First Trip to Luciano's... and it might be the last.

I recently got around to trying Luciano's recently. Luciano's is located on the main level of the Falls Center, the space formerly occupied by Food & Fermentation, the Brickhouse, and the Sioux Falls Brewing Company. It's gorgeous space-- open, rustic beams and brick and wood floors. There is also seating available outside with really nice views of the courthouse and the Cathedral. Great place to sit on a nice evening.

Luciano's here in Sioux Falls is an off-shoot of the eatery of similar name in Sioux City. I don't spend much time in Sioux City. Like most people from Sioux Falls I am rather skeptical of almost all things Sioux City and pretty much limit visits there to hitting the occasional concert. But, word on the street is that the Sioux City Luciano's is pretty decent and, hey, the place is new, so gotta give it a try.

Despite the Italian sounding name of the place, the menu is more European than it is Italian. Yes, there is some typically Italian sort of fare, such as lasagna or other pasta dishes, but there are also things like different varieties of schnitzel (complete with German potato salad), and French dishes like Flemish beef. There are also seafood selections.

We started the evening with some antipasti. I love these assortments of meats, cheeses, and pickled vegetables. I didn't notice anything particularly "authentic" on the plate, i.e. a good dried sopressata or mortadella or aged provolone, but still, pretty good. Unfortunately, this was the high point.

We'll skip the unremarkable soup. It was unremarkable. Let's get to the main dishes. I had lasagna. This is a dish that I often puzzle how one can screw up. They did. Overcooked pasta. Practically flavorless sauce, odd ricotta/béchamel. And a really flat, poor presentation to top it all off. The Secret Salad Fork had a fish dish- Salmon Wellington. I had a bite that was mostly the mushroom duxcelles and puff pastry. I kid you not, I nearly had to spit it out, it was that bad. That's a new one on me.

Service got a solid C+ for being friendly and somewhat knowledgable. I give the guy credit, he tried. But I didn't want placation or platitudes at that point, I wanted out.

I am told the place does a great job when owner Ray Hoffman is in the house. I hope so. But even then, it is going to take a great deal of convincing to get me back in the place.

Forget you, Chevy's! I'll make my own beans!

Disclaimer: Look. I know I try to write about the finer aspects of food around here. And when it comes to Mexican food, I have often crowed about the virtues of the extremely authentic Mexican food experiences available. This post is not about that. I freely confess that, sometimes, I want a particularly un-authentic experience and for sit-down dining, when it comes to Mexican, nothing gets much more un-authentic than Chevy's. At least not since Chi Chi's closed. Remember that??? I do! Anyway, there is nothing wrong with un-authentic, if that is what you are looking for.

So, I went to Chev's a little while back and when ordering my entree was extremely surprised to learn that the charros beans are no longer available. What the fork? How does that work? For those of you lacking the foggiest what I am talking about, charros beans were the frijoles that were not refritos. They looked like, well, beans In a spicy sauce. And now they are gone.

So, like Cee Lo Green might say, fork you and your no cans menu-hoo-hoo. Make your own beans. So, with props to Rick Bayless and Alton Brown, here is a method for making your own very tasty beans at home.

Pay attention.

Get yourself about 4 slices of nice, thick smoky bacon. Cut it into small, but roughly cut pieces and cook it in a suacepan, maybe 3 or 4 quart, over medium heat. Let it get crisp and render that fat out. (No, don't drain the damned fat. The beans soak it up and that's part of what makes this so good.) Pull the bacon out of the pan with a slotted spoon and set it aside on a plate. Don't eat it all while continuing the recipe. Now, at this point, you got options. You could saute about a cup of diced onion in there until translucent and then finely chop a couple of cloves of garlic and saute that for a minute. Then you add about a half a can of fire roasted tomatoes and a half a beer. Or, you could totally cheat and add the beer and about 7-8 ounces of salsa. (Know what salsa is? Chopped tomatoes, peppers, onions, and garlic with tomatoes. Duh. Let David Pace do the chopping. Completely fair.)

Oh, that beer? Dos Equis Amber works great, but so does Corona, Tecate, and Miller High Life. B-double "E"-R. It all works.

Simmer that stuff. Drain a couple of cans of pinto beans. Dump them in, toss the bacon back in and simmer the whole shebang on medium-low heat for about 15 minutes. Let them thicken up a bit.

