The aquamarine floor that spans Crasqui, the restaurant, may at first recall the paint job of polished, psychedelic-looking bowling ball. This is not by design. "Try looking at it after a few drinks," our server suggests.
We do, and it clicks. The undulating swirls dance like seawater lapping against the white leather furniture, the color of which supposedly resembles sand. Crasqui, it turns out, is named after an island off the coast of Venezuela, where the restaurant's chef/owner, Soleil Ramirez, was raised.
But you won't need to be in any stupor to imagine how the space, inside a nondescript building off the Wabasha Street bridge in downtown St. Paul, could match this postcard destination, 3,000 miles south. Food alone does the job. Compellingly, too.
To fully realize this, consider the fresh, creamy, almost saline qualities of coconut with Ramirez's take on fosforera, a Venezuelan soup native to the island of Margarita. To a bowl of gently cooked seafood, a server pours a bisque — a thin but extravagant distillation of shrimp and the coconut. Over tiny kernels of peppers and potatoes, he pours a variation of the broth (crema de coco), equally fragrant from tomatoes and garlic. These are soups I will think of in the howls of winter.
I've never been to Venezuela, but I hope the plantains there taste like the ones I had on a recent evening. They looked like miniature, rusted ingots, roasted until dark, caramelized and pungent, like molasses that had been fermenting all week. I don't think the black beans will ever look primed for Instagram — unless black hole in bowl is a new art form — but your taste buds will beg to differ when you find yourself merrily swiping heaping, nutty spoonfuls of them, as if administered by Mary Poppins.
"Seasonal" vegetables may sound like the neglected dish in any menu, but far from it at Crasqui. They have a kind of crunch that many kitchens across town don't normally achieve, while the seafood stock in which the vegetables are cooked imbues it with complexity. You may overlook the seasonal sorbet, too. Don't. I've had mangoes in the tropics that were less vivid than the way it's captured here, in puddinglike form.
If the simplicity of these dishes doesn't entice you, you may be missing the point. There is a diaspora of ways to express heritage and voice, of which Ramirez is a steward. Seven years ago, Ramirez fled Venezuela when corrupt government officials seized the money cobbled from the restaurant she helped run. She arrived in the United States with $300 and a week's worth of clothes, in search of asylum and opportunity.
She found both. After working for luminary chefs, including the late Jack Riebel, Ramirez built an eatery of her own and named it Arepa Bar, where she vends homier street food staples in addition to the namesake product. The profits from the operation inside Midtown Global Market — and her own savings — helped finance Crasqui, which she opened in early in August.
