If you're at a farm-to-table restaurant, chances are your server will dote on the provenance of ingredients more than the dishes. Once I was introduced (posthumously) to a cow named Bunga, who servers reassured was fed grass during special intervals when the pastures were less wilted by sunlight.
Churchill Street serves beef from locally raised cows, and they may have been lavished during their short lives. But you wouldn't know it. Said cows come from Peterson Craftsman Meats, and here it's served as a grilled flatiron cut, lean and meaty and accompanied by summer squash that tastes cleanly of itself.
While there is a section on the back of the menu that quietly explains where the meats, vegetables and other products come from — pretty much all local — this information feels like an aside, preferring to let the baby lettuces and spinach in a trio of salads speak (crisply); or giving rhubarb the breathing room it deserves in a dessert.
There is no pomp here, alas, only dinner. And Churchill Street makes it count in a city (Shoreview) once described as a food desert until a concerned resident, Carly Gatzlaff, stepped up. Last winter, she tapped Jonathan Gans and Josh Hoyt, alums of the beloved Bachelor Farmer, and Aaron Marthaler, who runs the kitchen, to bring upscale dining to the northern suburbs.
Marthaler cooked under Thomas Keller at the three-Michelin-starred French Laundry in California. Keller's exacting standards may explain the caliber of Marthaler's cooking as he expands on the great American tenor of comfort classics, like ensuring that the double-patty burger has just the right amount of cheese (both white and yellow American), sauce (cobbled from Worcestershire, mayonnaise, ketchup and pickle brine), onion (deftly caramelized) and pickles. Or frying buttermilk-soaked chicken thigh until the crust develops a furious crumb over a still-moist interior, then cutting through it all with a mop of honey vinegar.
There are other evocations of chicken, too — in wings, rubbed with a smoky marinade (serviceable); and a $32 roasted half-chicken (sensational) brined for 24 hours and dried for another 24 so each piece of breast and leg is unmistakably juicy.
And there are other crowd-pleasers, like an artichoke dip that doesn't taste like a bowl of grease, and arancini fried to the color of malt with an appealing, resistant chew.
The food is all in good fun, mostly. But like a closet math olympiad purposely fumbling over an equation at the whiteboard, Churchill, too, might be downplaying its smarts to appear one with its athleisure crowd. For under its laid-back vibe — Churchill was once a hardware store before it was transformed into its sun-drenched, loft-like environs with inviting deep-set booths — lie flashes of brilliance.