If you didn't use the salsa, chop up a few seeded pickled jalapenos and put them in there. Salt to taste. Finish them with a handful of chopped cilantro-- about a half cup.

Knock yourself out. These are good.

Crawford's

I just can't quite put it another way: This time of year sucks. Sure, the weather is starting to get a little nicer, and the grass is starting to show the slightest signs of coming back to life. But, overall, it is still rather "grey" around here. Hate that.

However, if you find your visual senses needing a little jump start, you might wander down to Crawford's on Phillips Ave downtown. Crawford's is the newest addition to the Sioux Falls fine dining scene. Named after the menswear store that once occupied the same spot, the building is beautiful. Step inside and be prepared for an explosion of styles, textures, and colors. I believe I read the decor is kind of like cowboy meets gypsy. That's a pretty good start. You'll see original brick, a pressed tin ceiling, leather, iron, lighting fixtures fashioned from antlers, cowhide, dark wallpaper festooned with jewels, colored candle holders, silk curtains, etc. etc. etc. A person could probably discover something they haven't seen previously on just about any trip in there. It's quite the experience.

The menu is pretty interesting. Kind of standard fine dining fare, in my opinion. Steaks, fish, lamb, pasta, salads, soups, appetizers. On our visit, we started with some calamari, steak bites, and smoked chicken wings. Nothing terribly exciting, but all prepared well and sent out without error. The calamari was some of the largest cut and tenderest squid I have had here. We tried the onion soup, which featured something like four onions. Hard to tell that, though, because of the smoky gruyere melted on top that gave it a definite smokiness. The entrees were good. Fairly big portions.

Service was good. We had a great waitress who was friendly and eager to serve. That can get a person a long way. Her only fault was a general lack of knowledge of fine food and the nuances of the menu. Crawford's makes a pretty big production out of the service. Our entrees were delivered by at least two people from the kitchen.

However . . . decor alone won't carry the day. Even though Crawford's is off to a great start, especially for being open only a week, I would offer the following thoughts:

• I personally thought the approach to the entrees was a little ham-handed. The food was well prepared, but the portions were a tad large. Big and pretty don't necessarily go together. I hope the chefs will start to experiment and get out a little more toward the "edge" like the guys at Bros have done. The food just needs a little more, well, finesse.


• I'd like to see some awesome off-menu specials. I learned a long time ago that if a place is featuring a really special dish that isn't on the menu, that's probably what you want to go for.


• Get that staff educated.

I also have one general question about fine dining downtown, in general. Let me preface this by saying that in my humble opinion, thanks to Parker's, Bros, and K's, downtown has wrestled the fine-dining epicenter back downtown, where it should be. But, are Crawford's, Bros, and Parker's too alike? Time will tell. Anyone who pays attention around here knows that almost any food place will be jam packed for the first several weeks it is open. Hell, Senor Wiener probably hit it out of the park for a month before everyone figured out they were serving hot dogs from a difficult to access location. Crawford's is definitely the "it" place right now. Can they sustain it, and what does this mean for other establishments?

I think David Graham should do well with this endeavor. By decor alone, Crawford's has quickly set itself apart from other venues, but in time it is going to take great food and support from the dining public. Personally, I prefer Parker's and Bros, but I will definitely be back to visit Crawford's many times, I am sure.

Revisiting old favorites- do they change or do we?

I was recently in Pierre and had the opportunity to visit one of my favorite places, La Minestra. Over the years, I have had many very enjoyable dinners there and have raved about it here. I re-read that post and puzzled over whether I felt the same now. I mean, the meal I had with some friends and family was perfectly good, but it really wasn't anything terribly special. The question I kept pondering: Had LaMinestra had changed or had my experiences and expectations changed? Probably, a little of both.

If you have read any of the older posts on this blog, you probably know that I have had the extreme fortune of being able to dine in some of the very top-tier restaurants in the country. These aren't places that merely make good food, they are on the cutting edge of food preparation and techniques. The sort of things a chef like Grant Achatz of Alinea in Chicago is experimenting with today may appear on a plate somewhere else years from now. You don't think some line cook at Chili's in suburban Atlanta invented molten chocolate cake, do you? Anyway, eating really great ingredients prepared in extremely innovative ways can change the way you think about the ingredients and how they are used. At least, that's what should happen if you are paying attention.

