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Trattoria Michelangelo
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| Around the World and Back to Main Street | Exile on Main Street | |
| I returned last week from
a vacation in Pakistan. Rawalpindi and
Islamabad, the cities I was in, are hardly known for their gastronomy.
Indeed, Pakistani cuisine is in some respects a subset of its Indian
counterpart. There are a few dishes, notably the kebabs from the
Frontier province, that you can’t get across the border (not that you
can cross it easily these days, although bus service had just been
renewed while I was there) but otherwise the political asundering has
little cultural basis.
However, the eating-out craze is slowly but surely taking hold in Pakistan. It’s not all laudable—"the land of the pure" is being corrupted by KFCs and Pizza Huts—but there are also good-quality restaurants serving foods from different parts of the country as well as more international culinary choices. I only had time for an unrepresentative sample, but in the unlikely event that any reader of ours finds herself in Rawalpindi I would recommend a restaurant called Rendezvous in the Saddar area of town. It serves desi (i.e., Pakistani), continental, and pasta dishes in a converted colonial-age compound, and you can partake of your meal on the lawn listening to live music—a sitar-tabla duo was performing when I visited. Pasta appears to be the latest thing in the twin cities of Pakistan; although for some of us the experience is marred by the inability to order a Chianti to help wash down that spaghetti Bolognese. Pasta places aren’t in short supply locally either, of course, and in fact they continue to spring up in odd places. The day after returning from my overseas trip B and I headed out to lunch at Trattoria Michelangelo on what’s literally and figuratively Main Street in Hopkins. Statuary and a fountain on Main Street, America? Whither meatloaf and apple pie?
Decorative items aside, though, Michelangelo isn’t chi-chi Italian. The sauces are red, the pastas would be familiar even in Pakistan, the patio furniture (we sat on the patio) is plastic, and the wine list has few choices and fewer pretensions (although a list of reserve Barolos is available). Even the fountain, on closer inspection, destroys any implication of elegance; it’s painted (poorly) and wired up to a prominent electricity outlet that is held together by that universal fixall, duct tape. Pastas are the mainstay here. The menu lists oven-baked and otherwise prepared pastas separately, the former including lasagna, manicotti, and baked rigatoni. Four specialty entrees are also listed, such as chicken marsala and scampi with red bell peppers. A side of the chef’s choice pasta comes with these. Salads and sandwiches round out the menu; the latter are prepared with French bread and include a pasta salad. The restaurant also features daily specials; on the day in question these were a bell pepper and ham sandwich ("American ham," none of that Parma stuff on Main Street, thank you), a Mediterranean salad with shrimp, and a sautéed chicken breast. B and I shared the gorgonzola salad as a starter. This was served already split for us—a nice touch—and was substantial even in half portions. The menu had warned us of a cornucopia of ingredients: mixed greens, onion, capers, tomato, mushrooms, artichoke. The presented version also had green olives and peppercinis. The dressing was a light vinaigrette. I found the salad a bland affair; either the dressing or the gorgonzola could have imparted more zest or flavor to it but both were too mild to serve that purpose. Nonetheless, I suspect the salad was good for me after the dietary excesses of Pakistan! For my main course, I had one of the special entrees, the chicken parmigiano. The preparation was classical, a thinly cut chicken breast, breaded and fried, with a light tomato sauce and melted provolone. The breading managed to retain crispness despite the layer of sauce, but the dish was oversalted and a little on the greasy side. B ordered the rigatoni al salsiccia; the rigatoni was done quite well, the sausage was moderately spicy and flavorful but had enough gristle in it that I was tempted to ask for a toothpick. Our entrees arrived before we were done with the salads, which weren’t cleared until after the meal. Perhaps our server was attempting a synthesis of the American before-main-dish and Italian after-main-dish salad habit! We might have been in the mood for dessert, but our waiter brought us our check and walked away rapidly. That’s one less tiramisu for our readers to hear about. A |
One evening, while dining
at La Bodega
in Uptown, I got into conversation with an Italian
gentleman, who it transpired, owned—in partnership—not only La
Bodega but also another restaurant in Hopkins. The restaurant was
intriguingly described as "fine dining in Hopkins." I had
completely forgotten this episode but was quickly reminded of it because
The Lunch needed a venue in the Western suburbs due to work conflicts. I
suggested to A that we meet in Hopkins and then we’d find the
restaurant, whose name I’d quite forgotten. We agreed to meet outside
a well-known car dealership. I am a compulsive never-be-late-unless-you’re-on-death’s-door
type of person and not knowing what we were looking for I got there half
an hour early. I found Trattoria Michelangelo almost immediately—the
site for The Lunch—but then had to find a way of whiling away thirty
minutes. I couldn’t wait at the restaurant because I had promised to
meet A outside this wretched auto dealership, which was several blocks
away. In the end I spent as much time as I could looking over new cars
and then went and stood—death suited, as Larkin would have put it—on
the curb waiting for A.
The restaurant sits on Main Street in downtown Hopkins, a cute little city in its own right. The gentrification started in St. Louis Park has also made inroads here with new townhouses for sale not far from the trattoria. I would like to think that we had named a town after Gerald Manley Hopkins (The Wreck of the Deutschland ) but I suspect the name has closer to home connections. For once we decided to sit outside in the patio area. It was a very pleasant day and not much traffic was flowing on Main Street. A pastoral, Italian look is attempted by the proprietors of Trattoria Michelangelo with green chairs and tables and there is even a white fountain. The attempt fails because the chairs and tables are made of plastic, which would be blown away by even a gentle Hopkinsian zephyr. The fountain is cheaply made and is already showing signs of discoloration; this could mean that it’s a genuine antique but the power cord plugged into the wall quickly dispels those notions.
The menu offers three reds by the glass and five whites. I chose the ubiquitous Malbec, an Argentinean wine with very little to recommend itself. We started off by sharing an order of the Gorgonzola salad. This was a dull, watery concoction, lacking the piquancy, which you normally expect from Gorgonzola. I had the rigatoni con salsiccia (rigatoni pasta, Italian sausage, onions, spicy sauces and Parmesan cheese) for my entrée. After the disastrous salad the pasta was a pleasant surprise, being firm with the sausage quite spicy if somewhat chewy. The other dishes are standard Italian restaurant fare: lasagna; baked rigatoni; manicotti; fettuccini Alfredo; farfalle primavera; spaghetti & meatballs; capelli d’ angeli; and pollo piccate. Most of the dinning space, it appears, is outdoors. The indoor is a tiny dive of a place. I saw the person who had extended me the invitation to dine here working furiously in the kitchen. Our waiter was the genuine article: a cliched Italian waiter with a marginal grasp of the English language. He flung (more than offered) the menus on the table but even this display didn’t appear to be a rude act, just an outlet for excess machismo. Later we were given no chance to order dessert and poor A went espresso-less. In the words of George Dubya: La Bodega, 101 Blu and Trattoria Michelangelo form the axis of mediocrity and we recommend you avoid them with the possible exception of La Bodega for late night dining. The entrance to the restaurant is guarded by a leonine gargoyle, which had an unfortunate accident with my knee – I suspect that neither will be quite the same again. B
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