The Bearded Goats of Uptown

I creep up behind a maroon Rav4 and look in the side mirror. No cars are approaching in the left lane. I crank the wheel and stomp the gas, snaking into the right lane just as a taupe Lexus behind us tries to snake into the right lane. I'm the bat of an eyelash faster. I right my wheels and jerk to a stop in front of the crosswalk. A man on a bicycle proceeds in front of us like he had just seen everyday life on Lyndale Avenue.

For all practical purposes, he had.

My downtown driving instincts have gone from timid to bestial. Somewhere, Ducky is smiling. In this car, Smooth is hyperventilating.

Four blocks later, I find a choice parking spot a half-block from our destinations. Two bucks and hour ... but at this point, you couldn't pay me two bucks a minute to drive in this crap - and I don't think you could pay Smooth to watch me do it.

A credit card spits out a receipt for our dashboard, and just like that we're in Uptown Minneapolis. At best, Uptown Minneapolis is a vibrant and artistic community driven by diversity and the courage to innovate. At worst, it's a thousand of Mike Tyson's weirdest moments being played out simultaneously by a whole neighborhood.

It had been three years since I had categorically “hung out” in Uptown. Back in those days, I was living on a couch and eating a one-dollar order of mozzarella sticks for lunch at Liquor Lyle’s. Uptown reminds me of good times, but it also doesn’t.

My eyeshot is filled with pastel plastic sunglasses. Red pants occupy the sidewalk in droves. Beards, beards, beards. Uptown is a rare beast in that, while your curiosity compels you to admire it, you also kind of want to kill it and mount its head on your wall.

Logic is waiting for us in front of the Muddy Waters Eatery. Face is still parking.

I'M NOT TYPING ALL THIS AGAIN.

The HUGE Comedy Building is a block away. Face had the tickets, and the gentleman at the front desk looked it up on an iPad. While at front, we heard a Moped zip by with what sounded like a John Deere engine.


“What was that?” the desk beard said. I offered my above-stated theory.
“That sounded very Uptown,” I answered.
“Right?”


I’m pretty sure everyone in Uptown shares a collective hatred for everyone else in Uptown, regardless of how alike they all are.

A man with his arms stretched across the lobby sofa struck up conversation with me as we waited. The exact content of it got blurred out by alcohol the overall astringency of this neighborhood alcohol, but I remember trying to make fun of Woodbury the same way he was making fun of Uptown and having it go up like a kickball full of lead.

Looking back, it was an incredible exchange:

My punchy tone reeked of Woodbury’s “Me too, look!”
His dismissive retorts reeked of Uptown’s “Whatever, bro.”

All we needed was Jesus to stop in and talk about how nobody in Heaven can make a good sandwich. 

Inside the theatre, one man responded to the warmest day of the year by wearing a scarf (of course), dark red pants (of course), a beard (of course), and a backwards conductor hat (I’ll give him credit; he pulled this off). Another wore bright red pants and wavy hair coated in a Sammy Davis Jr. level of gel.

Smooth leaned over to me.

“I just heard the guy behind us say he’s cultivated the best collection of pictures on the Internet!”

At the bar, Minnesota-based beers were highlighted on the chalkboard behind the barkeep. I had a couple bottles of John Henry 3 Licks, a good beer. He asked if I’d like my receipt e-mailed to me. I answered affirmatively, and he processed the purchase on an iPad.

The essence of cool is effortlessness, is it not? By that metric, the people of Uptown are causing a massive draft with their collective lukewarmness. The hairstyles you see in Uptown are the opposite of effortless; and outfits are so randomly-paired, they require weeks of premeditation. They care. They care a ton.

Uptown makes me look effortless, and it takes me 10 minutes to put my contacts in sometimes.

But that's Uptown. You don’t know what to expect when you get out of your car, but you’re not surprised by anything you see. This neighborhood has almost become a parody of itself.

Uptown denizens talk about Uptown like it's their own person Hell when, in reality, there's no place they'd rather be. Their fictive makes a pestilence out of their peers when, in reality, 10,000 clones of themselves would produce the exact same atmosphere. But that's the fun of Uptown: You meander about the anti-establishment crowd in their establishment-produced kits, loathing themselves into Crayola chinos and itchy faces. If you asked them what they actually liked, you probably couldn't even get an honest answer.

