Appetites: A photographic look at Twin Cities dining history

Minneapolis and St. Paul are considered some of the most up-and-coming food cities in America. Many would say they're already pretty established.

But it wasn't always that way. It's taken a couple of decades for the Twin Cities to catch up to some of our more food-forward cities that are typically on the coasts.

Mecca Bos, food writer for City Pages, recently got a blast into our food town's past when she unearthed a couple of filing cabinets filled with old photos in the former City Pages office building. She told MPR News about this treasure trove and the slideshow she's created from it for City Pages.

MPR News: So, you came across a bunch of old photos that had been published in City Pages over the past 30 years or so. Give us an idea of this.

Mecca Bos: We recently moved from the Designer's Guild Building in the warehouse district, which is an old dusty pile of a building. When we moved, the editorial staff was tasked with unearthing all these decades worth of papers and photos and junk and old police reports. But I happened to come across some pretty cool photos of old restaurants and chefs, some are still with us, some are long gone. But it was really fun culling them and calling up some of the chefs that were pictured there, crowdsourcing, asking people who were there if I didn't remember them myself and then reminiscing about some of the ones that I was there for.

MPR: And you brought some of them in here. We've been looking through them before we recorded. Take us through a few of them — one of them, a name I think will be familiar to a lot of people in the Twin Cities.

Bos: I was really excited and kind of sad to find this shot of the entryway at Figlio. Figlio is where I spent a lot of my own young drinking career, and I think it had to be the biggest boondoggles ever committed by a local restaurateur when they did away with Figlio. It was just a perfect place, it was a classic bar and restaurant at the corner of Lake and Hennepin at the base of Calhoun Square. It was kind of the place to be in the '80s and '90s. They actually had the first wood-fired pizza oven in the city. I don't know if everyone knows that already. It was a pretty big deal back then because they were the first.

MPR: So that's Figlio, an iconic place. Any other Twin Cities icons you came across?

Bos:I think anyone of a certain age who grew up in Minneapolis will remember the Mud Pie. That was on Lyndale Avenue and it was a vegetarian institution, back when vegetarianism meant you probably had to go to a special restaurant. You couldn't just waltz into a place and expect to find all kinds of vegetarian-friendly food on the menu. A lot of people remember it as kind of an "oats and groats" hard core kind of place, but other people say that they were kind of forward-thinking chefs who put a lot of thought into the food. Some people hated it, some people loved it. Almost everyone remembers their buckwheat pancakes. I remember my mom taking me there for those. They were open about 30 years, and somewhat ironically, the Bulldog hot dog bar is there now.

MPR: A couple of places in the pile of photos are still around. One place you were telling me that's had the same chef for 50 years.

Bos: The Black Forest Inn just celebrated their 50th anniversary, which is pretty incredible. But what's more incredible is that it's the same couple who own and operate the restaurant — Erich and Joanne Christ. Erich is still the chef of the restaurant after 50 years. They actually met at the restaurant. Joanne applied for a job after graduating with a German degree from the U that she didn't know what to do with, met Erich, and they soon fell in love, and got married, had a family. She runs the front of house operation. He's very, very German. I really like him a lot, he's a lot of fun and he says that he's worked his life away to such an extent that he doesn't know how to even have fun unless he makes work out of it first. It's still there, relatively unchanged, serving really traditional German fare and lots of beer after 50 years.

MPR: So taken as a whole, this pile of photos, what does it indicate about the Twin Cities dining scene over the last 30 years?

Bos: It shows in some way how far we have come. I like some of the ones that are most dated, like the ones of perhaps the Marquis Room, which is no longer with us. People are sort of sitting around in tuxedoes and furs, and even the Dayton's Skyroom, which some people will remember going to as a child with their grandparents. There was a pianist in an all-white tux playing a white grand piano. They're fun to look at, but they're dated.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full interview.

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