On a Thursday in late June, Lee and I visited Vinai, a James Beard nominated restaurant in Northeast serving elevated Hmong comfort food. We were out unofficially to celebrate a year in the Twin Cities. For us it was a rare night date, though the sun had set only 10 minutes before our 9:15 reservation.
We landed in a corner spot where we could see the entire, loud dining room. As our ears adjusted, the noise became inducement to forgo moderation in favor of ordering too much food and eating directly from the serving plates. We did this especially with the charred cabbage, served atop pureed carrots and shredded mustard greens, marveling at how a cabbage accrued the heft of a steak. The cabbage was topped with spicy peanuts, the kind you find in plastic pouches at gas stations. I liked eating the cabbage with the same gusto I might fill my mouth with those peanuts on a road trip.
At Vinai, columns and a low rail add intrigue to the busy interior, suggesting each table as its own cacophonous compartment. From our position, we could check on each one--the four-top of Boomers charming each other with expansive hand gestures, the group of work friends in the restaurant’s center, the dressed-down couple beside us.
“You can really wear whatever you want in this town,” Lee said. The couple beside us were basically in pajamas.
A stream of servers, dressed like dramatists all in black, raced between the tables, coordinating the tableau. The place throbbed with hustle, and the hustle became its own flavor. Vinai’s flavor is high-brow, lo-fi, and eclectic. I imagined the chef, Yia Vang, by turns as a McGuyver impersonator, a stunt shot practitioner, a freestyle walker. His dishes are uncanny in a way that suggests not the food’s artificiality but the human prodding that has produced them. They confirm that every recipe is a remix. At Vinai the remix arrives on an overdubbed cassette tape that sounds better for its distressed texture than when you hear the same songs on Spotify.
That’s the sound of the taste Vinai constructs. That’s the spell it casts. We were stoked to sit in that contrivance. Because the contrivance is what you pay for. It’s what overtakes you while you huddle close and eat. You need this spell because outside of it, it’s outrageous to exchange about an hour of labor at my current salary for a cook to garnish a marinated cabbage with Hot Nutz.
The reason we became overly aware of Vinai’s spell is because after the cabbage came the fish. It was a bad fish, decked out with dried grass erupting from its mouth, and a gravity-defying, shredded salad on top.
Lee said, “That’s not right, is it?” after she took a bite.
This prompted me to take a second bite that confirmed the fish was absolutely not right. If there was anything positive about this, it was the certainty of sending the fish back with no doubt about it. No fear we were being too picky. No chance we misinterpreted the flavor.
Also, the fish was beautiful. It had little discs of lime stuffed into the slit that ran the length of its body. Its jewel-like eye seemed awed by the awfulness that had overtaken it.
Before we even tasted the fish our server had apologized. Normally, the fish would be bigger, she said. Normally, when a fish was undersized, such as this one, it would be accompanied by a second fish, she said. But, ours was the last fish in the whole place, and she would charge us only half price for it. In hindsight, provided these disclaimers, we might’ve refused this fish whose taste conjured an image of a cooler left in the sun for a week. Before it reached us, someone might’ve noticed the fish was bad, but no one did.
When we told our server the fish was bad, she removed it and promised to strike it from our bill. She asked, was there anything else we’d like to try before the kitchen closed. “The beef? The shrimp toast?”
Lee said, “Nothing” at the same time I said, “Shrimp toast.”
Now the spell was broken. Or, rather, the spell was already broken and now we were aware of its brokenness. When ordering the fish, I’d also splurged for the crabby fried rice and the Happy Tiger hot sauce, a condiment that cost $4. After that I’d agreed not to order anything else. Now, I apologized for ordering more. In the fish’s aftermath, it seemed to me that all agreements were void. I had thought the shrimp toast might offer salvation. Lee had known that nothing would.
The wait for the shrimp toast found us conducting an inevitable reappraisal. Wasn’t the crispy rice ball parsimoniously small, and the mackerel a little cheap, not to mention hard to eat, from their tin? Weren’t those Hot Nutz an overly salty accessory to the charred cabbage? Hadn’t our server been rushing us the whole night? The hustle that had been charming now seemed like careless expedience.
The shrimp toast was set on our table at the same time the couple beside us returned a plate with a long fish skeleton picked completely clean. Their fish looked like one emerged from the mouth of a cartoon cat.
Our shrimp toast was dense and rich.
“This tastes like something you’d get at the state fair,” Lee said.
It tasted exactly like something you’d get at the state fair. If you bought Vinai’s shrimp toast at the state fair you’d be delighted with it provided you’d acclimated to state fair prices. We took a few bites but couldn’t eat any more.
While we boxed up our leftovers, the check arrived with two pieces of exotic candy on top.