Because they probably don't even know.

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A Pedestrian Meatball Adventure at Devil's Advocate

Everything is a thing now.

Come to Minneapolis and you can find gourmet cupcakes, gourmet donuts, gourmet sliders, gourmet cheeseburgers, you name it. Slap the word gourmet in front of anything; it’s a wide-open meta now. So when Smooth sent me a text last week about a reservation she had made for us at a restaurant called Devil’s Advocate (DA), I was only gently surprised to discover their claim to fame was gourmet … ready for this?

Meatballs.

Up until last Friday, meatballs were below an hors d'oeuvre. They weren’t the entrée; they were the extra two bucks on top of your entrée. And now a restaurant was making it the signature dish. Again, only gently surprised.

So can you make a meal out of meatballs? Technically, yes. The experience of dinner at Devil's Advocate leaves much to be desired, however, most notably an experience.

The Basics: If the idea of serving gourmet meatballs makes you think they’re trying too hard, wait until you see their website. DA is located just off Nicollet Mall on 10^th Street downtown. We made a reservation on the website, but came to find the restaurant half-empty. 

The menu at the restaurant is piecemeal and puzzling. When Smooth asked about the side of noodles, the waitress told her they could be worked into one dish with the meatballs and sauce. That would be handy information to put on the menu! Also handy would be a description of the sauces. "The Sunday Gravy isn't what you'd think it is," the waitress says. Then tell us what it is on the menu! Meanwhile, the 40 craft beers on their drink roster were described in exhausting detail.

Meatballs dominate the appetizer and entree selections, and the remaining selection is weak - predominantly meatless wonders meant to satisfy vegetarians. Smooth and I got started right away, calling up the buffalo balls for me and the Asian balls for Smooth. 

An Aside that Matters: Surely you know the 182 in Blink 182 represents the number of times Al Pacino said the F-word in "Scarface." Change that to the number of times Smooth said "Balls" and chuckled Friday night and their name becomes Blink 3,477.

The presentation of the appetizer plates was unique in that wooden sticks were served with a fondue-type sauce recepticle. You dip your stick in the sauce, plunge the tip into the ball, eat the ball, and nothing spectacular happens. I thought the buffalo balls were pretty good, and the Asian balls were virtually tasteless. Smooth concurred on the Asian balls and reacted to a sample of the buffalo like she had just eaten a detergent capsule. She's not exactly following buffalo sauce on Facebook to begin with, but the face she made ...

I will give the Devil's Advocate its due on the drink menu. Widespread claims of a multifarious craft selection proved true. We novice-level beer connoisseurs had only tried a handful of them previously. I tabbed a Clown Shoes Brown Angel (did not taste heavenly) and a Lagunitas Undercover Investigation Shut-Down Ale (more proof you can trust Lagunitas). Smooth had two Leffe Blondes, which disgusted her.

That's a joke. Obviously she enjoyed it if she ordered it twice.

Most of the Asian balls festered on the table as we stumbled through our entree orders. We were fortunate to have a very friendly, very patient waitress ... who was pretty to boot, aside from her Macklemore hair. She took great care of us until her final trip to our table.

Back to the food: You can have your balls on various buns, or in a "Bowl of Balls." We both opted for bowls - four balls, all of which must be the same, and one side. For Smooth, chicken balls with pesto sauce atop noodles. For me, Sunday Gravy on beef balls with mashed potatoes.

Have you noticed I haven't mentioned DA's decor yet? That was by design. Brick walls, maroon ceiling, unlit candles poking out from the walls, the end. The tubes snaking across the ceiling would be more striking if I hadn't already seen it in 20 other Minneapolis restaurants. One hundred percent of their creativity comes on the menu; the restaurant itself looks like a Green Mill that opened before the interior was finished.

The entrees arrived.

