Street food is hot right now, and LOLO American Kitchen & Craft Bar does it particularly well.
The restaurant (233 Main St. S., Stillwater; 651-342-2461; loloamericankitchen.com) serves up American street food with a gourmet twist, not to mention fancier entrees that are also on the menu.
We caught up with chef Brad Nordeen, 38, who owns the downtown Stillwater restaurant along with general manager Joe Ehlenz.
What did you want to be when you grew up? Maybe a baseball player or a firefighter.
What’s your first food memory? After school I used to go to my grandparents’ house, and my grandmother always made fresh soup every day. At a young age, I had an appreciation for fresh, well-cooked, high-quality food made with some TLC. And to this day, that’s a lasting memory I have.
What was your first job in food? I worked at the former Trumps in downtown Stillwater. I cooked at age 19 and became a supervisor with my friend Shawn Smalley, who runs Smalley’s Caribbean Barbeque, also in downtown Stillwater. That’s how we both started before we went off and did our own things.
How did you wind up in the restaurant business for good? I had been in it for 13, 14 years. Then my wife and I lived in Hawaii for a year.
We came back and I worked in the kitchen at 112 Eatery in downtown Minneapolis. That experience changed my life. I could see what a well-run restaurant it was, where there was a lot of respect for everyone from the back of the house to the front of the house. And seeing chef Isaac Becker’s philosophy of good, consistent food all the time was a huge influence. It reignited my passion for this business.
After that, I went to work at Phil’s Tara Hideaway (in Stillwater) where I had worked before moving to Hawaii. Joe Ehlenz, co-owner of LOLO, and I both went to college in River Falls (Wis.) and had worked together at Phil’s Tara. We remained in contact and opened LOLO in May 2014.
What’s your food philosophy? At LOLO, we want the food to be approachable and not too cheffy. But we use a lot of modern techniques and fresh, good ingredients that you might see at a higher-end restaurant. We do a play on street food. We have some more formal entrees as well.
What’s your favorite dish on the LOLO menu right now? I would say our Korean barbecue hanger steak tacos. We start with a great product — a hanger steak 28 days aged. It has some of the best marbling I’ve every seen. Then just the flavor combination — we add some napa slaw and some house-pickled cucumber. It’s sweet and salty and has a little bit of heat to it. It’s a very balanced dish.
What’s the last thing you cooked at home? It was a Korean barbecue-style turkey burger. My wife picked it out at the grocery store. She gets most of the groceries, and I cook them. At some point, you don’t want to think of creating stuff and going shopping after you’ve been cooking at a restaurant.
If you could eat or drink only five things for the rest of your life, what would they be? I would drink a good IPA and sparkling water. For food, it would be braised pork shoulder and some sort of smoked salmon — that’s what I always snack on at work. (When you don’t have a lot of time and you have to eat something really quick, putting salmon in a tortilla with creme fraiche or hoisin sauce, pickles and slaw does the trick.) The last item would be some sort of white fish, like halibut.
What’s next? We’re one of the new restaurants going into the Minneapolis airport next year. We’ll be in Concourse E, where there are plans for a food-truck court. We won’t be in the food-truck court, but we will be the end-cap full-service restaurant. Since we do a play on gourmet American street food, it fits well. Beyond that, we’re looking at another Twin Cities location, but things have not been finalized.
Nancy Ngo can be reached at 651-228-5172. Follow her at twitter.com/nancyngotc and pinterest.com/nancyngotc.
