Fortunately, Southern food in Minneapolis doesn’t have to mean a Spam sandwich. There are a handful of places that bring food experience from the other side of the Mason-Dixon Line to Vikingland. If you want Soul food, Lucille’s Kitchen in Plymouth seems, to this neophyte, to be the most authentic, especially now that Sallie’s Soul & Creole on Lake St. has closed up shop.

The Lunch ended up at a Southern food restaurant this week, Dixie’s Calhoun, the selection dictated not because either B or I had a hankering for grits but for a prosaic yet unusual reason: B realized that the index of our review archive had no entries under a few letters, D being alphabetically the first of these!

Dixie’s Calhoun—the postqualifer serving to distinguish the restaurant from the original establishment on Grand Ave. in St. Paul—is located on the ground floor of the Calhoun Beach Club building, across Lake Street from Lake Calhoun. The building provides a large, airy space for the restaurant. There’s a full bar, above which hangs a large whimsical alligator sculpture, plus three dining rooms. The windows, in the bar area and visible from most of the dining space, look out on Lake Street and Lake Calhoun. One wall sports a large vibrant mural, the centerpiece of which seems to be a black angel in a blue suit. The décor is generally attractive in a design-by-committee sort of way.

Dixie’s is Southern food in the large—it encompasses BBQ, soul, Cajun, Creole. Every month specials from a particular state are featured. The September 2003 state is Mississippi, represented by items such as roasted green tomato soup, rock-crab-stuffed artichoke with raspberry sage vinaigrette, catfish fingers with asparagus salad, and buttermilk-fried game hen.

The regular menu includes some distinctive appetizers—there are few other places in town in which you could find fried pickles, gorgonzola-stuffed portobellos, and soul fries (with cheddar and bleu cheeses and bacon and ranch dressing)? The sandwiches include two kinds of Cajun burgers (one served blackened and with bleu cheese) and, for the hapless vegetarian in a party that opts for Dixie’s, a Portobello mushroom sandwich with fried onions, lettuce, tomato, and mayo. Several salads are also available and the soups include a gumbo with chicken, shrimp, and fresh fish.

Almost a dozen entrees are also on the lunch menu. These come with baking powder biscuits and coleslaw and the choices include three types of chicken (BBQ, bourbon, and honey pecan), farm-raised catfish, spicy shrimp quesadilla, and red beans and rice. Just in case your selection hasn’t already put you over the RDA for calories, fat, sodium, and cholesterol, you can also order a macaroni-and-five-cheeses side.

We started by splitting the Mississippi-special stuffed artichoke appetizer, which came festooned with raspberries … a disappointment. The artichoke leaves seemed to have nothing on them, and the meager scrapings I could manage were tasteless. Even the artichoke heart was utterly devoid of flavor. The candy-sweet yet watery vinaigrette was no help. The crab stuffing was also too sweet and lacked any delicacy.

I followed the appetizer with a pulled pork sandwich. The meat was okay but the basic white bread bun, the too-sweet (do we detect a theme here?) barbeque sauce, and the wet, bland side of coleslaw were not. The fries were pretty good, a small redeeming feature. B ordered the buttermilk-fried game hen. I found the hen too crispy—the piece I had almost had a hard coating—and surprisingly bland, to the point of lacking salt.

With sugar a prominent ingredient in the dishes anyway, we skipped dessert. I did get an espresso, which turned out to be dense, chewy, and muddy.

But, for all my criticisms, the place was doing just fine. B and I aside, the clientele was uniformly white and prosperous-looking. Business was being transacted on some tables, gifts exchanged on others, and quite likely some occupants of the tony lakeview apartments in the building were truly enjoying this Minnesotanized version of the Deep South … Hmm, maybe they mean food you can get around Mississippi the river, not the state—you know, as in Davenport.

