Some restaurants manage to survive regardless of the quality of the food they serve, a fact that causes me considerable amazement, and for the longest while Mud Pie was one of these. It was almost as if the high moral ground of ecologically sensitive dining made taste and service irrelevant in the eyes of its clientele. There was little reason to go there unless you were vegetarian or vegan, and if you were a militant type of such there was little reason to go anywhere else—you could find something to eat in most restaurants, but it would likely be just one thing. I suspect what caused the fall from grace was the profusion of new places, predominantly opened by recent immigrants, that offer a broad selection of well-prepared and tasty vegetarian choices. Burritos, lentils, crepes, rice and beans, superior versions could all be had elsewhere, and more exotic choices were also close at hand.

Even places like Brenda have been feeling the pressure, I believe. The last time I ate there was probably two or three years ago, and around that time I had a few meals in close succession—mostly business dinners with customers with vegetarian preferences. If I recall correctly, the menu was almost entirely vegetarian then. Now there’s Iceland wolf fish (broiled, with a brown butter baby shrimp sauce), shrimp quesadilla (served with, among other accompaniments, a coconut mint cilantro salsa), Niciose (sic) salad, a chicken Caesar salad, a Tunisian tuna sandwich with a choice of harissa or herb mayonnaise, and also smoked salmon and turkey sandwiches. One of the day’s specials was also nonveg, Icelandic haddock sautéed in a sesame crust. No reference to mammalian meat, but orders of taxa well above the plant realm are available for consumption.

Nevertheless, I went veggie, getting a cup of one of the two daily special soups followed by one of the daily special entrees. The soup contained roasted tomatoes and white beans in a light broth and garnished with fresh herbs. It was very flavorful. The overly generous quantity of beans in it made it almost too hearty, but if one must err in such matters it should be on the side of excess.

My entrée selection was a Mediterranean stew omelet, with asparagus, red onion, eggplant, capers, olives, and Parmesan. This too was excellent. I was impressed how the asparagus spears stayed crisp even though the onions were completely tender. The omelet came with a fruit salad, a refreshing tart/sweet combination of grapefruit and orange sections and dried cranberries.

My omelet also came with a small plate of good peasant bread and very good homemade cornbread—unlike most restaurants the bread is not a freebie unless you order some specific entrees or salads.

I also thought B’s main dish, the Icelandic haddock, was well prepared, the fish cooked right and the sesame crust and teriyaki sauce imparting a savory-sweet, almost caramelized finish. B thought that the density of the sesame crust was too much, however.

We went the whole hog (an insensitive choice of phrase in the present instance, perhaps) and ordered dessert as well, splitting a chocolate éclair. This suffered from a dry and tasteless pastry crust although the chocolate was good.

Service was a rather mixed bag. Our waitress was pleasant but forgetful for most of our lunch—it took the longest while to get our glasses of wine and, subsequently, for her to take our food order. At the end she made up for the lapses by, unasked, splitting our éclair for us, and she remembered to bring me my espresso ("I’d like that after the dessert, please") immediately after we had polished it off.

Brenda is a pleasant destination for the lunch hour. It’s airy and uncongested and on this winter day the beige-peach walls and the fresh flower sprigs on the tables lent the interior a springtime feel. Not that spring is especially close—this is Minnesota, the land of May frost dates, after all—but its anticipation made me ponder how time’s been flying lately.

It doesn’t seem that long ago that we started The Lunch, but it’s been a year; I would have put long odds against us managing to keep it up for so long. But the thing about the Web is that it makes you part of a network. A social fabric becomes interwoven with the Internet, and the fact that the interpersonal connections are virtually established—and, arguably, not very personal—is more than offset by the reach the technology affords. Without the number of readers we have I know our enthusiasm for this project would long since have waned. Thank you!

In my line of work I come into contact with a lot of South Asians – Indians to be more specific, who more often than not tend to be vegetarians. Taking them out to a meal can be challenging; I have sat through excruciating conversations, held in Indian English on the one hand and a Minnesota patois on the other, when my South Asian guests have tried to determine if a dish was truly vegetarian or not. The safe choice has always been to take them to an Indian restaurant – Udupi, which is purely vegetarian rather than a Vincent where you’d be lucky to find one vegetarian entrée on the entire menu and how fun is to order the same dish twelve times over? The other vegetarian restaurant of note in the Twin Cities was the now defunct Mud Pie, a most mediocre of restaurants, where eating was always an adventure and not necessarily a positive one. One of my favorite vegetarian restaurant used to be Delights of India on Lake Street now long gone and its space is now occupied by that atrocious Nat Raj.

Café Brenda is the solution for entertaining your vegetarian guests in a reasonably fashionable (if dated) environment to passable cuisine. The restaurant has been around for a while and is now in need for a rethink as far as the décor is concerned. The walls of this L shaped establishment are a combination of pink and burgundy. The little bar at the entrance has colorful murals painted on it. The menu is mostly vegetarian but it does offer some fish based dishes (I suppose fish feel no pain being harvested for food!). I started with a glass of an unsung red Shiraz. There is a daily lunch special menu and off this I chose a cup of spicy yam soup. The soup was a little thicker than I like but otherwise spicy and quite good. I went for one of the fish specials on the menu: an Icelandic Haddock sautéed in sesame. The fish was cooked well but I thought the sesame overdone; indeed, the entire side of the fish was caked with a thick layer of sesame this was visually unattractive if not entirely inedible. The menu offers a variety of salads (Caesar, Niciose), sandwiches (vegetarian, tuna, turkey) and specials (shrimp quesadilla, etc.). So there is plenty on the menu to keep both vegetarians and selective nonvegans happy.

This was one of the snowiest days this winter and that might have contributed to the fact that the restaurant was almost entirely empty. Our waitress was forgetful and the service slow. We finished our meal with a shared éclair (chocolate of course!). The pastry was a bit dry as if it had sat in a fridge overnight but the chocolate was smooth and delicious. A finished with his obligatory espresso while I looked in vain for some black tea (not flavored with some exotic herb) on the menu. Our bill came to $47.00.

Café Brenda is probably your best (non-ethnic) vegetarian dining option in the Twin Cities, which is a sad commentary on the state of gastronomic affairs. The other alternatives are ethnic dishes prepared without meat. I would be happy to hear from our readers of any vegetarian restaurant that they enjoy and that we might have missed.

This review marks the one-year anniversary of The Lunch. We have enjoyed writing these reviews—sometimes under tremendous workload and "real job" demands—and hope you’ve enjoyed reading them. Your feedback is always welcome.

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