Central Avenue Update Part 4: Momo Sushi to Francis Burger Joint
The Churn for Friday, November 15, 2024
In this week’s edition of The Heavy Table’s Churn newsletter, we put way, way more miles on our passports while visiting points scattered across Asia, two Ecuadorian joints, and a burger place. Central Avenue: It contains multitudes!
Our guest for this expedition was author and friend of the magazine Bill Childs.
CENTRAL AVENUE CHECKLIST UPDATE, PART THREE
We continue our update-it-all visit to Central Avenue and dine at Momo Sushi, Sabor Cuencano, Khao Hom Thai, Panaderia Ecuatoriana, and Francis Burger Joint.
By M.C. Cronin, Becca Dilley, James Norton, and WACSO
This time out, we tried Tibetan, Japanese, Ecuadorian, Thai, and classic American fare with a vegan twist. And we were reminded again of the wild swings we can get on these crawls. Not just in terms of cuisine but in overall experience.
Sometimes you get a fantastic ambiance, and the food falls flat. Other times, you get an amazing meal in an atmosphere no better than a DMV waiting room. Then there are those times where everything just comes together. Spoiler alert: those are very rare. – M.C. Cronin
Momo Sushi | 1839 Central Avenue NE | Minneapolis | 612.789.9190
We arrived on a Sunday night, and the place was thriving. Most tables were taken, and a constant stream of people trickled in to pick up takeout. There’s a nicely appointed front terrace and a cozy, heated, canvas-covered patio specifically designed to appeal to the die-hard Minnesotans who refuse to give up on patio season until icicles form on our eyelashes. Normally, on a chilly fall night, we’d rough it, but as it’s our job to absorb the full experience, we took a table inside.
Momo Sushi certainly doesn’t bury the lede. They offer a fairly even mix of Tibetan and Japanese ambiance. There are Tibetan Buddhas, paintings of historical Tibetan figures, and Tibetan prayer flags strung overhead. There’s also a sake bar and a dedicated sushi bar.
The mishmash of cultural decor could have easily gone off the rails, but it works. The natural wood floors and furnishings, along with the earthenware ornamental pieces bring it all together to create an inviting, warm, and vibrant space.
On these crawls, we’ve seen sushi pop up on the menus of a number of Thai and Chinese restaurants. It tends to feel like an afterthought. A desperate attempt to elevate and diversify offerings in order to bring in more people. At Momo Sushi, they take it more seriously. From a crowd-building standpoint, it seems to work, but from a “Is it good sushi?” standpoint, welp… – M.C.
About a week before our Central Avenue visit, we hit Momo Sushi for lunch. Astoundingly: you can get three sets of sushi rolls for $13. Less astoundingly: They're not great. Not disastrous, either. But roundly mediocre: overdressed, with over-worked flattened rice, and overdressed slices of cucumber stuffed into nearly everything.
During our dinner visit we liked the Minneapolis Roll ($6, below bottom) a little better, but this avocado/apple maki was heavy on the avocado and ultimately not terribly distinctive or interesting.
The Crazy Monkey Roll ($12, above top) was a horse of a different color. Well, a fruit of a different color, at any rate. This mashup of crab meat, cream cheese, fried bananas, and mayonnaise diverges so far from orthodox sushi that it might as well be classified as a sandwich.
It's a huge swing, and dipped in a bit of soy sauce ... well, saying that it "makes sense" might be an overstatement, since it's a lot of banana and mayo to eat at one go, but it's shockingly okay, leaning hard into “creamy” to the exclusion of almost anything else. Demented, sure, but somehow also okay.
Unfortunately, nearly everything else we tried at Momo Sushi was wildly underflavored and forgettable - a Chicken Teriyaki ($14, above) somehow managed to have less flavor than plain, unseasoned chicken, the Cream Cheese Wontons ($6) were underfried, underpowered, and greasy (underheated oil seems like a likely culprit), and the Momos ($13 for a mix of veggie and meat dumplings) were dull as dishwater and much like an underseasoned lump of hamburger meat stuffed into a plain wrapper, respectively.
What's the lesson in all this? If you sell so-so food at low, low prices, you'll still be packed to the rafters even on a regular old Sunday night. – James Norton
Sabor Cuencano | 2552 Central Avenue NE | Minneapolis
The vibe here is small-town diner. In fact, if you changed the food offerings from llapingachos (stuffed potato pancakes) and empanadas to old-fashioned buttermilk pancakes and Denver omelets, this could easily be a family restaurant on Main Street, Anytown, USA. As if to drive home the point, the night we visited, most of the tables were occupied with families enjoying a homemade Sunday dinner.
