Healthy Choice

Indeed, Spoonriver is the most spa-like restaurant we've ever had on the fine-dining scene in Minneapolis. "Food is medicine, I truly believe that," Brenda Langton told me, when I spoke to her on the phone for this story. "A lot of people shouldn't eat certain things. There are so many diseases nowadays, if you don't eat well, whether it's cancer, diabetes, heart disease, you name it, it all comes back to diet. Doctors don't have the time to teach people how to eat, so people have to take responsibility for themselves, and when they do it really pays off. That's why I like to put whole grains on the plate. Not to mention beans, organic vegetables, meat that is grass-fed, and chickens that are well raised.

If you want to eat well in both the sensual and medicinal senses, you really can't do better than starting with that watermelon and tomato salad ($7.50). The tangle of baby greens in a Champagne vinaigrette garnished with radish matchsticks and a single plump apricot stuffed with a dollop of tart and hot wasabi-chevre is equally artful and refreshing ($8.50). Spoonriver serves lunch, dinner, and weekend brunch, and tends to offer meals at a slightly lower price-point than most of its fine-dining peers: Brunch can be had for as little as $6, for house-made granola with yogurt and beautiful fresh fruit and berries; lunch entrees hover around $10 or $11 for, say, barbecued mock duck over brown rice with a Thai basil salad; dinner entrees are mostly on the thrifty side of $18, for which price you can get a light and lovely bowl of delicate ravioli filled with Indian-spiced potatoes and peas, floating in a Thai green-curry coconut broth loaded with cooked-but-crisp vegetables.

The restaurant has a very few more expensive entrees, such as the $24 admirably light local rainbow trout, split, de-boned, quickly broiled, and topped with a tangy passion fruit-citrus sauce and a few delicate mouthfuls of crab meat, the plate filled out with whole grains and chilled broccoli in a sesame oil vinaigrette. To go with all the light and healthful cooking, Langton has marshaled a diverting, likable, and affordable wine list and assembled a playful and amusing selection of cocktails, including a prickly pear Margarita, made with house-infused pineapple tequila ($9.50).

The decor of the restaurant pulls off that tricky maneuver of managing to make you feel both energetic and serene at the same time. The dining room is very, very long, the interior mostly a vibrant tangerine color; a glass curtain wall to the street creates a sense of light and space. During the day it feels as if you're dining in a tropical sunroom, and at night as if you're captured in a bubble of sunset suspended in the dark.

Many times I was at Spoonriver and overheard table after table of Café Brenda regulars telling Langton that this was their third visit, their fourth visit, their tenth visit, that they were delighted and that they would be back. For all those who use restaurants as their offsite conference room, there isn't a healthier, nicer local choice. You could dine out at Spoonriver every meal and lose weight doing it. Add a walk after dinner on the all-but-attached Stone Arch Bridge with its romantic moonlit city views, and you could grant the restaurant a subtitle: Spoonriver, where you'll live long and prosper.

If healthy dining isn't a top priority, though, you may find that Spoonriver leaves something to be desired. For me, I found some of the dishes to be more healthy than delicious. A leek omelet at brunch was far too dry and filled to bursting with handfuls of fresh, bright green, just-wilted leeks—too much of a fresh thing. The portion of chicken in the chicken mole looked like the one the Heart Association gets on the news and illustrates as being the correct, deck-of-cards-sized one, but left my date grousing and raiding the icebox an hour after dinner. The beige disc of quinoa rice pilaf accompanying the trout lacked any detectable seasoning; the green salad with fig vinaigrette and pumpkin seeds was a huge mound of little leaves with little dressing and less appeal.