Safe and Sound

Café Levain
4762 Chicago Ave. S, Minneapolis
612.823.7111
www.restaurantlevain.com

Now that we no longer have roads in the Twin Cities, picking restaurants has gotten a little trickier. Oh, I know that technically we only lost one road, but I think that with summer highway construction still going full-throttle, with the way all the I-35W detour roads, official and unofficial, are now hosting 140,000 extra vehicles, and with the way news reports keep relentlessly pointing out the terrifying and ghastly conditions of the rest of our bridges, we can all agree that we have entered a golden age of staying home. And since it's too late to put in a vegetable garden, we'll also call it a golden age of fasting. Air is the new onion soup. Wind is the new roast chicken. Thoughts are the new crème brûlée.

Mmm, onion soup, roast chicken, and crème brûlée. Don't you just love them? Don't you just hate fasting? Well, let's call the time for fasting over, because if you live in south Minneapolis—or, you know, parts of Edina, Richfield, and so forth—you should know that if you plot your route correctly there is one landlocked new restaurant you could get to without hazarding too many road miles, and it's a place that has onion soup, roast chicken, and crème brûlée beyond reproach. The place is Café Levain, the simple bistro that has replaced dear, departed Restaurant Levain.

Restaurant Levain, of course, was one of the most adventurous fine-dining restaurants in the history of the Midwest, but it closed last New Year's Eve after a long battle trying to fill the house enough days of the week to break even. Owner Harvey McLain's response to the Icarus-like fate of his highfalutin, high-profile erstwhile restaurant was to hire a young line cook who used to work at Restaurant Levain, Eric Sturtz, and charge him with developing a menu of affordable, French-influenced comfort foods. The resulting spot risks little but succeeds.

One of the primary reasons to visit Café Levain is its truly fantastic French onion soup ($7.50). It's all a French onion soup could ever hope to be—the stock is a rich mahogany brown and nearly as beefy as a steak, the onions are sweet and slurpable, the lid of cheese on the well-browned crouton, made with both Gorgonzola and Swiss Emmentaler cheeses, is gooey, piquant, devourable, craveable—really, just perfect. It's going to be one of those restaurants, I think, where six people sit down and order six onion soups—though that's partly because there aren't a lot of other options.

The restaurant serves only three appetizers, including a very good version of pork rillettes ($6), in which mild, rich pork is treated in such a way that it's nearly as soft as custard and spreads like butter on Turtle Bread's famous baguettes. I didn't think much of Levain's mussels; when I tried them they seemed fishy and underseasoned. And I didn't much love their frogs' legs ($8), which were well-breaded and deep-fried to the point that they might have been anything—a cheese curd, say, or a jalapeño popper.

Café Levain has a few salads that change seasonally. The ones I tried were good, though a little more tart than they needed to be. Leaf lettuce in a simple mustard vinaigrette with breakfast radishes ($6), all from local Riverbend Farm, was uncomplicated and appealing. Arugula with celery leaves, roast haricots verts, and an artichoke heart ($8 for an appetizer, $12 for an entree) was promising but needed its dressing toned down.

I trust that the 26-year-old chef, Eric Sturtz, will have that in hand soon. He seems to have very good instincts when it comes to making customer-friendly food. For instance, I called him up to find out a few things before writing this, such as whether there was any orange zest in the broth for one night's remarkable special of an orange bouillabaisse, and learned that the two dishes I liked least at Levain, an eye-crossingly dull tagliatelle pasta ($12) and a dry, plain hangar steak ($18), had been pulled off the menu, and that the remarkable bouillabaisse special had been tweaked and put on permanently. That bouillabaisse ($10) is a stunner—a creamsicle-orange version made with red peppers, mussels, and, when I had it, California sea bass. The addition of orange and cream to the bouillabaisse broth made it as rich as a dessert, as lively as a sunset, and unforgettable.