A stone wainscoting is the feature of the space. It runs around the room and ties into a stone-fronted order counter. But the various tile materials used are all slightly mismatched. It’s as if someone found a good deal on stone remnants and went full DIY. There’s even a faux fireplace with electrically generated flames fooling nobody. The goal was “cozy and charming.” The reality approaches that, but from a slightly askew angle.
Generic semitransparent squeeze bottles filled with orangish and greenish sauces sit on most tables along with classic glass sugar dispensers. At first, the sauces got our attention. What were they? Who dared try them? Should they be refrigerated?
We did try both sauces, and we’re glad we did, but it was the sugar that took center stage when our Spanish-speaking server brought over our order of cheese empanadas and mimed pouring the sugar on top. He’d used Google Translate earlier, but this gesture needed no technological aid. We were somewhat hesitant, but he was adamant about it. And we quickly understood why.
If you come to Sabor Cuencano, come with a basic working knowledge of Spanish or a willingness to use a combination of hand signals and menu pointing to communicate. And don’t ignore the sugar. You won’t be disappointed. – M.C.
When you go to a restaurant and they have a dish on the menu that echoes the name of the restaurant, you get that dish. If it's bad, you've saved yourself a lot of time and put a stake through the heart of an undeniable culinary vampire.
More often than not, though, you'll get an inkling of what makes the place great, as was the case with the Cuencano ($19) which was a big freakin' plate of WOW - hominy, rice, llapingachos, delicate and deeply flavored beans, perfectly seasoned tender pork, some sort of... well, some sort of meat, snuggled deeply into the folds of a lovely salsa de mani (peanut sauce).
Everything on the plate complemented everything else - the damn thing was a garden of gastronomic delights.
Less good but definitely not bad was the Morcilla Blanca ($11), a rich, greasy sausage stuffed with a mix of rice and vegetables that was surprisingly evocative of fried rice.
The restaurant's crispy/chewy Empanadas de Queso ($7.50) came with a sugar shaker, and a sprinkle of sugar does add a discernible something, nudging these cheese-filled pastries just over the line into the "sweet" side of the sweet/savory divide.
We also dug the restaurant's Batidos ($4.50), beverages that sit somewhere between a smoothie and a milkshake - sweet but not dessert in a cup, fruit-forward but cut with plenty of milk and vanilla. Mango wasn't bad, but fresa (strawberry) was better, a really heavy hit of light, tasty fruit and milk.
The vibe and the crowd and the food at Sabor Cuencano really made us think of home cooking - not too much polish but a whole lot of love on these plates. – J.N.
Khao Hom Thai | 2411 Central Avenue NE | Minneapolis | 612.788.4000
A gregarious whirlwind of a server sat us down and slapped menus on the table. He was clearly a veteran of the food service arts, so out of curiosity, we asked him if he knew of any connection between Khao Hom Thai and the former occupant of this space, Karta Thai. “Yeah,” he nodded, “Me!”
He’d worked here as a server when it was Karta Thai. In fact, he’d worked in a number of Thai establishments, and he shared his sure-fire method of deciding whether he’d work at a given Thai place. He’ll try the laab, the mango salad, and the tom yum. If they’re on point, he’s willing to sign on the dotted line.
That seems like a good method. Many Thai places can get Pad Thai right, or close enough, to satisfy most people. But those three dishes span a different set of skills.
Buoyed by the knowledge that Khao Hom Thai had passed our server’s test, we ordered with confidence.
But what about the ambiance?
It needs work, though it wouldn’t take much to improve it. A dimmer switch and “warm white” LED bulbs—rather than the Retina Blaster 4000™ “cool white” variety they had installed— would take the experience from a 2-out-of-10 to a 7.
Then perhaps remove the utility shelving covered in bus bins and cleaning supplies. Function over form works in specific cases like delis and takeout-focused joints, but when you offer seating, you really need to consider hiding all the stuff that makes a restaurant run. – M.C.
The worst thing that we ate at Khao Hom Thai was the restaurant's Pumpkin Curry ($16), which was well-balanced, not overly sweet, and squash-forward in a seasonally delightful way. It was quite a good curry.
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