The bowl of balls might not have been the best route to take. Smooth's bowl was smothered in pesto, and mine just looked like a pasta dish missing the noodles. It's hard to make a big deal of my first bite of a meatball. It's also difficult to make a big deal out of the taste - because, frankly, it didn't taste any different than what I order with my mostaccioli at Mama's. Smooth couldn't get halfway through hers, overwhelmed by sticky tufts of pesto that could have re-roofed the Hobbit house.

The night was capped off by our waitress spilling water on my pants while pouring a glass of water, and dropped a pesto-coated fork on the center of the table. Once I finished picking pesto off my face and shirt, I offered our Living Social voucher.

Without it, two appetizers, two entrees, and four beers total almost pushed us to $80. We left having eaten at a new restaurant, and that's where our emotions ended.

Maybe we did it wrong by showing up for dinner at Devil's Advocate when we should have shown up for a new beer adventure with some neat nibbles to occupy the space between sips, but no matter who's to blame - be it us, them, or the devil himself - the gourmet meatball revolution is but a quacking nuisance.

Hey, we've got to draw the line somewhere.

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Matt's Bar: Less Than its Reputation

The Juicy Lucy is serious fricking business in the Twin Cities – so when I tell people “Matt’s Bar was tested and found unworthy,” I know I will have some explaining to do. But first, I’ll give Matt’s this: If I had to guess between them and the 5-8 Club who invented the Juicy Lucy – a million cash if I won, uneven legs and a baby with Tonya Harding if I lost – I’d guess Matt’s.

I don't know if Matt's realizes this, though, but their longtime nemesis has reached its tentacles throughout the metro area and new contenders are punching harder than this archaic Minneapolis mainstay.

The Basics: 35th and Cedar in Minneapolis. It's been there for almost 60 years. They boast "No ice. No plates. We blew the budget on napkins." They obviously didn't blow it on the website. Matt's continues to win award after award, as you can see in this gallery.

Editor's Note: This is a cleaned-up, updated version of a review I originally wrote in 2011.

Smooth and I hit Matt’s after Mass one Sunday, and the 10-minute wait for seating was pretty good from my understanding. The first thing you realize about Matt’s Bar is they’re cheap, and I don’t mean inexpensive. I mean cheap: In addition to what I already mentioned, only one water was brought to our table, with no ice in it; and soda was sold in cans at something like an 800% markup. I was tempted to ask if Al Bundy owned this place.

You already know what we both ordered. Why would you go there for anything else? But we also ordered a basket of fries. For those keeping score at home, Matt's $5.95 Lucy runs miles below what their competition is selling Lucies for. The food took longer than our table, and the fries looked like they were stolen from the kitchen of a nearby McDonald’s.

Seriously, if you’re not running a fast food place, don’t do skinny fries. Just don’t. 

Quick history lesson: I had tried to eat at Matt’s once before with two friends about four months ago, but we got in line behind 12 people and started outside. In the dead of winter, my friends decided to go elsewhere. On the way out, one of them said something profound. 

“Their Juicy Lucy tastes like any burger with cheese inside of it,” he said. “It’s all just reputation.”

The moment finally came when the words ceased, the fries were whisked away, the soda can was shoved aside, and I faced the legend. As I raised the burger to my watering mouth, the revelation was finally at hand. Every snarky swipe I stocked up could have been quashed with the simple ecstasy of this one … first … bite …

Didn’t happen. 

There was no transformation of reality. My soda can didn’t refill itself. The clouds didn’t fizzle away and my office didn’t call with plans to stay closed an extra day. Nicky Whalen didn’t spring out from behind the bar and lunge at me with a pitcher of Leinie's. The world was just as it was before I took that bite.

Don’t get me wrong: Matt’s Lucy is a good burger. Disagreement on supremacy between the 5-8 and Matt’s is defensible … but, if Matt’s did indeed invent the Lucy, wouldn’t the originator feel some obligation to help their brainchild evolve? It feels like nothing has changed about that place in 50 years – not the chairs, not the lighting, and sure as hell not the beer selection. Perhaps this was good enough to prevail at one time, but we're not in that era anymore. The opposition has leveled up.

