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At dusk the temperature was still a few ticks above freezing, which for Minnesota in the middle of winter happens to be a synonym for “bikini time.” “This is what I would call bad weather,” said former Minneapolis mayor R.T. Rybak. By that he meant he wished it were colder.
Tiny raindrops that would soon turn to snow lined the empty wine glasses. A long table stretched down the middle of the closed-off street in the North Loop, a warehouse-y neighborhood adjacent to downtown; you wouldn’t be remiss to note the similarity to tables inside Viking longhouses. A custom-made throw blanket from the trendy Faribault Woolen Mill ($65) awaited each of the 100 diners who dropped $395 apiece for the privilege of a four-course outdoor meal (plus appetizers!) in the middle of winter. Smoke rose from fire pits.
On the menu: half-moons of chicken liver pate served atop spicy gingerbread cookies; seafood towers on ice; duck broth delivered in individual Thermoses and poured over foie gras and pickled ramps; beef pot pie where the puff pastry kept the braised meat and black truffle steaming until it reached the diners. The food came from three James Beard-nominated restaurants, including two, The Bachelor Farmer and Spoon & Stable, that bookend the city block. Soon, the temperature dipped and snow began to fall. Chaos erupted when arctic blasts blew down the table like a wind tunnel and knocked over wine glasses. The former mayor smiled.
This is what Eric Dayton—restaurant owner, men’s store proprietor, governor’s son, and organizer of The Great Northern, a 10-day celebration of all things winter—calls “stepping into the punch.” Think of it as Minnesota’s cultural secession from the Midwest. The idea of branding Minnesota as “The North” sprung out of Dayton’s travels in Scandinavia. Dayton went to Stockholm and Copenhagen, to Helsinki and Reykjavik, and he saw places that had a lot in common with Minnesota. (Surprising Minnesota fact: Minnesota’s first non-native population was New Englanders; Minnesota was once known as “New England of the West.” Scandinavians didn’t come until the late 1800s. So began the region’s identity crisis.)
The difference between what Dayton knew from Minnesota and what he saw in Scandinavia was Scandinavia had a hold on the cultural zeitgeist; Norway and Denmark and Sweden had somehow become worldwide trendsetters in food, music, and a relaxed, progressive lifestyle—one built around the malleable but increasingly popular concept of hygge, or taking cozy pleasure in life’s ordinary moments. Minnesota? It was just the frozen tundra.
Everyone knows Minnesota’s winters suck. It might be the only thing you know about Minnesota. (That and something about a shitload of lakes. Prince lived there, too.) So why not embrace the cold as an indelible, unique, and, yes, fun part of its identity? Minnesota was Garrison Keillor and Lake Wobegon, unironic “don’t cha knows” and “you betchas,” lutefisk and, according to The New York Times, at least, grape salad—a designation Minnesotans considered highly offensive. Instead, Dayton believes, the Twin Cities should be the Stockholm of the United States. Not just a pair of unremarkable cities in the unremarkable amalgam that is the Midwest, but instead the capital of a brand-new, Scandinavian-tinged tribute to all things cold: The North.
“Suddenly everything Nordic was the coolest,” Dayton said. “And that sowed my seeds of frustration: ‘Why can’t we be cool?’ ”
Of course, calling Minnesota cool isn’t to say Minnesota isn’t also very, very cold. It is, of course, colder than shit.
According to recent ranking by Thrillist, it’s colder than the Dakotas, colder than Maine, colder than motherfucking Alaska: America’s coldest winters. Not that sane people would regularly go outdoors in winter in a state that once saw a thermometer read 60 degrees below zero.
(When my in-laws were lobbying me to move here, they showed me something they called “fun”: During one of Minnesota’s vicious winter cold snaps, they boiled water on the stove and threw the water off their second-floor deck. The boiling water froze into a cloud of tiny ice particles in midair, floating down onto the snowpack on their backyard. “Fun!” I backed away in horror, resolving never to move here. Then I got married and did just that.)
To most Americans, this sort of cold would be known as a severe marketing problem. Who the hell wants to live in a frozen hellscape for three (or four, or five, or six) months a year? But Minnesotans are people who sit on frozen lakes with cans of Grain Belt Premium and dip their fishing lines into holes in the ice for hours at a time. Being able to withstand (enjoy?) the darkest depths of winter is a point of pride.
