DeRusha Eats: Jason Talks With Isaac Becker & Nancy St. Pierre
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- His three Minneapolis restaurants are almost always packed. It started 10 years ago when Isaac Becker and his wife Nancy St. Pierre opened 112 Eatery.
This week in DeRusha Eats, Jason chats with the award-winning culinary couple behind Bar La Grassa and Burch.
Burch Steakhouse isn't so different from what once stood at the corner of Hennepin and Franklin in Minneapolis. Where pharmacists used to prepare prescriptions, today Chef Danny Del Prado works precisely to heal our pains.
Chef Isaac Becker and his wife Nancy St. Pierre own three of the most successful restaurants in the Twin Cities.
"Burch was really scary. The menu is pretty big," Becker said.
Burch is a new kind of a steakhouse: Steak plus gorgeous veal and pork kinkhali dumplings, and asparagus salads with morel mushrooms.
"She doesn't ever order steak, I do. With that in mind, we wanted to create a place that could accommodate everybody," Becker said.
Bar La Grassa does the same with pasta. 112 Eatery took late night dining to a new level.
"This was never a plan, Bar La Grassa was never a plan. 112 was always in our hearts," St. Pierre said.
Nancy and Issac met working at D'Amico Cucina. She was a server, he was a line cook.
"There was a sense of reward at the end of a busy night having cooked how many plates of food," Becker said.
Now, she trains the service staff; He trains the kitchen.
"The whole thing is important," he said.
"We've all had the fine food but the service kind of wrecks your night a little bit," she said.
All three restaurants serve huge volumes of people at incredible levels of quality.
"That's nice. I think it goes back to the investment you're willing to put in," Becker said.
It's an old-school approach: Isaac doesn't tweet or Facebook. Instead he builds great restaurants with great people, and the staff and customers keep coming back.
"With all the restaurants it's kind of been like what would we want if we went out to dinner," Becker said.
Isaac won Best Chef Midwest from the James Beard Award in 2011. He is at Burch Fridays, Bar La Grassa Saturdays and 112 Eatery on Tuesdays.
