MN Day 4 - Spooky Art, Secret Beaches, and Singing Saloons

Today was my last full day with my sister and cousins because they’d be heading back to MA tomorrow evening so we did our best to make the most of it. Our first plan of attack was to go all out on a big brunch so John and Kevin could stop rubbing their previous brunch in all of our faces. Initially we stopped at a really unique spot called The Herbivorious Butcher. If you walked in you might think it was a slightly retro but classic butcher shop, but the twist is that every single fine cut of meat or cheese is actually 100% vegan. The shop was founded by a brother and sister team from Guam who love food and animals equally and felt that there was no reason you couldn’t enjoy all the finest foods without hurting any animals. It’s very sweet, and pretty mind-blowing to see how creative they are with their offerings, but I think we all sort of underestimated how much it would actually operate like a butcher shop. While everything looked fantastic (and I highly recommend you check out their website for both mouthwatering food photos and cute photos of the owners being a very sibling-y team here), we were looking for more of a sit down meal as opposed to either the sandwiches to go or DIY meals that are more of their speciality so we ultimately decided to find another spot. Still, it makes me really happy knowing a place like this exists.

Even if our first brunch choice didn’t totally pan out, while we were walking back to our car we stumbled across this bar that featured a delightfully strange Dandy Otter mascot and would be hosting karaoke later tonight so that really piqued our interest and we filed the name away for later.

Our next stop for brunch couldn’t have gone much better, as we picked the ironically named 50s inspired diner: The Bad Waitress. The tongue-in-cheek name proved a misnomer as restaurant ticked all the hallmark diner boxes with friendly service, fun kitschy art on the walls, and heaping helpings of American comfort food. I went with a hefty three egg scramble with spinach and avocado (because I definitely wasn’t getting enough fruits or vegetables this week) which also came with perfectly toasted multigrain bread and some fantastic homefries. While before noon might not be the time to get either booze or milkshake, somehow the Bad Waitress’ signature boozy milkshakes felt like the perfect brunch companion so I got the boozed up version of their Spy House Caramella Malt Shake which has their rich, house vanilla bean ice cream, real caramel, and cold-press iced coffee from Spy House roasters, a shot of Bailey’s, and whipped cream and espresso beans on top for added flair. It was far too decadent for that early in the morning, but boy did I love it.

After brunch, my cousin Katie felt like we hadn’t done enough classic summer vacation-y things while we were here so we decided to make a beach day of it. We had heard good things about scenic Lake Minnetonka, and we figured that since Minnesota is basically Lake Mecca we had to take advantage of natural wonder when it presents itself. On the one hand, the Lake lived up to the hype in that it was absolutely gorgeous with piercing blue waters that we just don’t get on the East Coast, but on the other hand we really lived up to a classic family trait and got hopelessly lost trying to find a public beach to stop at and really enjoy things up close. We did find a nice private dock and a little park which had great vistas, but no beaches unfortunately.

While our beach quest proved to be a bust, the views were worth it, plus we unknowingly drove through the general area of Prince’s home-studio Paisely Park which is pretty neat. We didn’t actually go see it, but it’s a pretty incredible looking compound where Prince used to live, record, and occasionally give special concerts. Before his death, he was working on turning it into a public museum and community space like his own personal Graceland. He never got to see this come to fruition but tours are now going strong (even during the Pandemic which, to look at things positively, is a testament to how beloved he was). Personally I don’t know Prince’s music well, but he really seems like one of the few musicians who everyone respected as a singular talent even if he wasn’t their cup of tea. With maybe the exception of Bob Dylan, I don’t think there is a more famous Minnesotan, and I think its sweet that he never forgot about where he came from and always wanted to be a source of inspiration for kids in the state (especially children of color) to dream big and follow creativity. Because he kept a lot of his charitable donations secret, we might never know exactly how much he gave to support arts education and community services across the state (and the country if we’re being honest) but the estimates are that he almost single handedly kept some dance and music schools afloat at points.

When we got back to Minneapolis, we finally satisfied Katie’s beach craving with a trip to Minneapolis’ Hidden Beach, a former nude beach and counterculture hang out turned family outing spot, tucked along a pathway hidden in the woods by residential area and overlooking the city’s Cedar Lake. It was secluded and cozy, and we had a perfect beach bay to enjoy there. On the one hand, I’m sure some people feel like the beach might have lost its edge since the days of naked hippiedom, but I think its hidden nature makes it still plenty cool and much less crowded than similarly nice beaches which is always a plus.