The 5-8 now has three locations, which satisfies your visiting kin and your impatience alike. The Blue Door, meanwhile, compensated for its own dreadful wait time by high-fiving the popular Surly brewery and has opened a second location in Longfellow. The Nook has its inferior sister bar The Shamrock; and, five minutes from Matt's Bar, Vincent A Restaurant is serving a Juicy Lucy nobody else can touch. 

So why go to Matt’s? Why wait 10 minutes for a table and feel fortunate, feel like you're dining at a garage sale, pay 12-pack prices for a pitcher of Mich Golden and eat a burger that supposedly fathered the rest of its kind but finds itself surpassed by many of them today? I can only really think of one reason, and it's not a very good one.

Reputation.

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Rolling Over in a Restaurant Grave

There's a building on the corner of Tower Avenue and 10th Street in Superior that changes faces like the Mission: Impossible cast. One year it was The Cove; another year it was O2; then it was Lord Stanley's. I just checked Urbanspoon - Lord Stanley's is now closed. I have no idea what's there now. I could Google it, but it doesn't really matter in this context.

Many towns have a building like this. The sub-cultures and demographics of a market are all spoken for, and there's that one building nobody gets behind - no matter what identity it takes on - so unwise entrepreneurs take turns with their "Next Big Thing" and watch a dream fizzle out like a flat soda. The building is like a gold-digging spouse; everyone sees it coming except the ones madly in love. Next thing you know, we're watching them take the sign down in tears.

Woodbury has such a building. I happen to live quite close to it. It's in this absolute coffin of a location, next-door to a janky Red Roof Inn you wouldn't stay in if even you could find it, across the street from a gynecologist's office, and near literally nothing of a tourist's interest (unless you find Rainbow Fresh fascinating). This building's existence is a miscarriage of zoning regulations. It shouldn't even be standing.

Just me drunk in a park. 

But it is - and by golly, people have tried. When I moved here, Masseur told me it was Throwbacks. I don't know how long Throwbacks was there, but news stories I've read give the impression it wasn't there long. Then it closed.

Woody's Roadhouse stepped up to the plate next. They appeared to mean business - they invested formidably in the exterior, and even had Twins players do a signing during the first game of the Stanley Cup Finals last spring - you know what, let's run that last part back. During the first game of the Stanley Cup Finals. They didn't even last a full year. I have at least one example of their management's ineptitude, but I suppose any number of things could have led to their demise.

For the next two or three calendar seasons, the building was dormant. In spring (or whatever you want to call what that was), I saw a sign: Cowboy Jack's, coming soon.

*******

I dug deeper and discrepancies were detected. This wasn't another daft businessman; the Cowboy Jack's brand is owned by the After Midnight Group, a Twin Cities restaurant mini-conglomerate responsible for Cabooze and several other Jack's locations. AMG used to have an uptown location, Cowboy Slim's, which was always busy and a must-hit for my out-of-town single male friends.

Ducky and I drove by Slim's one day to find their building gone. I mean gone - even the basement was torn out.

Given Slim's golden location and perpetually blithe atmosphere, you would think it would take a cataclysm to move AMG out of there. What exactly happened? That would be a question for AMG, I suppose.

But here's what it equals: A restaurant group called AFTER MIDNIGHT, moving into the dullest part of the least after-midnight city in the metro area. Woodbury has nail salons, town homes, and preservatives. Woodbury has legacy kids with bored housewives and soccer tots. Woodbury has elders with Audis who brake unexpectedly and have a hard time unloading their Target carts. Whatever AMG is looking for to come in and buy beer, Woodbury doesn't have.

Or do they?

Cowboy Jack's came tacitly into Woodbury. They were unresponsive on their Facebook page and nowhere to be found on the radio. As Smooth pointed, “If we didn’t live right here, would you have ever known they were opening tonight?” I eventually found it online in a news article, and made our way there on its opening night - ready for this? - Monday, May 6.

It was the second-worst demonstration of calendar awareness I have ever seen from a business based in this building, whatever that says.

