The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

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Nibbles and tidbits:

This one sounds too good to miss: Monday night, (June 16), French Meadow Bakery and Café is hosting a five course Brazilian dinner, with live Brazilian jazz and Brazilian-inspired fashions. Cost is $50, including organic/ sustainable wine pairings. It's a benefit for KBEM, Jazz 88 FM, so at least part of the ticket price is tax-deductable.

The dinner is being prepared by French Meadow's Brazilian chef Fernando Wanderley, so it ought to be pretty authentic. Courses include a wild ramps and sweet corn soup; hearts of palm salad; potato dumplings with Wild Acres duck confit, and dessert of papaya with crème de cassis, but the real star of the evening is going to be the entrée, moqueca de peixe - red snapper cooked with peppers and onions in a palm oil and coconut milk sauce. It's a specialty of Bahia in northeastern Brazil, where the cuisine and the culture have a strong African influence. Bahian cuisine is one of great undiscovered cuisines of the world, and you can get a taste of it on Monday night. Vegetarian options are available.

Seating is limited. For reservations, go to www.jazz88fm.com and click on the RestauranTour link.

Japanese restaurants seem to be popping up all over these days, and the latest to join the ranks is Azuki, a tiny storefront squeezed in between Chipotle and the Oak Street Cinema, on Oak Street in Stadium Village. I am terminally bored with sushi, which has become the ultimate generic food - it's basically the same stuff whether you buy it at a fancy sushi bar, the deli case at Lund's, or in bulk at Costco. A local Chinese-American restaurateur tells me we can see a lot more sushi bars opening in the next few years as the owners of all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets switch to sushi, which has higher profit margins.

But I liked Azuki. Service is fast and friendly, prices are very reasonable, and there is more to the menu than sushi. My lunchtime tempura bento box included a couple of pieces of batter-fried shrimp, yam and taro, plus a California roll, a couple of gyoza dumplings, salad and rice ($9/ $12 dinner.) I didn't taste my companion's pork katsu donburi - a big bowl of rice topped with egg and friend pork cutlet, but it looked like the genuine article ($7/ $10 dinner), and there is a lot more that I would like to try, including the udon noodle soups ($9-$12), and the oyako donburi (chicken and egg over rice ($7/$10).

Azuki Japanese Restaurant, 307 Oak St., Minneapolis, 612-331-9551.

Speaking of the Oak Street Cinema, this weekend they are screening The Yacoubian Building, my favorite movie from the recent Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Film Festival. It's a wild lalapalooza of a movie, Egypt's Oscar entry for Best Foreign Film. This blurb from the Oak Street Cinema website captures it:


A microcosm of Egyptian society - with its rich inhabitants living in luxurious apartments and the poor on the roof, the businessman who bribes his way to power; the rich son of a playboy who only appears interested in prostitutes; the relationship between a homosexual journalist and the porter's son, who becomes a terrorist after been rejected by the police academy, and love story out of a Forties Warner Brothers musical.

I don't know what a movie ticket costs in Cairo, but they sure get their money's worth.