- Michael Gebert
- Erik Anderson and friend at Intro
It hasn’t broken through to citywide consciousness yet the way Next did a few years ago, but for me the most interesting moveable feast in town is the rotating-chef restaurant in the former L2O space, Intro. At least that’s my conclusion after dining there last week for its second seasonal menu, this one by Erik Anderson, a former Chicagoan (his father worked at the Drake Hotel and his parents ran a diner in Aurora) who became a Food & Wine best new chef along with cochef Josh Habiger at Nashville’s the Catbird Seat in 2012. You can see a slideshow of his tasting menu below—though at least one dish has already changed—but for me it’s clearly destined to be one of my best meals of the year. It’s short, exquisite, and full of classical French dishes dressed up in modernist ways. It gives a clear picture of what he’ll be doing at his upcoming Minneapolis restaurant, Brut, and it’s unlike anything else in town—a breath of fresh air and new influences in a town where upscale tasting menus can often seem to be doing the same things over and over.
For me it was perfect timing because I had access to a beautiful kitchen, and I could get working on stuff for Brut. It was a great idea, it’s a great vibe, a great restaurant, and it’s been a lot of fun.
But it took me a long time to really realize that and become comfortable with that, instead of like, here’s the guy with the new Nordic fucking cuisine book that’s so slick and shiny and he plates like that—I mean, it’s so easy to fall into that, you know? The last year and a half I’ve been very mindful about just trying to push that away and dig in deep and think about what I love about cooking and what makes me continue to do it.
So you’re making fun of the Noma-head who walks into kitchens these days, but you spent some time there, at the foraging based Copenhagen restaurant ranked one of the best in the world. What did you get out of that experience?
Zipping back across the world, when you went to Nashville—you’d been at the French Laundry, you’d spent time at Noma, how did you reconcile that with the expectation of some kind of southern-ness in your food?
The menu’s online, but—I haven’t heard anything supernegative. Some people said it’s not enough food, so we added the supplements. So we do like a duck for four, there’s a Wagyu steak supplement for four. So there’s the option, though I kind of strongly disagree. I think it’s paced out well—I’m not going to raise the panic alarm just because a couple of people wanted more.
