it was a south Minneapolis little-old-lady restaurant that served things like individually molded Jell-O salads--filled with grated carrots, sour cream, and horseradish, no less. It's not Loretta's food that I miss (shudder), but the sense that it expressed something native, essential, and different about a world of people who lived here.

What was it that hot dishes or bizarre Jell-O salads said? I'm not totally sure, that being the nature of abstract art. But it was something about the massive food companies based here, like Pillsbury and General Mills, and how they used local supermarkets and newspapers as their practical laboratories, promoting recipes and lifestyles in which combining things from boxes and cans was cooking. Add that to the winter-isolation climate, which discouraged the use of expensive fresh vegetables. Now factor in a utopian social-justice and feminist streak that (vaguely) held that it was better for women to be volunteering in the community than selfishly laboring over beef bourguignon. Do all that math, and I think it can be truly said that nowhere on earth was there more enthusiasm--intellectual, civic, and even religious--for combining prefab boxes of corporate products into meals. That led, inevitably I think, to a real cultural fondness for anything very creamy, like gravy, cheese sauce, or that weird supermarket green-tinted sour cream called "guacamole," which is necessary to make the meals from boxes of nothing taste better. Then came the Tuscanization of America, and all those unsophisticated Jell-O salads and cream gravies went away, and crappy mozzarella tomato salads came to rule the earth.

Does that make you feel sad? It's counterintuitive, I know, but it sort leaves me feeling sad. Even though I can clearly see that mourning the passing of things that no one wanted to eat is beyond perverse. But maybe this is the same impulse that encourages us all to keep our old, dull pets and not just shoot them in a bid to upgrade to new and improved ones that can vacuum and sing like Maurice Chevalier while chocolate-dipping the squirrels.

Yet it is also this perverse and roundabout logic that leads me to feel deep and intense things about Manny's Tortas, things that are partisan to the point of being jingoistic, against an enemy that doesn't exist.

Let me explain.

A torta is not a universal constant. To some, a torta is a casserole. To others, a family-sized omelet. It also occupies a rainbow of sandwich forms. As a "burger" in America might be a burger, or a Buffalo-sauce-glazed chicken breast topped with bacon, or a grilled portobello mushroom, a "torta" might be any number of Mexican things served inside a hamburger-bun-like roll--barbecued pork, sliced steak, shredded chicken, or anything at all.

Except I've never heard of them like we have them now, at Manny's Tortas, the new East Lake Street restaurant that opened last month in a snazzy, de Stijl-influenced room full of bright graphics, gray banquettes, and molded plastic chairs that work together to make it look more like a modern art museum's cafeteria than the new after-bar hotspot of south Minneapolis.

There is an actual Manny: Manny Gonzalez, who moved up here to the frigid North from Mexico City some 20 years ago. Gonzalez worked in various restaurants and put in a whopping 10 years in a prominent Minnesota catering kitchen before opening his first place, the Manny's Tortas window in the food court at Mercado Central, the Latin American mall on the corner of East Lake and Bloomington in south Minneapolis. Last month, Manny and his sister Victoria Gonzalez opened the new place, a quick-serve torta restaurant with a beer license and late-night hours, across from the old Town Talk Diner. (Quickly: The place is open till 10 o'clock every night, and till three o'clock in the morning on Fridays and Saturdays. Also, they offer seven kinds of Mexican beer--so, suddenly, there is a place to go on a Friday at midnight for a beer and dinner, at less than $10 a head. Next summer there will even be an outdoor patio.)