I first came to realize this during last year’s NFL playoffs, when I watched the Vikings lose to the Seattle Seahawks in one of the coldest games in NFL history. Former Vikings head coach Bud Grant was scheduled to flip the coin pregame. The 88-year-old Grant took off his coat and handed it to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell: “Would you hold my jacket while I go out for the toss and show how we love this weather?” Grant walked to midfield wearing a short-sleeved polo shirt and a Vikings ballcap. It was negative 25 windchill. The crowd roared at the intersection of America’s favorite sport and Scandinavia’s favored mentality.
One year later, I convinced eight friends to join me for my first ice-fishing trip up north. Don’t worry: Our icehouse came equipped with DirecTV so we could watch the NFL playoffs from the middle of a lake. These people are insane.
When Dayton’s acclaimed restaurant, The Bachelor Farmer, was founded in 2011, Dayton had the feeling Minnesota was always trying to, in its hippest spots, imitate someplace else: a Vegas-style nightclub! A restaurant that makes you feel like you’re in New York City! A rooftop bar that transports you to Santa Monica! But when The Bachelor Farmer had its first breakout moment, a four-star review in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Dayton was struck by what the reviewer wrote: that the restaurant captured the zeitgeist of Minnesota with an edgy and unapologetic brand of modesty.
“There’s an initial modesty to the food—actually, to the whole Bachelor Farmer experience— that dovetails into the soft-spoken Midwestern ethos,” the review read. “Yet understated should not be confused with simplistic.”
“That was the best thing anyone could say about the restaurant,” Dayton says. “Why do we have to pretend to be someplace else in order to be great? I just wanted to contribute something to the city, to let people know that, yes, Minnesota can be cool.”
That also happened to be the same time Nordic countries had become an international symbol of cool. Restaurant magazine first ranked Noma as the best restaurant in the world was 2010 (then again in 2011, 2012 and 2014). New Nordic cuisine swept across the world and brought new interest to the region. Pundits tried to figure out what made Scandinavian countries consistently rank as the world’s happiest. Baltic-style democratic socialism became the governmental dreamscape of American progressives. The Danish concept of hygge became a mantra for minimalists worldwide.
Meanwhile, television shows like The Killing, books like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and bands like Miike Snow, Little Dragon and Lykke Li introduced us all to Scandinavian pop culture, and frankly it seemed a good bit cooler than our own. A book about the mystique of Scandinavia was released; it was titled The Almost Nearly Perfect People. “The global pull of Scandinavian life, never weak, continues to strengthen,” read The New Yorker’s review of the book. “Peek behind a fad these days, in other words, and you are apt to find a Scandinavian, pedalling hard.”
And so there’s perhaps no better time for a place like Minnesota to cast out its put-upon Midwestern-ness and embrace an identity as the American cousin of hip, cool, cold Scandinavia. “Midwest I find to be a putdown for the vast center of the country, as if it’s somehow all the same thing,” Rybak, the former mayor, said. “There’s an enormous difference between being an outpost on edge of the Midwest versus Minneapolis and St. Paul being the Star of The North. A label like The North is a prism by which you can see yourself differently.”
The Scandinavia-to-Minnesota pipeline present in the snow-flecked outdoor feast has infused the Twin Cities in recent years. Dayton’s men’s clothing store, Askov Finlayson, has capitalized on that same Minnesota-Nordic aesthetic. (The store was discovered on a national scale by this very men’s magazine, then one year later ranked as a top 11 men’s store in America by another men’s magazine.) A Swedish restaurant, Fika, opened at the American Swedish Institute, followed by a place called GYST Fermentation Bar, which specialized in fermented foods and drinks. Minnesota’s New Nordic ideal quickly migrated from the trendy fringes to the mainstream: the Vikings this season adopted the Icelandic soccer team’s Viking war chant as its own, and a cheeky pub called Erik the Red recently opened near the Vikings’ stadium, billing itself as a “Nordic BBQ and Barbarian Bar.” The Great Northern features 10 freezing days of national pond hockey championships, a cross-country skiing competition and a giant ice palace in downtown St. Paul. Next year the festival will step onto a bigger stage as it leads straight into Super Bowl LII in Minneapolis (tagline: “The Bold North”; venue: U.S. Bank Stadium, which resembles a postmodern Viking ship).
All of this is why, on a freezing Monday night, a hundred people paid a small fortune to eat a magnificent meal outdoors, sitting at a table on a city street in the middle of goddamned winter.
“When people think of Minnesota in winter, I want them to visualize that dinner,” Dayton said. “I’ve come to see the perception of our winters as a real challenge for our city and state. People who didn’t grow up here are scared of it. We gotta shift the perception of winter here from so negative to”—he paused for a moment and anchored himself back in reality—“well, to at least neutral.”
