“I loved the connection between rising meals and making folks pleased with a meal,” says Tomlinson. Her intimate restaurant, launched final 12 months, follows a contented run as chef de delicacies on the late Nook Desk in Minneapolis, a winter working on the acclaimed Fäviken in Sweden and as many cooking classes as she may afford at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris after a stint within the nonprofit world. Alongside the best way, she’s additionally picked up awards for her work with pastry and pork. In 2018, she was the primary lady to win the Grand Cochon prize celebrating heritage-breed hogs.
One of many early dishes Tomlinson realized to make from her grandmother, of Swedish descent, was apple pie, which individuals nonetheless speak about a number of years after Jeanette Tomlinson’s demise. “There was all the time a pie within the oven. It was my grandmother’s love language.” Lard was key to the pie’s success, however so was a light-weight contact with the crust, says Tomlinson, whose grandmother’s arthritic fingers in all probability defined the follow. The end result was “an unpleasant, crumbly” however scrumptious crust, says the chef, who turns 37 this month. “It wasn’t a basket weave!”
With few exceptions, there’s nothing fancy about Myriel, both. Tomlinson is solely channeling old style cooking methods and championing the reason for small farmers to create a mode that fuses her French coaching and minimalist method to elements from the Land of 10,000 Lakes. Consider it as elevated farm meals, untouched by tweezers.
Tomlinson says she realized her craft at a time when the restaurant kitchen “was a spot for pirates,” however resisted the temptation to join the club. Her pores and skin is freed from ink, for example. Certainly one of many causes she landed a non-paying gig at Fäviken was due to the best way she endeared herself to the employees as a buyer attempting to get a seat on the famously hard-to-book eating vacation spot: She thanked them on the door with a pie she baked herself — in her Airbnb in Norway, then ferried to the distant restaurant by way of practice and cab.
Loads of her friends subscribe to purchasing what’s native and seasonal from close by sources. Tomlinson takes the philosophy a step additional, counting on a handful of suppliers inside a 50-mile radius. Some are such small companies, the sources produce other jobs to maintain their ardour.
Take Clint and Amanda Scherping. He’s a undertaking supervisor for a development firm. She’s educational dean at a highschool. The couple, dad and mom to eight kids, discover time to boost beef cattle, pigs, chickens and geese on their 350-acre farm an hour exterior the Twin Cities. “We don’t confine something,” says Clint, who jokes that gathering eggs on their “micro-batch” plot is “an Easter egg hunt” that may lead everywhere in the floor and into the hayloft. Tomlinson spends a day or extra each week choosing up elements herself. Driving to and from her suppliers, she additionally forages. Mom Nature presents the chef mushrooms, flowers, wild grapes and plums that Tomlinson pickles or turns into vinegars. Cedar timber present branches for burning and berries for cooking.
Myriel additionally makes the case for Midwestern hospitality, service being an vital a part of a meal in her restaurant, which takes its title from the gracious bishop in “Les Miserables” who welcomes Jean Valjean into his residence in Victor Hugo’s 1862 basic novel. Tomlinson says she strives for “unpretentious excellence,” exemplified in particulars such because the desk linens her mom sewed for her.
The chef says she was additionally impressed by the “intentionality of enterprise” at Fäviken, the place lookouts recognized visitors as they approached the restaurant and will greet them by title in no matter language they spoke. There aren’t any scouts at Myriel. However after visitors are seated, Tomlinson introduces herself to individuals of Myriel’s 12-course, $135 tasting menu. (An a la carte menu can also be accessible; duck breast, Parisienne gnocchi and vegetable soup are typical standbys.)
“I like assembly everybody who’s eating right here,” says the chef, who interacts with visitors all through the night time. “What we’re doing is storytelling,” making connections to the meals and showcasing “the exhausting work from one neighborhood.” She acknowledges that among the particulars may sound “Portlandia”-precious, however says “our beef actually comes from joyful cows,” raised by farmers who title them.
QR codes don’t have any residence at Myriel. Tomlinson goes for a extra personalised model, writing her menu utilizing only a few phrases so clients have an opportunity to interact with servers. “Shorthorn tartare, gaufrette” interprets to a ruddy scoop of uncooked minced veal flanked by a single ridged potato chip and a dusting of herb ash created from final season’s dried bounty. Management freaks interested in what they are going to be consuming at Myriel could be dissatisfied to be taught Tomlinson doesn’t publish a menu on-line, partly as a result of it modifications quite a bit, she says, but additionally as a result of “I’d reasonably they arrive as a result of they know what to anticipate by way of expertise.”
