With its heavy Scandinavian population, Minneapolis is a key U.S. player in the most avant-garde movement in food today: New Nordic cuisine, based on fish, dairy and cold-weather crops such as rutabagas, mushrooms and radishes.
I’ve missed many a trend in the foodie world, and I can’t wait to miss this one.
From an interesting article on nine cities that supposedly have thriving start-ups in specific industries. My comments:
1. Minneapolis is cited as an exciting place for restaurant start-ups. I call baloney sandwich. If you are an exciting place for a type of business, the business has to produce tradable goods or services. Restaurants do not count. If you want to start a restaurant, do not go to a city where the main growth industry is restaurants. Go to one of the other cities instead.
2. Baltimore and Boston are cited for New Commanding Heights businesses–education and health care, respectively.
3. How does this story affect my claim that cities will be increasingly chosen for their consumption characteristics, not for their production characteristics?
I know this wasn’t really your point, but that actually sounds pretty good. I occasionally make a stew out of yogurt, root vegetables, mushrooms, and fish, and it’s really good, despite the fact that I’m a pretty bad cook. I imagine it would be even better in the hands of someone who knows what he’s doing.
The formatting needs some adjustment.
As far as ‘chosen for consumption characteristics’ vs production, the question is which is the cart and which is the horse.
That’s hard to do when everything is connected, but I think the best metaphor is to compare an economy with something like a rain-forest ecosystem, in which the primary bioproducers are the big trees and plants, and everything else depends on inhabiting some specialized niche that can extract a little of the energy captured by the main photosynthesizers.
In a hub city, the main industries that offer lucrative employment for the affluent class play this role, and the upscale ‘artisan-type’ consumption options follow in an effort to serve this market when there is sufficient scale and density as well as the need for markers of class differentiation.
My hunch is that if you conducted a historical survey, you would see the same pattern emerge in locations which had a sudden boom in one of those primary ‘anchor’ industries, with a lag between the boom and the appearance of the marketers of fancier wares catering to the holders of the new wealth (and their wives). Consider Houston and the oil boom, or San Francisco and the Gold Rush and then the Silicon Valley boom.
Richard Florida has also written about the creative class and advised cities to attract these folks, but again I think he has picked the wrong causal direction for his correlations, and that the creative class and upscale-trendy-establishment entrepreneurs naturally follow the real money and the activities which generate the primary local production of value.
I’m a Minneaplis resident, a big fan of food (please don’t call me a foodie). This article’s treatment of Minneaplis is bull.
There are a bunch of new places to eat exactly because 1) the food tradition here is Scandinavian due to the large incumbent Scanid population and 2) there’s been a large influx of people moving in, discovering that Scani food is horrible, and developing a demand for good food. I mean, there’s a viking themed bar I’ve been to, and half it’s menu is full of Irish pub staples.
Also, I’ve never met anyone that thinks the Spoon and Saddle is a top tier restaurant, let alone a consensus best.
Doesn’t Garrison Keillor make fun of Scandinavian cuisine and its reputation for blandness a lot on Prairie Home Companion? I have a difficult time believing this is a Thing, now, but then again food is a fad-prone industry.
I suppose you could say that if a city is birthing new restaurants that are going to be franchised far and wide, then you might really have something, but I guess what you’re really providing in that case is the service of restaurant management, marketing, strategy, etc, along with the actual food, and the customers are the local franchisees, not the consumers eating the food.
I never hear foodies talk about nutrition or cost. I think what turns me off is the mixing of such a frivolous hobby with what i usually feel is necessary evil. Maybe I should change my thinking.
Ever eat lutefisk? It is a staple of Nordic holiday cuisine. It doesn’t bode well for a resurgence in Nordic gastronomy.
http://whatscookingamerica.net/History/LutefiskHistory.htm
=== ===
It is said that about half the Norwegians who immigrated to America came in order to escape the hated lutefisk, and the other half came to spread the gospel of lutefisk’s wonderfulness. – Norwegian-American saying
=== ===
The “New Nordic” trend in food was started by Noma, a restaurant in Copenhagen, that became acclaimed as the best in the world after El Bulli closed. It’s Nordic, but in the very loose sense that a 3-Michelin star French restaurant is related to the know be of cooking grandmothers in burgundy do on Tuesday nights. On the plate, it is a bit different from French or Italian, but if you called it New Germanic, I’m not sure I’d argue. There’s a large emphasis on cooking and preservation techniques that are more traditionally-rooted than, say, the extreme modernism of molecular gastronomy.
As for the direction of causality, I do think there’s a sizable feedback loop where better amenities bring more people which attracts more businesses. certainly if you think about migration within a city, undesirable neighborhoods get gentrified through a cycle where people draw in pathbreaking amenity businesses which draw more residents and so on.