Complicated Dining

Other dishes at Saffron sat on their plates just taunting me with their obvious cooking skill and care. For instance, the blue crab salad ($8) is crabmeat tossed in a curry vinaigrette served mounded on a silky avocado salad. It is served on a long plate, with streamers of additional curry vinaigrette snaking in two directions, like festive banners blowing in the wind. Dotted around these pretty waves of vinaigrette are perfectly cut, jewel-bright segments of pithless citrus fruit, including lemons, oranges, and grapefruit. Looking at this crab salad you just know—you know—that someone is cooking their heart out back there, putting form to all kinds of skill and talent. Which makes it all the more heartbreaking that I hate this crab salad. To me it tastes acrid and bitter, the vinaigrette only drawing out the crab's stale, briny chemical notes and masking all of its sweet and fresh ones.

Toward the end of my visits to Saffron, I began to wonder if there was some basic problem with my palate and this food. Was there some spice in the ras al hanout that I just didn't like? Orris root, perhaps? As a restaurant critic I always say I like everything, but truth be told, there are a few things I'm not that wild about, like tarragon. And while I've had a few quiches in my day worth eating, I find the vast majority sulfurous and overcooked. Julia Child herself could rematerialize in my kitchen and offer to make me a tarragon quiche, and I would say, "You know what? I'm just not that hungry. You go back to your eternal rest, and I'll make some toast later. No biggie."

I took my strange dilemma right to the young chef in question, Sameh Wadi. "In my head, I see that you're an up-and-coming local talent who I should be wild about," I told him. "And while there are some real gems on your menu, I'm finding the vast majority of it—how can I say this? Well, I'll just say it. I just don't like it. And I can't figure out why."

"I've actually heard that before," he told me. "Mostly from my family." So, in case you were thinking I couldn't make this review any more complicated, this poor and, at least on this page, beleaguered young chef (he turned all of 24 a few weeks ago) now has a critic and his family in agreement that there's something odd about his food. Surely that is a hell no one on earth has ever before suffered.

I asked Wadi about his family's thoughts on food; after all, he credits his mother with his love of cooking, and his father, now deceased, was one of the founders of Minneapolis's most beloved Middle Eastern grocery and quick-serve, Holy Land. "At Saffron, we just stretch the envelope so much here," Wadi told me. "A lot of the time, the Middle Eastern mind just can't stretch that far. Not having rice on the menu, that drives my family crazy. Not having pita bread with every course drives them crazy. But I'm trying as hard as I can to elevate flavors to this century and to the American palate. A lot of the things I do are Minnesota meets the Middle East. If I didn't have steak and potatoes on my menu I'd lose a lot of clientele. If I was cooking just for myself there'd be a lot more offal and weird ingredients that don't suit the American palate right now."

Like the lamb brains? I asked. Yes, he said. The lamb brains ($5) are, to my thinking, one of the strongest offerings on Saffron's menu, partly because it is beautifully simple, just a lightly breaded brain, fried, served with a half-dozen confit cherry tomatoes rendered sweet and jammy through their long, slow cooking. The brains are creamy, pale, sweet, and ethereal, and the tomatoes accent that creaminess wonderfully.

After talking to Wadi and eating nearly everything on his menu, I think Saffron would be more to my liking if he only made the things that he liked or that his family liked, and kept far away from white-tablecloth restaurant standard-bearers like blue crabs, rare duck breasts, and any and all dishes like the garganelli pasta with escargot (it was weirdly unseasoned) and halibut with (and pummeled by) curried vegetables and cilantro. It's hard to fault a young chef for wanting to succeed in the big leagues of fine dining—after all, fine-dining chefs get all the glory, and few chefs have ever been called a "genius" on a magazine cover for cooking their mother's recipes.