A way of Myriel’s homespun allure begins on the display screen door and continues within the eating room, the place candles flicker, the cotton napkins have the texture of dish towels and the trendy equal of an old style relish tray — pickled asparagus, inexperienced beans and celery root — alerts the beginning of the tasting menu. The edible greeting harks to the best way the chef’s household acquired anybody who dropped by — with espresso and a snack, sometimes selfmade — or what Swedes know as fika.
In Myriel’s case, there’s tea, poured from the pot into dainty cups: “Black currant and lemon verbena,” a server says in asserting the faint however restorative brew. Myriel revels in hygge (say hoo-ga), the Danish notion of cozy pleasure, acceptable given Minnesota’s Nordic associations. A curl of dairy cow bresaola cured in pink wine and stamp-size cheddar cracker dotted with fermented tomato accompany the steaming tea.
The cymbal crash within the in any other case subdued live performance is a two-part course: creamy scrambled eggs served in a vase of buckwheat pastry accompanied by a molded carrot salad in a silver dish. The previous tastes Previous World and luscious. The latter is a mound of brined cows’ milk cheese and creme fraiche coated with sliced carrots dressed with chive oil, the whole lot hidden by an excellent inexperienced carpet of chopped carrot greens.
Tomlinson is gently adamant about presenting Minnesota cooking in the most effective gentle. You’ll by no means see the meals equal of “Fargo” on her menu. When requested if she may contemplate serving hotdish — image a bunch of primary elements, typically together with a can of creamed soup, baked in a casserole — she says the closest approximation is “cassoulet, served in a gratin.”
The chef eschews ocean fish for lake fish, together with perch from Lake Superior. “What Minnesotan didn’t develop up fishing?” One of many extra elegant programs is a silken trout mousseline in a pool of beurre monté, its floor enlivened with dots of emerald ramp oil from ramps she collected herself. The product is all the time handled with respect and restraint. Younger hen, merely roasted with salt and butter, comes with bread and cultured butter for sopping up what Tomlinson calls “chook inventory” hit with wild plum vinegar. The home-baked bread made with pink winter wheat arrives late within the meal; Tomlinson doesn’t need you to refill on it.
If quite a lot of the meals is apparent to the attention, as farm cooking tends to be, the flavors run intense and true. The candy taste of the Scherpings’ Irish Dexter beef springs from cattle fed a weight-reduction plan of grass and hay. A blueberry sorbet captures summer time’s bliss in each spoonful.
Dinner at Myriel prompts a query: Why isn’t Midwestern delicacies extra of a factor? Tomlinson thinks it could be as a result of the model is “exhausting to outline. It’s extra refined.” A lot of what she does at Myriel has origins in “pre-World Battle II methods: canning, preserving, drying.” The restaurant’s basement homes bunches of dried flowers and herbs, together with the hyssop used within the ethereal lemon thyme panna cotta.
Farmer Clint Scherping says he sees Myriel as a strategy to “preserve an genuine connection to our wealthy agrarian tradition,” but additionally a path towards therapeutic a divided nation. “If we need to assist individuals who don’t have the identical alternatives,” he texted after we spoke on the cellphone, “how or the place will we begin? Properly, how about by our bellies?”
If Tomlinson isn’t sharing a narrative, considered one of her employees is taking pulse checks. “How was your dinner companion tonight?” I search for from a bit of extraordinary veal tenderloin, paired with nutty hen of the woods mushrooms, to discover a server checking in on me, a solo diner who joked earlier within the night that considered one of Myriel’s signature drinks must maintain me firm. Nodding to the Sazerac-like cocktail, the attendant joked, “By no means allows you to down.”
A meal finishes with the choice of Swedish egg espresso, which is simply what it seems like: an entire egg added to floor espresso earlier than it’s brewed, making for a transparent and velvety cup. Solely when dessert is eliminated does a diner obtain a listing of what they ate; in a captivating contact, a little bit map of Minnesota, stating Myriel’s farm sources, is tucked contained in the envelope.
Diners celebrating an anniversary or birthday may additionally be the recipients of a slice of no matter pie Tomlinson baked that day. The chef thinks pie is sensible, one thing a buyer can wait to eat the following day.
Greater than that, she says, pie “is the most effective expression of hospitality I may give in a single factor. That’s how I knew I used to be liked by my grandmother.”
470 Cleveland Ave. South, St. Paul, Minn. 651-340-3568. myrielmn.com. Open: Indoor and outside eating 5 to 9 p.m. Wednesday by Saturday. Costs: Tasting menu $135, a la carte dishes $6 to $28. Sound verify: 79 decibels/Should converse with raised voice. Accessibility: No limitations to entry; ADA-compliant restrooms. Pandemic protocols: Employees should not required to put on masks or be vaccinated.
