After a long day of calling on accounts around the Twin Cities, I was back in my hotel room just in time for the start of television weather bulletins for a severe thunderstorm heading toward Minneapolis. I decided that I probably needed to go get food sooner than later rather than waiting out the storm for an hour and then heading out. I remembered a nearby restaurant that I hadn't noticed until my last visit to the Twin Cities - Tavern23 - and I decided to go there just before the storm hit.
Tavern23 is located in the Centennial Lakes Office Park along France Avenue in Edina. (see map) Getting there just as the wind was picking up and sporadic large rain drops began to fall, I walked into the place and found a somewhat spacious place with a lot of hockey memorabilia and pictures on the wall. The center of the restaurant featured a nice dining area with large comfy booths and tables. A large open kitchen was to the right as I walked into the restaurant.
Most of the hockey sweaters and photos on the wall centered on a guy by the name of Lou Nanne. Now, not growing up in Minnesota and being more of a Minnesota Twins baseball fan than a Minnesota North Stars hockey fan when I was growing up, I had to ask myself, "Who in the hell is Lou Nanne?"
Lou Nanne is a hockey legend around the state of Minnesota. Nanne first came to Minneapolis in the early 60's from his home in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario to play hockey for the University of Minnesota. He graduated with a business degree and instead of taking an $8000-a-year offer to play professional hockey for the Chicago Blackhawks, Nanne went to work in the private sector making three times that amount of money, essentially walking away from hockey. Still, the burning competitor inside him kept him in shape in case he decided to get back into the game.
After becoming an American citizen in 1967, Nanne played on the U.S. Olympic hockey team at the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble, France. After the Olympics, he signed with the National Hockey League expansion team Minnesota North Stars where he played 11 seasons before retiring. During his final season, he was named the interim coach of the North Stars after the firing of André Beaulieu. One of the North Stars all-time most popular players, Nanne was known as "Sweet Lou from the Soo".
Pictured right - Lou Nanne. Photo courtesy Minnpost.com
After hanging up his skates, Nanne became the general manager of the North Stars and helped turn around the fortunes of the franchise. The team made the playoffs seven years in a row capped with a Stanley Cup final appearance in 1981. Nanne was also the general manager of the U.S. men's national hockey team in the 80's.
Nanne resigned as general manager with the North Stars in 1988 citing health reasons and retired from organized hockey. He became a financial manager - a job that continued into his mid-70's. Over the years, Nanne had offers to start a restaurant a number of times, but he didn't feel that he could devote the time to it as he was traveling extensively for his financial company. However, an opportunity arose in 2015 when he was approached by Michael McDermott, the CEO of McDermott Restaurants who owned Rojo Mexican Grill, as well as a handful of franchised restaurants around the Twin Cities. Proposing the restaurant be a steakhouse, Nanne and McDermott were able to coax chef Josh Hill to join them in the venture. Hill had worked at the famous Manny's Steakhouse in downtown Minneapolis for seven years before joining up with McDermott and Nanne. (Click here to see a Road Tips entry on Manny's Steakhouse.) They found a spot in the Centennial Lakes office complex that used to house a Romano's Macaroni Grill and opened Lou Nanne's American Grill in early 2016.
The first year of any new restaurant tends to be the toughest and Lou Nanne's suffered from an identity crisis as workers from nearby office buildings tended to gravitate toward nearby places for fast lunches and after dinner drinks. However, being that it was more of a steakhouse, Lou Nanne's didn't pull in that crowd. Deciding to rebrand the restaurant after a year in business, they turned it into a more casual dining place that would cater to nearby office workers and families. Lou Nanne's steakhouse became Tavern23 in the late summer of 2017.
One of the things that makes Tavern23 so popular is its outdoor patio. Looking out over a small lake in the office complex, the patio was nearly full of diners and people enjoying after work drinks before the storm brewed up. As I came in, there was a mass exodus of people leaving the patio with a number of employees rushing to lower umbrellas and pick up items that could blow away with the impending storm.
I ended up seated at the bar since many people were being moved inside. It wasn't long before the rain came down in wind driven sheets outside. I love a good thunderstorm and this one was a good one. Because of all the hubbub of trying to get people inside, it took awhile before I was acknowledged at the bar by one of the bartenders, Nick. He gave me a dinner menu to look over and I got a Surly Furious IPA that they had on tap. Actually, once things got back to normal, service got much better as Nick and the other bartender tag-teamed in making sure that I was taken care of the rest of the visit.
The menu at Tavern23 is definitely more geared for upscale bar food than the elegant steakhouse menu they used to have at Lou Nanne's steakhouse. They had a number of interesting appetizers including avocado egg rolls, marinated chicken lettuce wraps, and rosemary-marinated lamb lollipops. They had an extensive selections of burgers and sandwiches, wood-fired flatbreads and pizzas, wok-fired dishes, soups, salads, and even sushi. Tavern23 also featured a limited amount of steaks, some seafood choices, and entrees such as a beef, sausage and chorizo meatloaf, blackened catfish tacos, and Nanne's bolognese - a pasta dish made with a meat sauce recipe passed down through the family of Francine Nanne - Lou's wife.
My mind was telling me to go light and get the albacore tuna salad sandwich, but the devil on my shoulder kept telling me that I needed something substantial. I wasn't really certain what I wanted to get, so I ended up going for the beef stroganoff. It featured strips of steak with bucatini pasta in a creamy red wine sauce with chopped mushrooms. A dollop of sour cream came on top with a couple pieces of garlic bread on the side. The strips of steak alternated between undercooked to overcooked. There were a few pieces that were cooked perfectly and weren't too tough or too stringy. For the most part, the stroganoff was very good, but the few pieces of steak that went one way or the other on the cooking scale brought down the overall quality of the dish. It wasn't that it was bad, but it definitely wasn't consistent.
I took my time with dinner as the storm raged for a good 20 minutes followed by a light shower. By the time I finished, the storm had passed, the rain had stopped, and the slowly sinking sun in the west was beginning to come out from behind the passing clouds. Before I left, I paused on the patio to see lightning off in the distance to the east with the late-day sun beginning to illuminate the office buildings across the lake from the restaurant. It was turning out to be a nice evening.
Tavern23 is one of those places where you can get just about anything you're looking for - steaks, seafood, sandwiches, burgers, upscale appetizers, some interesting entrees and a good selection of craft beers and cocktails. I'll have to say the beef stroganoff I had was inconsistent in the cooked temperature of the steak strips, but the overall taste was fine. I found the place to be comfortable and elegant, but not so upscale that it made me uneasy to be in there. It wasn't the best place I've eaten at in the immediate area along France Ave. in Edina, but it was far from the worst.
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