The Essential Dear Dara: Writings on Local Characters and Memorable Places

by Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl

Overview

A portrait of a place and its people through the writings and musings of one of the Twin Cities’ most beloved and prolific writers.

For 25 years, Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl has been a fixture of Twin Cities life, telling the stories of our people, places, and (sometimes delicious) things. If journalism is the first draft of history, what Dara does—reported features and essays—are more like the first draft of culture. What do we see looking back at a quarter-century of Dara? A place brimming with unforgettable Minnesota eccentrics—from libertarians at the gas station to Aquatennial Queens to artists working in the medium of dog hair. A place full of culinary adventurers and ambassadors—the Ann Kims, Sean Shermans, and Juicy Lucys in our midst. A place profound and complex—from George Floyd Square to the shores of mighty Lake Superior. A place uniquely Twin Cities and Minnesotan.

Most great cities have a great columnist. Jonathan Gold said that Los Angeles was the real topic of his food writing, coming into specific view wherever he shone his flashlight and raised his spoon. New York City had Jimmy Breslin and Dara’s early writing hero, Joseph Mitchell, each of whom expressed something essential about their city through the tales of sports heroes, skid-row charmers, and mobsters. Dara’s Twin Cities is just as evocative, but of course completely different. It is a must-read for people who want to meet the people in that neighborhood of four million souls who call the land in and around the upper Mississippi home.

Revisit Dara’s favorite stories from the last 25 years, including columns, profiles, and restaurant reviews from the pages of City Pages, Minnesota Monthly, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Gourmet, and Saveur. Each piece includes a brief introduction putting the piece in context and explaining why Dara considers it among her quintessential contributions to Minnesota life and culture. Together these works capture the art of this essential columnist, food writer, and voice of the Twin Cities. They also show a Minnesota rarely seen, one where a writer’s enthusiasm, humor, passion, and curiosity are rewarded with secrets and wonders.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681342757
Publisher:	Minnesota Historical Society Press
Publication date:	09/06/2023
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	623,224
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl is one of the most awarded magazine writers in the country, with six James Beard Award wins (and 15 nominations)—the so-called Oscars of food world—and another five CRMAs, known as the Pulitzers of magazines. She grew up in New York City, little aware of her destiny: to write about the quirks and passions, the foods and cocktails, the people and places of Minnesota. She started her work life as a 13-year-old restaurant dishwasher and, after coming to Minnesota to attend Carleton College, became City Pages’ restaurant critic in 1997. Since then she has worked as a staff writer, columnist, and critic at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Delta Sky, Minnesota Monthly, Gourmet, Saveur, Food & Wine, Experience Life, Bon Appétit, and other publications. For eight years she hosted a radio show on WCCO called "Off the Menu," and she is a regular guest on Minnesota Public Radio. She lives in south Minneapolis with a dog the size of a cat, a cat the size of a cat, and two children who are much bigger than cats and want to be left out of it. She would like everyone to know that Minneapolis is one of the best places in the world, as long as you have a lot of pairs of boots and love snow, which she does.

Read an Excerpt

One of the great vexations of writing about Northern cuisine, as opposed to Southern, is our lack of iconic restaurant foods. The South has so much, like biscuits, pimento cheese, barbecue, fried chicken. We have—what, exactly?

Our small-town cafés served pie; we can all agree on that. Eggs and bacon and hash browns. Toast. At some point in the mid-20th century, we got hamburgers and fries. These are not exactly foods that lend themselves to Faulknerian rhapsody among the tupelo trees.

Yet one particular Northern food-culture question has been tickling at the edges of my mind for years. It has to do with something that’s sometimes called a "beef commercial sandwich," sometimes called "hot beef." I decided this year to get to the bottom of it. Where did it begin? Where is it now?

I got a ping back from the news archives, and the summer of 1952, when The Minneapolis Tribune took a few inches away from the dire issues of the day to reprint an editorial from The Christian Science Monitor. "Much was my consternation the first time I sat down in a modern American eatery and ordered the advertised 'Hot Beef Sandwich,'" the author started. "What I got was a perfectly straightforward Beef à l’Angleterre"—an intentionally pretentious phrase for roast beef.

The author went on to describe the sandwich: beef served between two pieces of bread, with mashed potatoes inside the sandwich(!), and the whole beef-mashed potato brick smothered in gravy. But here was the author’s problem: It was impossible to eat with "the fingers, on account of the gravy, among other things. . . . I do not want to carp, but let us have some respect for tradition."

Why did The Minneapolis Tribune choose to run this, when the hot beef sandwich—bread, mashed potatoes, some form or other of roast beef, gravy coating—had been common for at least a generation? I suspect that reprint fits in a noble Minnesota newspaper tradition: calling out what these boneheads on the coasts have to say now. (See: grape salad.)

I’m pretty sure that I am the specific human being who first wrote about the Ju(i)cy Lucy—our burger with the cheese inside—after noticing it on a couple of local menus. Nowadays, there’s a small juicy-lucy chain in Lima, Peru, and a brand new juicy lucy restaurant in Staten Island—yes, in New York City.

I’d seen what it looks like when a Northern food entered the canon and became famous. So I went out in search of hot beef. Or the hot beef commercial. At the outset, I really didn’t know what it should properly be called.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Section 1
SuperAmerica Man, City Pages, 1995
The Fanciest Cat, City Pages, October 9, 1996
Dogs of War, City Pages, October 16, 1996
(Second) Oldest Living Aquatennial Queen Tells All, Microsoft Sidewalk, August 6, 1997
The Birth of BeBe Zahara Benet, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, September 2021
The Miniature Dogs of Lucy Francis, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, February 2020
Con Artistry, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, March 2014
Primeval Connection, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, January 2022
Called Out, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, July 2015
Sidebar: How to Interview Anyone
The King of HmongTown, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, October 2018
Maria Bamford’s Tough Year for Laughs, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, January 2021
The Doughnut Gatherer, Minnesota Monthly, May 2009

Section 2
A Fish Called Lute, City Pages, November 6, 1996
A Tribe Called Lucy, City Pages, August 12, 1998
In Search of Hot Beef, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, April 2019
Sidebar: How to Write a Restaurant Review
Sooki and Mimi Isn’t an "Authentic" Mexican Restaurant—It’s Authentically Ann Kim, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, May 2021
Spoon and Stable, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, January 2015
The Sioux Chef: An Indigenous Kitchen, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, August 2016
The Cheese Artist, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, September 2012
King of the Roast, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, July 2016
The Pride Behind Pride, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, June 2020
38th and Chicago: Holy Ground, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, July 2020
Good Stalk: Rhubarb, Saveur, April 2013
Panic in Bloom, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, October 2013
Above the Clouds and Crowds on the State Fair’s Skyride, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, August 2018
Between the Sheets at Fantasuites, City Pages, August 28, 1996
The Ghost in Room 308, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, July 2019
Superior Days, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, March 2021
A Lakeful of Miracles, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, March 2022
The Secret Grand Canyon of the North, Gourmet, 2008