*******

Give it to Jack's for snatching up a ready-made bar. Much of the exterior and some of the interior were left as-is from Woody's. Otherwise, it’s the same old wooden-fence booth walls and barrel bar tables you can experience at any western-themed bar. Waiting patiently in the middle of the saloon is a mechanical bull, which is SO not Woodbury. Above the bull, situated in a circle in the rafters, is a small-scale Western town. That at least showed AMG wanted their new baby to look special.

The first steps inside reveal a burly man talking into a radio and a small army of hostesses. Get all the way inside and you see the place barely half-full. The only place with a real crowd was at the bar; the other side of the building was as empty as it was over the winter. The waitresses will please those of my kin who mourned Slim's passing. Smooth and I plopped in an oversized booth and ordered margaritas.

Cowboy Jack’s: NOT a margarita parlor. They only have one flavour, strawberry, and it’s so sappy and syrupy you could use it as papier-mâché adhesive. BUT I looked at the menu and my target was locked on their potato skins. And OMG they’re half off at happy hour, AND OMG driving right home from work gets me there during happy hour! They have cheeseburgers that sound good; and, while I presume they’ll be serviceable, I don’t see myself coming here off happy hour and thus don’t see myself eating anything other than potato skins.

Unmoved by the margaritas, Smooth and I opted to chase margaritas elsewhere - but the waitress was onto us.

“You’re coming back, right?” she said. We responded affirmatively. “Because usually when I do this, I don’t go back.” She charged my eyes with a very captivating gaze – not a romantic, fuzzy-handcuffs captivating, I mean Mr. Blonde from "Reservoir Dogs" captivating. “I’d better see you guys here again.” This straight-forward advance left me with mixed feelings, none of which involved not coming back.

I mean, what if she follows us ...

*******

Here's what I know now about Cowboy Jack's: They've dangling bait for a crowd that is not only situated right between downtown Stillwater and Lowertown St. Paul, but may have already committed to Wild Bill's. They are in the worst possible location aside from maybe the bottom of Lake Elmo. Oh, and Wodbury's police force is famously unforgiving.

But they're also in Minnesota's fastest-growing city, so there are dividends to be had if Cowboy Jack's can take root now and build a following as the population ticks upward. And it isn't like Wild Bill's - conveniently located between a coffee shop and a realty headquarters - has choice location, either. The rest of Jack's competition sits in strip malls with kind-of-cursive name lights and discommodious happy hours. Maybe AMG is looking at a bigger picture. I suppose I'll know more a year from now.

If it doesn't work, though, is this the point where we all decide this is a doomed location and it's time to stop trying? It's easy to just look at the history and assume that, but I'm sure it'll just be a matter of time before this siren of a building sucks a business on in.

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Muddy Waters Eatery, the Junk Drawer Gem of Uptown

Let me take you back to a December afternoon in south Superior, into a nameless antique antique shop with me. The dirty windows nearly rendered the place virtually lightless, and you could feel the cobwebs in this little shop without seeing them. Walk through the time-worn wooden doors and it feels like a horror movie's about to start ... but on this afternoon I walked out with the best collection of Christmas presents I've ever found.

Fast forward 10 years and step in an eerie booth in the Muddy Waters Eatery, and I’ve got my back against a tarnished wood wall topped by an opaqued window. With a lantern hanging in our booth and a waxy deer head watching above, I ate squash wrapped in bacon. I glued lettuce, prosciutto and a strawberry together with fig jam and made it a meal. I ate a cheeseburger with chicken-fried bacon.

The food in this eatery was folly within folly, in a good way of course.

The Basics: The worst part of the Muddy Waters Eatery is the acrimonious hipster populace that walks past it on Lyndale Avenue in authentic fashion farm/nauseating hellhole Uptown Minneapolis. 

“I think this is actually The Wedge,” says Logic. “Like, this is what holds Uptown and Downtown together.”

Anyway, their website is right here - oddly, the first things they want to tell you about are coffee and cupcakes. Parking on Lyndale is precisely as wracking as you'd think it would be.

Smooth and I met our two newly-engaged friends, Logic and Face, at Muddy two weeks ago. A feature I loved right away was the front wall, which opened up in a fashion similar to The Boss Bar in downtown Chicago. The setting sun provided most of Muddy's lighting; the rest shimmered from lanterns. Large ones loomed in pairs above the main bar, and small ones marked the centers of the booth walls. 