I was introduced, quite accidentally, to Jazz one afternoon at the age of eleven. It was a scorching hot summer and I was at a loose end. This was also the time when I had started reading my first "serious" book (The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence) and it seemed fitting that I should also venture into "serious" music. I did so by plundering my fathers record collection that he’d accumulated as a young man and which had sat festering for twenty plus years in a wooden crate at the back of our garage. The records were in pristine condition, protected by their sleeves and covered with what seemed like baked hay. Out they came: Pal Joey (musical), The Lady is a Tramp (Frank Sinatra), any number of Nat King Cole albums, and an old 78 by Sidney Bechet. Never having seen a 78, I carried the solid looking disk to our family record player and after having figured out the correct speed was rewarded by Bechet’s soaring trumpet on Blue Horizon. This was a seminal moment—though I wasn’t to know that for many years—my first Jazz record. And what a Jazz record! I was lucky. It could have been something from the era of bebop improvisation (Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman or even Miles Davis) but instead it was Jazz in the Dixieland—New Orleans style and I would remember that sound for the rest of my life.

Dixie’s was reviewed quite deliberately (not to imply that our reviews aren’t normally deliberate) because we noticed that The Lunch hadn’t yet been to a restaurant whose name started with the letter ‘D’. Dixie’s occupies the lower front portion of the Calhoun Beach Club, commanding a view of Lake Calhoun across Lake Street. This is yuppie central. The affluent young—not quite prepared to buy a house on nearby Dean Parkway—are renting top-of-the-line condos, perched atop Calhoun Beach Club with majestic views of the lake. Some readers may remember this space as being the former home of David Fhima’s Minneapolis Café.

The space is large and is divided into three levels; each separated from the other by a few steps so the effect is multi-layered rather than multi-leveled. A large wooden bar that almost extends the length of the restaurant commands the entrance and makes up most of the first level. Strung across (and above) the bar is a large crocodile; it’s difficult to tell how much of the reptile is real and how much mechanical but it certainly is a formidable looking creature that you wouldn’t want to meet wind-surfing on Lake Calhoun! The second level is dining tables in an open floor plan, whereas the third level has dark recessed alcoves and a high ceiling. The walls are painted a varying shades of green and yellow with large murals crudely drawn on them. These murals depict a Southern/Cajun/Black theme including a white hooded horse rider.

I ordered a glass of Columbia crest cabernet, a full-bodied wine infused with a bright vanilla taste. A, who had arrived before me, had ordered an appetizer consisting of artichoke stuffed with rock crab and served with raspberries. This sounds a lot better than it tasted. The artichoke barely had any edible flesh, whereas the crab was too sweet—if you can imagine that. The menu has southern specialty dishes like ribs, fried chicken, catfish, and the signature crawfish étouffée. From the daily specials I chose a buttermilk fried hen served with an andouille cream sauce. I suppose one gets what one asks for. What was I thinking ordering a buttermilk-fried hen? It just seemed such a New Orleans thing but it was a bony bit of chicken, covered with a sweet batter. Awful! The sausage based andouille cream sauce on the other hand was quite good but not enough to salvage the dish. I had a taste of A’s pork sandwich which was too sweet as well. Looks like sugar was liberally added to all dishes.

The service was very good and it seemed A new the waitress from another venue. The bill came to $54.00. The meal was absolutely forgettable but I can see how the venue could be popular with people wanting to take advantage of the outdoor seating to watch the lake. CBC has other facilities like a health club and facilities that may be rented for parties and weddings. Many years ago I used to office out of this building but those were the days. The music on the sound system was some nondescript pop. I couldn’t believe it. With the whole heritage of New Orleans to choose from why not play to your strengths? As if one Dixie’s wasn’t enough, this is the second location the original Dixie’s is on Grand in St. Paul.

If you crave a Cajun fix then try Copeland’s in downtown. The food is considerably better there. I left in a foul mood which was eased by listening to a combination of Louis Armstrong and Jelly "Roll" Morton—true sons of New Orleans—on the CD player as I drove back to work.