I think my pictures show paint a pretty picture of the Hidden Beach but I’d remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that my sister easily got the best picture there:

I’m not as much of a beach person as my cousins, so along with my sister and my cousin Kevin we left the beach a little ahead of the rest of the group to go see a weird art studio/ oddities shop called Studio Payne in St. Paul. The shop was founded by a taxidermy artist (quite a combo) named Cameren Torgerud who wanted a place to display his own art while also offering an opportunity for other artists and customers around St. Paul to embrace their weird sides. The shop was a mix of all things creatively macabre with local art that blended classic cartoons with 1980s horror movie aesthetics, animal skulls, and vintage collectibles around every corner. Some of the art might be a bit too far into the disturbing side of things for everyone, but you gotta appreciate the blend of talent and weirdness that goes into making such creepy imagery feel fully realized and there’s a sweet sense of community to all these oddballs finding one another.

As a big fan of Little Shop of Horrors (Rick Moranis is tiny king), my favorite piece in the gallery was easily this snarling carnivorous plant made out of turtle shells, raccoon vertebra, and possibly real fangs (but I think the teeth and the tongue were carved out of materials that were never alive as novel as that might seem).

After checking out the weird art, we made our way to check out more accessible wares at my one my friend Mike’s favorite bookshop near where he grew up: Magers and Quinn. Before going into the bookstore, I ran across the street to the surprisingly awesomely decorated Calhoun Street Mall to get a shot of energy from Dogwood Coffee. Sadly this location has closed, but there’s a few other spots kicking around and if you’re in the Twin Cities, I can’t recommend Dogwood enough. There coffee really made an impression for tasting almost unusually great (I didn’t get anything fancier than my normal cold brew but they must just have a great roast or something, somehow with all the coffee I drank on this trip I never really learned anything enough about it to talk snob lingo), and the fun atmosphere and friendly people just made it all the better.

After getting re-caffeinated, we made our way to Magers & Quinn which very much lived up to my friend’s hype. At 8,000 sq. ft of store space and over 250,000 books, M&Q is the largest independent book store in all of Minnesota and it is a real treasure trove of all the new and used books you could hope for. It’s the kind of place that’s a blast to just get lost in. I know my cousin found somethings he was excited about, and I came across a really good deal on an Audiobook of Phillip K. Dick’s A Maze of Death which I thought would be a fun way to thing to listen to spice up my long driving days. Some other fun things my sister and I spotted included: somebody two books called Monkeys, Go Home and God Speaks to Women in the middle of the James Bond series (if only there were real Bond adventures with those names!) and a fun pulpy reprint of The Hound of the Baskervilles with the most incredibly British tag line I’ve ever seen.

And if I may take a moment to embarrass my friend a little, Mike’s love of bookstores is no small thing and it makes it all the more exiting that while I was on this trip he was hard at work on his first young adult novel which has since been published by Scholastic and is a thing you can and should own with the kind of gleefully punny title that would have made kids like him and I light up with excitement at our elementary school Scholastic book fairs:

After the bookstore, we met up with the rest of our cousins and ordered up a batch of one of Minneapolis’ most famous food creations: the Juicy Lucy. While there is a hot debate about which local bar first served up this reinvention of the cheeseburger, Matt’s Bar or the 5-8 Club, there is no doubting that it has since become a beloved and greasy addition to the city’s culinary scene. The Juicy Lucy (or alternative Jucy Lucy depending on the restaurant) is defined by the cheese going inside the burger instead of on top so that cooks with the meat and oozes out when you take a bit which supposedly caused a sweet old midwestern man to exclaim “Ooh now that’s a juicy Lucy!” thus giving the creation its name. For our Lucy’s, we went to Matt’s Bar, but I’m told that all rivalries aside both restaurants’s burgers are very good. I can’t say we were disappointed (though I don’t honestly remember what if anything my vegetarian sister did while we got our meat and cheese on), and the mix of melty cheese and perfectly cooked beef was definitely a deliciously messy experience that offered much more satisfaction than pure novelty.

After our burgers, we hung out around the Air BnB for a bit (and I’m pretty sure I fell into a brief burger coma) so that we could save up our strength for a night of bar hopping to make the most of our last night all together.

We started our pub crawl at a place called Tilt Pinball Bar which I believe everyone enjoyed for the fun combo of good cocktails and classic pinball, though I think they all thought I had over-hyped how much I’d gotten into pinball over this trip until they were all ready to move on to the next location and I very annoyingly insisted I finish out all my coins because I was on a roll. It wasn’t my finest hour, but thankfully it was a great bar even if you’re not a pinball junkie and they had a fun house cocktail called Batman’s Secret Gadget which featured Cherry infused Bourbon, Sweet Vermouth, and Orange Bitters for a twist on the classic Old Fashioned. In my minimal defense, they did have one of my favorite Pinball machines called the Monster Bash which features the gloriously ridiculous premise that all the classic Universal Monsters are all in a band and you have to get the group together for one more big graveyard smash. Maybe other people are strong enough to resist its goofy charms but look at this ludicrous thing:

We had ended up starting pretty far away from our final destination, the Otter Saloon and its karaoke night, but the weather was cool and pleasant and the walk through Minneapolis provided us with plenty of fun sights we might have otherwise missed. For my money, the night time only made the impressive stained glass and stony gothic architecture of the city’s First Baptist Church stand out even more than it would have during the day.

