Brenda Langton is a one-name force in Minnesota food. Tell any food-interested resident of Minneapolis "I saw Brenda at the farmers' market buying hen-of-the-woods mushrooms," and she'll instantly know whom you mean. It's not just the chef's two local restaurants -- chic, colorful Spoonriver and homey, simple Café Brenda -- that have made her significant; it's her dedication to the Great Lakes-and-prairie foodshed, her commitment to local farmers and her pioneering vision of what great regional American food can be.
It all started some 30 years ago, when Langton was whipping up all-vegetarian meals at her first Minnesota restaurant, Café Kardamena. "Vegetarian cooking was sort of strange then," she remembers. "In the '70s, everyone wanted to make a traditional American diet vegetarian, and there was a lot of concern about protein, so we'd always end up with something like walnut balls topped with béchamel sauce and cheese." In 1986 she closed Kardamena and opened Café Brenda, dropping the walnut balls in favor of seafood and sustainably raised local farm produce, meat, dairy and fish.
"I remember we were the first restaurant in town to get Lake Superior herring," Langton recalls. "We had a fisherman load them into the cargo bay of a Greyhound bus." These herring are one of the great, little-known American fish, and they taste almost honey-sweet because of their diet of tiny freshwater crustaceans and plankton. She served them then as she does now at Spoonriver, simply, with lightly pickled shaved vegetables and nutty, local Minnesota wild rice salad. "I love food straight-ahead," she confesses. "I've never been much for creating things out of dry ice or foam. "
The impetus to cook straight-ahead is what led Langton to open Spoonriver, a jewel box of a restaurant directly across the plaza from architect Jean Nouvel's Guthrie Theater. That plaza was key to her vision: She also wanted somewhere to start a chef-driven farmers' market, which she did in 2006. Now food lovers swarm to the Mill City Market every Saturday to shop the 30-odd specialty growers and artisanal food makers who sell mushrooms, sheep's-milk ricotta, rainbow trout, grass-fed lamb and beef and every conceivable northern fruit or vegetable, from muskmelons to beets.
Not surprisingly, Langton uses these ingredients as the core of her menus. Watermelon gazpacho is little more than the sweetest summer watermelon, plenty of tomatoes, croutons for body, a jalapeño for spice and a handful of fresh herbs, all whizzed together in a blender until the cold soup is crayon-bright and fragrant as a bouquet. The crunch of summer sweet corn is accented in a particularly Minnesotan way, by combining it in a cold salad with lake-harvested wild rice and blueberries. Bee pollen is used to rim the glass of a cocktail made by infusing vodka with honey and lavender flowers; when the drink is served, grains of the peppery pollen fall into the glass, giving it a taste so sunny and wildflower-floral that you can practically hear it buzz. For dessert, juicy apricots are transformed into kanten, an intriguing Asian-inspired farmers' market pudding, creamy with coconut milk and tahini.
If this menu, with its bee-pollen-rimmed cocktails, wild rice, blueberries and Lake Superior herring, sounds unique, it is. It's what happens when one chef works a single area's farm produce for a lifetime -- a very tasty lifetime.
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