It isn’t difficult to get a read on the Muddy Waters’ decorative theme, and the heavy Friday night traffic didn’t take anything away from it – in fact, Muddy did a fantastic job building a theme that compliments its clientele. The walk inside takes you from eatery (front door) to haunted house lobby (front bars) to Satanic ritual (bathroom hallway) to that decaying little antique shop (the booth). 

On the way, I saw every routinely-exposed body part tattooed (yes, including a face), and the well-dressed stuck out like chicken pox on the childish face of anarchy. 

A Letterman-faced woman with blonde-striped hair and nail polish chipped to oblivion took our orders. Rolling out for appetizers was bacon-wrapped squash (read that again) and something called fried halloumi. For entrees, Smooth, Logic and I all dialed up a Muddy's Burger; Face ordered a pizza.

For drinks, I started with a Spice Trade and Smooth tapped a house-blended shandy. The Spice Trade was a junk drawer of flavor in all the wrong ways and had me worried about the integrity of our food. If you want a pirate-themed drink, do it at Smalley’s, okay? Smooth enjoyed her shandy, but the pulpy lemonade turned me right off (as all pulp does). From the author’s eye view, this is no place to take chances on the drink menu. I hid behind tall boy cans for the balance of our meal.

The entire existence of Muddy Waters is summed up in the fried halloumi. On this plate comes - ready for all this? - prosciutto ham, fig jam, balsamic, lettuce, a chopped-up strawberry, and probably a couple of things I can't remember. A wacky cheese paste worked as an adhesive, in case you wanted to stick a little bit of everything together on the edge of a butter knife and stick that into you mouth. But who would be stupid enough to try something that?

It's delicious. It seems so basic when it's all sitting together there on a plate, but who thought to put it all on the same plate at the same time? I keep imagining somebody watching a Mr. Potato Head fall onto the floor and his facial features explode across the floor, and thinking, "That would make an awesome salad!"

Bacon-wrapped squash: How do you think it was?

The Muddy's Burgers came with a knife shoved through the top bun and bleeding barbecue sauce. Onion drooped over the ledges of the patty beneath stiff branches of chicken-fried bacon. It looked and ate like a pretzel bun, but don't quote me on that. The bites were awkward and clumsy - sometimes I got no beef, sometimes I got nothing but beef, sometimes I'd pull an onion string the size of my forearm, and I'm pretty sure I had to take a bite sideways. 

Only a handful of times has the experience of a cheeseburger so precisely matched the experience of its house. During my solution of the Muddy's Burger, I'm fairly certain I saw a man with an afro walk by our booth one way and walk back with dreadlocks the other way.

This Also Happens in Uptown: Just let me tell a bathroom story really quickly.

I was waiting behind two gentlemen in line for the men's room, when the man behind me was expressing how badly he had to go. I explained that I was only taking a "utility pee" and let him go in front of me. This man would eventually go in the women's room.

I pee, whatever, and come out. The only person in line for the bathroom ... is a woman. Keep in mind, a man is currently in the women's room. I explain this to the woman.

"So," I say, "Just go in the men's room."

"Are you going to judge me?" she asked. I make an approving frown and shake my head.

She opens the door to the men's room right as the man in the woman's room walks out. They look at each other, then look at me, then look back at each other.

The woman then continues into the men's room.

Logic understands the
importance of pointing
at food. 

So why would I go back to Muddy Waters Eatery? You can find unexpected tastes here, but Muddy eschews going overboard on flavors by messing with textures a little. And it works. I have an emotional connection to its open front wall. I can't look at a butter knife anymore without thinking about the halloumi.

Moreover, Muddy Waters more than qualifies to be the really good reason I'd go to Uptown on a Friday night. I'll run over a hipster to eat here again, you can bet an inch of your left leg on that.

To compare it to my antique shop Christmas would be a bit of a stretch, but there are certain qualities of the two events that align. Then again, if I opened a Christmas present and found bacon-wrapped squash inside, I definitely wouldn't ask for the gift receipt.

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