Illata
Bar Seating at a BYOB?
Illata is the kind of place you go when you want to feel at home, but promised yourself you’d put on pants today. In what was clearly a quaintly cramped rowhome, the BYOB feels like a meticulously planned dinner party in a city apartment. The menu feels similarly cozy yet elevated.
I hadn’t planned to write about Illata here. After all, I didn’t imagine bar seating would be big at a BYO establishment. But, in a night full of kismet, the first happenstance was that my table wasn’t ready, and they had a small bar with two corner seats open. In keeping with the “making any occasion special” feeling of the evening, I brought what is currently my all-time favorite wine, a gran riserva Cava from Llopart producers in Catalonia, Spain. This bottle spent 80 months aging on the lees (the yeast that causes secondary fermentation in sparkling wines). It is the best tart brightness of usual sparkling wines, paired with a sherry-like caramelized raisin note. As I settled into the cheery green tile counter, I was feeling like an out-of-town guest, just arrived to my cool friends place in the city.
As for the food, it was simply yet perfectly put together. The mussels with chili oil, asparagus with corn nuts and a pile of fresh herbs, shrimp with roasted and raw zucchini, and the true star of the show, eggplant tortellini in a tomato consomme. All of these felt like the romanticized notion of what a chef would cook for themselves on their day off. Something about the green of the bar top, the efforless cool of the ambient music, and the spare white walls make me homesick for Montreal, a place I’ve visited but never lived.
Speaking of homesick, halfway through my dinner, I overheard a couple to my left talking about The Bachelor Farmer, one of the first trendy fine dining places in Minneapolis back in the early 2010s. The nordic-inspired restaurant, and its borderline pretentious yet oh-so-cool cocktail bar Marvel Bar, were two casualties of the pandemic. Marvel was the place I went for my 21st birthday, and before my college graduation. So when I heard the space mentioned, I had a rare social moment and cut in to chat with them.
They’d lived in Minneapolis for years, and left just in 2022. We rattled names back and forth in a friendly volley: Indeed, Hai Hai, 112 Eatery, Sociable Cider Works. We missed all the same places. More and more, that seems to be a fundamental unit of connection we have at our disposal: shared corners of loss, places that only exist in our memories, or that have moved on and changed without us. Not quite bittersweet, but tart and comforting at the same time.
Brown butter tart with sour cherries finished me off (literally, I couldn’t eat the whole thing and took some home for the next day). I packed up my wine and dessert box, and dance-walked my way home. Someday, I’ll miss these places too, the way they bring me closer to rooms I’ll never see again, to strangers I’ll never see again. But for now, I know the sidewalk on Grays Ferry well enough to not trip on its uneven bricks. The air is gentle, and in this part of the city, there are fireflies. A marvel, stumbling into somewhere new and into the past all in one night.