Small But Mighty

HEIDI'S
819 W. 50th St., Minneapolis
612.354.3512

If you want to really rile up a millionaire celebrity chef, ask him this question: "So, who really cooks in your restaurant?" Faster than you can say "foie gras," he'll throw down his Louis Vuitton knife roll full of free, endorsement-deal golden knives and sputter that this is a naive question—the chef is the chef, even if he only visits the restaurant a few times a year and lives on another continent. But is such a chef really the chef? I'm not so sure.

If you're not so sure either, pilot yourself over to Heidi's, the new restaurant by Stewart Woodman, and try to get a table in the first dining room, against the east wall. From there you can turn your head to the left at any given moment and see Chef Woodman, onetime New York City power player at such restaurants as Alain Ducasse's Essex House, Zoe, Lespinasse, and Le Bernardin, plating your dinner. Or plating someone else's dinner. Or receiving clean dishes from the dishwasher. Or answering a question from a server.

He's not there because a TV film crew is there. He's not there because a writer from a glossy magazine is on hand taking notes. He's just there. Every single night. Deglazing pans. Sautéeing fish. Reducing pheasant stock. Arranging micro pea shoots beside ravioli. And if you happen to show up around lunchtime and look through that same window, you'll see Woodman portioning the fish, roasting the pheasants for stock, making the ravioli, and so on. Is this any way to run a restaurant?

A lot of chefs would say no. In fact, some chefs have a phrase for running a restaurant this way, and it's not a particularly flattering one. They call it "dairy farming," because, like a dairy farmer, you have to be there to milk every morning, milk every night, help with calves at three o'clock in the morning, clean out the stalls all afternoon. I had a number of astonishingly good meals at Stewart Woodman's new restaurant, and I had a couple of truly mediocre ones, but through them all I never got over the full-on shock of looking at that little window and seeing him doing one of the least glamorous of human activities: working through dinner.

Of course I called up Woodman once I was done eating in his 40-seat jewel-box restaurant. "So," I asked, "how do you like being a dairy farmer?"

"It's my dream job," he told me.

"Really?" I asked. "No, really."

"It's my dream job," he insisted. "This, just cooking, is the job I've loved more than any other in my whole career. I get in in the morning, I cook all day, I cook and cook and cook. I feel like at this point in my life I want to be a dairy farmer. My wife would probably wish I was more of a chef sometimes so that our lifestyle could reflect that, but what can you do? You are who you are."

Speaking of dairy farming, Woodman told me, did I know who was really suffering at Heidi's? His purveyors. "I call them up, 'I need two pounds of tuna. No, that's all. Just two pounds. No, I'm not joking. I couldn't use an ounce more. Be sure to hurry.'" I suppose someone must suffer for Woodman's art, and I'm glad it's not me.

For in the best cases, people at Heidi's are really experiencing art—if they order the warm fingerling potato appetizer ($9), for instance. Here, Woodman dresses a handful of warm potatoes poached in a black-peppercorn broth with a Dijon vinaigrette enhanced with a tiny dice of cornichon pickles, lines up the potatoes on a bed of warm creamed leeks with melted raclette cheese, and scatters crispy bits of browned leek over the whole thing. Jumping Jehosaphat, that's a potato salad. Creamy, salty, tangy, cheesy, crispy, a little peppery and flinty from the peppercorn broth, perfectly balanced in terms of salty, sour, creamy, and sweet, it's one of those appetizers you finish and want to tell your server: "Now, for an entree, I would like a lasagna-pan-sized serving of the same thing." If there's a better vegetarian appetizer in the metro area, I'll eat my lasagna pan.