The other factor, for me at least, that I believe has changed my perspective a bit is that we are enjoying an embarrassment of riches here in Sioux Falls right now. I credit the efforts of places like Parker's and Bros along with an absolute smathering of really excellent richly ethnic spots. We have reached a point where if you want something more interesting than a steak with baked potato or even a brick oven pizza, you can get it. Thanks to really excellent seared duck breast (Parker's) or unctuous, slow cooked pork goodies, including pork belly (Bros), even a trip to old standards like Minerva's don't look quite so attractive. Thanks to beef tongue tacos and really decent Pho, we know there are more exotic flavors out there.

My recent meal at LaMinestra was really pretty good. Steak cooked correctly and good service. But it was just lacking pizzaz. The sauce for the steak, a take on beef bourgignon, fell short. Too acidic. Lacked richness of the dish it was meant to replicate. The potatoes- eh. It was good. It just wanted something more jacked up, so to speak.

There is always going to be a place for safe, mildly-seasoned, old favorites served in familiar settings. After all this is South Dakota, and there are still plenty of people around here who believe that too much salt and black pepper can render a dish too spicy. But for those of us who understand the criticism of a judge on Top Chef that the food is not well-seasoned, and who have eaten outside our comfort zones, the old standbys begin to look, well, old.

Please make an effort to visit a small, independent restaurant in South Dakota. Order something other than a steak, stuffed chicken breast, or basic pasta dish. Treat your server well and thank the chefs- if you think they do a good job. See if your perspective changes, even just a little.

Boston's Est Mort

According to the AL, Boston's is no mas. Anyone surprised?

Amazingly, Boston's has seemingly done well in Rapid City, but here in Soo Foo? Not so good.

Any thoughts?

Food Network Does The Impossible: I Actually Miss Emeril

There was a time when you could watch the Food Network and watch very accomplished chefs demonstrate some great dishes. I'm not talking about Bobby Flay, or episodes of American Iron Chef, I mean chefs like Sara Moulton, Mario Batali, and, even if you could stay awake long enough, old episodes of Julia Childs' The French Chef. Even Emeril Lagasse, who was on waaay too many times each day BAMMING his way through menus was cooking was cooking things.

Now, the programming seems to be dominated by too many "reality" sorts of shows like The Next Iron Chef and Chopped (both of which seem mostly to be Top Chef knock-offs) or shows about places, like DDD.

Okay, maybe there are some cooking shows, but they mostly seem staffed by people who won the opportunity to host shows, or people with swell cleavage (Giada) or perky people (Rachel Ray) or drunk bimbos (Sandra Lee). I want to see something interesting, as far as real cooking goes. Cleavage is nice and all, but there are other channels for that. I know Food Network must realize there is an issue, because there is now a Cooking Channel.

Anyway. What killed me, literally, was the other night I was watching a show called "Guy, Off The Hook." Ok. It's Guy Fierri, same guy from DDD and Guy's Big Bite. Pretty sure this "Guy" was the first "Next Food Network Star." You would have SWORN you were watching a blonde, spiky Emeril working the crowd. And he really wasn't cooking anything interesting.

When Emeril became a caricature, the Food Network tosses him over the rail. Now they got Guy Fierri becoming equally, if not more, annoying. When will poor Guy sleep with the fishes?

So, like I said, I finally miss Emeril. That means I REALLY miss Mario. Molto.

Turning Japanese? Chuck Williams thinks so.

This is a two-part pre-Christmas rant.

Part I: Williams-Sonoma. And, that's Williams-Sonoma, NOT Williams & Sonoma. (This is a similar lesson to learning not to say Bracco's and Spezia's.) Chuck Williams is a guy who opened a cookware store north of San Francisco in an area famous for wine-- Sonoma County. Hence, Williams-Sonoma. Williams & Sonoma sounds like a law firm.

So, anyway, there was probably a time when Chuck was the MAN when it came to mail-order gourmet cooking equipment. That time was probably from 1956 to some time in the late 80's or early 90's. I remember getting the WIlliams-Sonoma catalog back at the time I was starting to do a lot of cooking. That was right about the same time I got my very own subscription to Gourmet magazine. By the way, Gourmet was a much different publication back then, too, but that's another rant entirely. Anyway, I felt like I had arrived.

