Chet’s Taverna is out to change this perception. The restaurant is housed in a small, spare room, with tables and chairs that could have come from a no-frills coffeehouse, patchily applied sea green paint on the walls, and green and tan linoleum tiles on the floor that were probably laid in the 1950s. Except for the linoleum, the look is European, but only after a fashion: it’s the Europe of nondescript cafés where the wine is served in pitchers and lunch is intended to be a half-hour stop.

If your urge, after this first impression, is to turn around and leave, overcome it! The look is deliberate and affected, perhaps to make you reconsider your misplaced association of good food with refined surroundings. The same goes for the staff as well. Our waitress was disheveled, but she turned out to be friendly and attentive, cheerfully providing a pen for B’s discreet (or was it indiscreet?) note-taking and quarters for plugging the meter—although it turned out that 25 cents gets you a whole hour in this less-than-trendy area. Also in keeping with the theme, the tableware isn’t pristine either: Most of our plates and bowls had small cracks!

The menu, which changes regularly, is short but not simple. A few each of appetizers, pizzas, pastas, salads, plus fish and soup of the day. Despite the limited number of choices, there’s something for almost every diner. In particular, vegetarians of all stripes, from true vegans to the "if it doesn’t bear live young it’s veggie" variety, can be accommodated. The two pastas, however, were targeted for meat eaters; one that caught my eye came with pork confit, parsnip purée, savoy cabbage, and dried apricot.

Uncommon ingredients and combinations abound elsewhere too. I had a pizza with house-cured ham, sunny-side-up egg, asiago cheese, and sage. This isn’t the sort of fare I’d usually go for, unless I was thinking breakfast, but the only previous time I had had lunch at Chet’s a waitress was eating this with such relish that I resolved to try it next time. In my case, however, some excessive jostling had ruined the egg’s sunniness by the time it reached me and the albumen was unappetizingly runny in places. The crust made me forgive these shortcomings. It was picture and taste perfect; if Chet’s does it consistently like this they can claim the best pizza crust in the Twin Cities. As a starter, I had a cup of the daily soup, a hearty vegan lentil and vegetables with rosemary and a lemony zing.

The wine list is compact but commendable given the scale of the place. There are four or five by the glass offerings in both the white and red category, predominantly European. I went with a valpolicella and was pleased with it.

Chet’s owners also own the venerable Modern Café, and there’s a family resemblance: good food in blue-collar neighborhoods in homely—European versus American, respectively—settings. The same group opened a third establishment a couple of years ago on the West Bank. But Grey Duck didn’t follow the formula, affecting a certain polish of décor. It didn’t last long—as if to reinforce the point of the owners’ other restaurants!