We also came across this fascinating piece of public art in the form of mesmerizing Sculpture Clock by kinetic artist Jack Nelson. The gleaming brass contraptions inside the clock don’t necessarily help the device tell time but they do make it hard to tear yourself away from as you can tell by my cousins Elizabeth and Katie’s rapt expressions:

you can see a neat video of just the mobile part in action here — you can see a neat video of just the mobile part in action *here*

We did one more bar before karaoke that Mike recommended called Brit’s Pub, which as the name none-too-subtly implies is a Twin Cities take on a classic British Pub. The lower floor is packed with British sports memorabilia and the rooftop deck has an impressive set of lawn bowling greens (which looked much more fetching in the daytime photo below that I snagged from google images than my blurry night time photos). It was a really fun and lively spot, and I was excited because I was able to get a pint of Old Speckled Hen, a classic British beer that I may have enjoyed too much when I was doing an internship in Cambridge, UK over one of my college summers. It was a fun stop, and it helped us get a good buzz going to be able to well and goodly make fools of ourselves at karaoke.

And make fools of ourselves we did! We had a blast doing karaoke Otter’s Saloon. The place was the right mix of divey and popular so that drinks were crazy cheap, but the vibe never felt sad. They had a special shot called the blue otter that didn’t taste particularly good, but we thought the name was silly and it was cheap and strong so we had far too many of them. The people at karaoke were actually good at singing which is always nice (plus you can see the host had an absurdly large top hat which you love to see), but nobody can ever compare to my cousin Katie, who mixes actual genuine talent with the kind of unhinged showmanship that feels more like Andy Kaufman-esque performance art than anything else. She did a version of A-Ha’s Take on Me that really blew the roof off the place, and she said afterwards, when she was good and drunk, when we complimented her for actually nailing the high note “However high I start, I can go higher”. While nobody could quite reach Katie’s level, my cousin John did impress the room by rapping Will Smith’s Gettin’ Jiggy With It (something we know, as his family, that he’s been perfecting over the years in trademark John commitment to competitiveness) and I personally delivered one of the of all time spectacularly bad renditions of Hall and Oates’ Rich Girl. At one point some drunk guy whose birthday it was joined our table and at least for the night we sort of took him in and bought him a birthday Blue Otter or two. I forget the exact context of why this was, maybe because she didn’t sing anything or because she skipped a round of shots, but we briefly all decided to kick Elizabeth out of the family to replace her with the birthday boy, but at least by the end of the night order had been restored and Elizabeth was back in the family.

My favorite part of the night though was that every singer was also projected on a bar television that fantastically low resolution, so when John was rapping he looked more deranged than perhaps anyone singing a Will Smith song has ever looked. The intensity is palpable:

It was great last night together, but we were a tiny bit upset that Karaoke ended before Katie got to go full Ethel Merman with her take on Everything’s Coming Roses (somehow she’s the only person I’ve ever seen do this at Karaoke) so as soon as we got in our Uber back to the air bnb Kevin wasted no time looking out for his big sister. We were barely all in the car before he turned off the driver’s radio and proudly announced “Turn this shit off so my sister can sing a showtune.” It was one of my favorite moments of the trip, and true to form Katie jumped right into the song and belted it our from memory. Luckily our driver thought it was hilarious and got a big kick out of the whole performance. I think it’s safe to say we weren’t his usual fare and I don’t think I would have wanted it any other way.

Favorite Random Sightings: a brand of spreads with the just horrible name Elliot's Adult Nut Butters; an ad that said “Tree Squad: When Trees Need More Than Hugs”; a wine shop delightfully called the Cork Dork

Regional Observations: Something that I got a kick out of while walking around Minneapolis was that it felt like many of the store fronts had the shop’s name in disproportionately small writing out front for the size of the actual building so even the architecture in the midwest is trying to be modest.

Albums Listened To: I think we mostly listened to My Favorite Murder and the start of the Philip K. Dick Audiobook, so not exactly a big day for my iPod.

Joke of the Day:

Little Johnny watched, fascinated, as his mother smoothed cold cream on her face. "Why do you do that, mommy?" he asked.
"To make myself beautiful," said his mother, who then began removing the cream with a tissue.
"What's the matter?" asked Little Johnny. "Giving up?"

Song of the Day:

Truly a one-of-kind fever dream that blends technical skill with high camp silliness like only Prince could

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MN Day 4 - Spooky Art, Secret Beaches, and Singing Saloons