If you wanted/needed a cherry pitter, chocolate shaver, and a big old 5 pound bar of Callebaut to shave, Chuck could hook you up. In other words, you could find things at W-S that you probably couldn't find elsewhere. Nowdays, there are many more outlets and W-S has changed.

If you are a student of the W-S catalog, or the retail stores for that matter, it's more about what they think you should want instead of what you need. It's more about life-style than equipment. I think the demise came about around the time Chuck started a housewares outfit called Pottery Barn. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this stuff is real cool and it looks really nice, but if you are a shopping addict, you are going to be remodeling every 6 months to keep up with whatever the latest style might be.

Try this- walk into a W-S store and try to find a decent pair of tongs. Not the big-ass rosewood BBQ ones that are like squeezing one of those spring-loaded grip workout dealies, just a decent pair of stainless steel tongs. End of story- you won't find one, but you will find an espresso machine you'll need financing for, sauces that conveniently make Beef Bourgignonne in a $400 All-Clad crock pot, or whatever the hell color of Provencal place mats they are hocking this year. See, it's not so much about selling you equipment as it is an image.

I suppose this is just good retail and it apparently works. But I seriously just want a pair of tongs or maybe a decent China cap chinois. Need to go elsewhere. My choices? Whenever possible, a local retailer, like Kitchen Window in Uptown of Minneapolis, Someone's in the Kitchen in Rapid City, or Treasures from the Heart on 57th and Louise. Seriously, check that out, they got major stuff in that store disguised as yet another Yankee Candle retailer.

Part II: Despite my ever-growing infrequent purchases from W-S, I do still get the catalog and here comes the turning Japanese part. Remember that song from the 80's, by the way? "Turning Japanese, I think I'm turning Japanese, I really think so." Did you know it's about masturbation? Look it up.

So, the reason I say Chuck thinks we are turning Japanese is because besides outrageously expensive espresso machines, this year's holiday catalog features some crazy spendy Asian-style knives. Specifically, Shun Bob Kramer Meiji knives that you can get ON SPECIAL as a 6-piece set for the low, low price of $1599. Serious bargain considering the regular retail is $2177. Now, I may not know why Owners Equity plus Liabilities = MC squared, or any of that other funny accounting stuff, but I sure as hell know that's $266.67 PER BLADE, on sale. In the same catalog you can get a 12-piece set of Wustof Classic for $500, or for another $200, you can get the same knives with Asian-style handles.

Now, I must admit, the really spendy Shun knives are gorgeous. Damascus steel, cocobolo handles. Really sweet. But who buys these things? My guess, people who have more money than sense or people who want everyone else to be super-impressed because they have really expensive stuff.

Having knives like that is kind of like having a custom-made Holland & Holland shotgun instead of a good old Remington 870 to shoot ducks. They'll both get the job done, but which one are you going to toss in the bottom of the boat while you set decoys? Or, to put it another way, it's perhaps a little like checking a Louis Vuitton hard-sider suitcase for a three-stop trip to vacation. Sure, you can, or could, but why? I mean, who the hell do you think you are the Prince of Whales? You gonna use that $300 santoku to hack through half a chicken, or open a can? Exactly.

The other major beef I got is Asian knives, actually. To give credit where credit is due, they are usually well-made and extremely sharp. But, they are different than the traditional French-styled knives that most of us have seen in kitchens forever. Besides that half-cleaver, half-chef's knife santoku design, these puppies have different edges on them. The bevel on the blade is ground to a different angle. The steel is also a little different than what the Germans crank out in Solingen. It's harder. The point? (Har Har) It's a little harder to maintain the edge on these. The designs of some of these knives are very purpose-oriented. Watch a good Japanese sushi chef use one of those long, skinny blades. If he came up through the traditional Japanese apprenticeship regime, he probably mixed rice for 20 years before he was allowed to wash that knife. Anyway, if you aren't used to these knives and their functions, know they are different, and not necessarily for everyone. Just because they look cool and might appear to give you some out-of-the-box cache, you might not like them.

Good equipment doesn't always come cheap, but it helps to have the right tools for the job. If your budget is somewhat limited, I recommend you take your time finding and buying high-end equipment. Eventually, you will find what you like and be able to afford it, even if it means buying a pan or a knife a year. In the meantime, you are better putting your money into decent ingredients and concentrating on your technique so as not to screw them up. If you can't do that, Damascus steel Shun knives won't save you.