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

Related Content

• All Hopped Up on Russian Rye
• Malaysian Restaurant Does Chinese New Year, Singapore Style
• Cue's Second Act
• The Intelligent Minnesotan's Guide to the Awesomeness of Kushner
• Singapore: Best (Indoor) Street Food in the World

Yippee! We're headed for Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia this morning. Temperature is gonna be around 89 degrees in Singapore on Sunday, with a 50 percent chance of rain, but we can live with that. Singapore is supposed to be one of great food cities of the world, so stay tuned for a few gastronomic reports from en route.

If you read the story recently in the New York Times about the great chicken noodle soups of Asia, you'll be happy to know that you don't have to go all the way to Singapore (or New York City, for that matter, to enjoy them. One of the highlighted soups, curry laksa, is one of my favorite dishes on the menu at Peninsula, but you can also get a decent version at K-Wok - a Vietnamese-Chinese restaurant at 1813 Riverside Ave. on the West Bank that also has a few Malaysian dishes on the menu. Red Pepper, 864 University Ave., St. Paul, serves a delicious Hmong and Lao version of curry noodle soup, called kow poonm shown above ($6.95), that's a little less intense than curry laksa.

The Times article also writes about the classic Indonesian chicken soup, soto ayam, which is on the menu at our only Indonesian restaurant, Bali. I haven't tried it yet, but everything else I've had at the new Eat Street restaurant (14th and Nicollet) has been pretty good...

On  a completely unrelated topic, I just got a press release from the Guthrie announcing that Tim McKee (of La Belle Vie, Solera, Barrio, and Smalley's Caribbean Barbeque) is going to be taking over operation of  the restaurant now known as Cue, in partnership with Dallas-based Culinaire, sometime in April. No word on what the new name will be, or what McKee plans to do with the restaurant, except for this quote: "I think it has terrific promise, but it's important for the style of restaurant to work with the design of the space. If you look at Solera, or Barrio for example that connection is obvious. I'm looking forward to aligning those elements for the Guthrie's new restaurant."