On Sunday, dad and I crossed the river (well, two rivers, since we live in Shakopee) into Saint Paul for lunch at Little Szechuan (422 University Ave. W., St. Paul, Minn.).  The restaurant features authentic Chinese cooking from Sichuan Province — known for spicier fare, to generalize.

I asked to go because I wanted to see how the fairly popular Chinese restaurant looked inside and I also needed to see what all the craze was about.  In the years I’ve been gone from the Twin Cities, Sichuan-style cooking has not only emerged but seemingly flourished here.  There are about a half dozen (or more?) restaurants serving it, which I think is a lot seeing as how you could barely find dim sum at six places here for a couple decades.

Little Szechuan's pork ribs and spicy black bean sauce.

We ordered pork ribs with a spicy black bean sauce and a plate of stir fried lotus root.  Here’s my dad’s review, paraphrased, of course:

Ribs dry and too greasy, they were old and deep-fry-reheated — the hot oil added to the black bean sauce for spice also soaked through the garnish to create a nasty-fatty looking pool by the time the ribs were half eaten.  Nothing to rave about.  (My review concurs.)  The lotus root’s great natural crunch was nicely preserved, the spicy sauce was nice and tasty.  A good execution.  But our dry mouths and [Ben's] headache later suggest that perhaps too much MSG was added.

My dad readily admitted that he doesn’t like Sichuan-style cooking.  He’s totally in the bag for his native Cantonese cooking.  Little Szechuan was nice inside and the menu was extensive.  I wouldn’t mind going back to try some of the other dishes.  It’s clearly different and thus, Minnesotans have excitedly grasped the opportunity to expand their culinary horizons.

But why do the food elite have to praise the arrival of these new opportunities in gastronomical adventure at the expense of the tried and true?

I have done a tremendous amount of Googling lately — in search of trends, fads, rants, raves and anything else the great Google is willing to crawl on the topic of Chinese food in the Twin Cities.

For some reason, I keep coming back to threads like this one on Chowhound, the site for “Those Who Live to Eat.”  That particular thread hailed the arrival of another new, Sichuan-province style restaurant in Chanhassen, Minn. about ten months ago.  Peppered amongst the praise, though, are quasi-slights against other Chinese restaurants like ours.  These online opinions tell me this: some of the Twin Cities food elite have written off Chinese restaurants like my dad’s as unauthentic and pedestrian.  If a lunch buffet is served — don’t even try it.  I’ve touched on some of the other things we’re up against in an earlier post.

Now, online food bloggers and commentators are going to surface the most in this quest, obviously.  So I take my findings with a grain of my dad’s beloved five spice powder — it’s only a fifth of the big picture (if that!).  We still have a huge audience for our food.  And we’ll never be all things to all people.

But I kind of yearn for the day when Red Moon’s food will be held in a bit higher esteem among these Twin Cities foodie folk.  Because I stand by this:  Red Moon’s food is what it is.  It is excellent.

Then again, I’m heartened by this fair-minded assumption:  the opinions of 20 bloggers and comment-suppliers on a foodie blog cannot even begin to reflect the opinions of society-at-large.  And who is spending money at our restaurant?  Oh yeah, the people who aren’t spending their household food budgets on a dozen new places a month.  They’re our regulars and they love our Chinese.  Call it pedestrian if you want… but that’s the kind of foot traffic that keeps folks like us in business.

You can expect a few blogs about journalism from me, naturally.

This evening I attended WCCO-TV’s “Bloginar,” hosted right down at the Channel 4 studios on the Nicollet Mall.  My hope was to learn a thing or two that would help me with the development of this blog and to meet other Twin Cities bloggers.  I met a few, but the bulk of the seminar was focussed on the station’s new online venture, “The Wire.”  It was a bit disappointing that I didn’t really get a chance to meet and greet with more local bloggers, but I figure — that’s what the Internet is for, right?

Anyhow — it was really great to see a preview of “The Wire” and to hear all of the local questions and comments from some of the more Web savvy creatures around — the few dozen people in the room.

“The Wire” is a sort of Flash Web application — a timeline tracking stories as they happen — plotting each new development with little bubbles that grow in size proportionally to their relevance and how many comments they’re getting from users.  And each update is linked to the prior and subsequent blurb on the same topic/story.  Imagine how much easier it could be to follow developing stories like all-day events or catastrophes — things you kind of like to piece together yourself as you process what happened from start to finish.  (For an even more comprehensive look ahead at “The Wire,” check out David Erickson’s Internet marketing blog.)

When big stories happen right now, I find myself using stations’ clunky search boxes to track down any and all content they might have.  I like watching initial live reports in addition to the latest, polished packages that might be posted hours later.  I want to see all the copy that’s been posted.  Often, stations don’t wrap that up in one neat package.  Web producers get tired after a long haul.  Related links aren’t built-in.  And goodness, it’s rarely pretty.

John Daenzer, Director of New Media at WCCO-TV in Minneapolis, shows a crowd of local bloggers the station's newest Web venture, "The Wire."

The producers of the new venture showed us a six-minute video summing it all up — and it ended with a soundbite that’s become the paradigm for new media, something about how “The Wire” is an opportunity “to have the viewers help us give them what they want.”  Some love that.  Others cringe at it.  My opinion on that seems to lie in the middle somewhere, given the realities of the need for revenue and the responsibility journalists have to educate and sometimes even advocate a little.

I will say that it is so refreshing to see a local television station taking this kind of initiative on the Web.  I’m sure it will go through many tweaks before it really hits its stride.  But it appeared the bloggers in the room were quite receptive, if not just plain giddy.  And it is what it is — a cleaner, well-managed aggregate of local news… managed by the people who know a thing or two about local news.  It isn’t nuggets sandwiched between heaps of trash aggregated on Twitter or Facebook.  And it will not be replacing wcco.com, but rather augmenting what the station’s seemingly recession-resistant Web staff is already pumping out.

I was most struck by the kind of commitment the people at WCCO-TV have for developing new things, taking chances and spending a little money (a nice chunk of change, it seems).  I left television news because it became clear to me these kinds of investments weren’t happening in very many places… that there weren’t many crucibles for this kind of development left around the country.  And at the rate I’ve witnessed, it will take years, if not a decade-plus for some of the smaller market TV stations to catch up to a station like WCCO-TV on the Web front.  By then many of them will be…gulp…  Yes the old media are dying — but some of them will make it back from the cusp thanks to innovation like this.  The people behind it may have just the brains journalism has been searching for.  The people who will cement the next golden age in media.  Even if it isn’t thanks to this particular venture.  Bravo, Hometown Team (I loved that ‘CCO branding in the 1990s.)

Besides two stays of three months and a few visits here and there — I keep having to remind myself that I have not lived here at home since June 2001.  And that is a long time.  I live in Shakopee, Minn. with my dad — a city that used to be Twin Cities-fringe at best.  Now it’s just another piece of the suburban blob, big-boxes and all.

Fortunately, it’s also home to an increasingly ethnic presence and subsequent varied dining options.  Today, dad and I had to drive at most a mile or two for some Vietnamese pho at Pho 83 Cuisine (which I’m happy to report even has its own Web site, still rare for lots of ma and pa Asian joints).  We used to have to drive down to Eat Street in Minneapolis for such treats.

The Pho Tai Bo Vien in Shakopee, Minn at Pho 83 Cuisine

The pho was pretty standard — which means good, cause pho is yummy.  The restaurant has been there for a couple of years — and I guess my cousin and brother have enjoyed going there for awhile.  I’m excited to discover all kinds of new and exciting things back here at home.  How nice that some of it is right here in little old (but oh-so-new) Shakopee.