#lowry hill

[chaddavisphotography]

Lowry Hill Liquor Store on Hennepin Ave in Minneapolis.

[goodlivingrooms]

1800 sq ft Lowry Hill apartment - Minneapolis, Minnesota

[chaddavisphotography]

A Wedge sign in Uptown Minneapolis.

[evoljennifer]

POTD January 18, 2020 Slightly Crossing The Line

[sandwichbully]

Lowry Hill Meats, 21 October 2018

  It’s October in Minneapolis, which means a number of things depending on who you talk to. Some people refer to it as pumpkin spice season, people who like to shit on other people’s fun talk shit about pumpkin spice season, people over nine years old marvel at the way leaves change color like that’s some shit they’ve never seen before on an annual basis, errbody in the club gettin on Tinder for cuffing season, and scarf enthusiasts are losing their goddamned nut over their time to shine, but mostly, it just means shitty, pissy weather, night and day.    When it’s not windy, it’s raining; when it’s not raining, it’s just gloomy; when it’s not gloomy, it’s windy; and when it’s not some combination of these bullshit elements driving me to - Wait, did they say the words “trap house jazz” on NPR? Whatever, when it’s not windy, raining, gloomy, shitty, pissy, or some combination of those, it’s fucking freezing and the landlord doesn’t know to turn the fucking heat on. “But, Charlie,” you say, “the leaves change color.”    Say that shit to me one more time and I’ll strangle your ass. I swear to fucking god.    Anyway, that’s just why there hasn’t been a Sandwich Bully for three weeks; it’s just been too shitty to go outside. You know what I did yesterday? It was 42°F, you think I conducted any urban exploring in 42°F? (That’s 5½°C... That’s right, I’m flexing my alt-code muscles.) I baked a frozen pizza (chicken pesto, if you’re curious, and it was meh) and watched a couple Shane Black movies.    You know what I did last weekend? No, I’m seriously asking. I don’t remember what the fuck I did. It probably involved staying inside because it was shitty, gloomy, damp, pissy, and nut-shrinking cold outside and you’re right I’m angry, we got shorted on our summer this year, we had a blizzard in May. That shit aint right. Why did the settlers think establishing a major metropolitan hub up in this motherfucker was a good idea? It’s cold all the time, mosquitoes are the size of cats, gnats everywhere, fucking winter lasts eight months, everybody’s obese because of that, suicide rates seven thousand percent higher than the global average, really!!    But today it’s 55°F, sunny, not a cloud in the sky. I had to take to my bike and get out and just be out. And then I realized that I hadn’t done a Sandwich Bully in a while, so while Ophira Eisenberg wrapped up Ask Me Another, I started Googling delis and then just sandwiches and I narrowed it down to a few choices:    Broder’s Deli (next to last one in that link and frequently mentioned in our halllowed halls)    Lowry Hill Meats    Northbound Smokehouse (top one in that link)

   I also considered just walking to Icehouse, where I never go, because they have a Reuben that - and check the fuck out of this shit out - consists of pastrami, “pickled cabbage”, fontina, and remoulade on rye. There are so many places to start there that I kind of want to hold off on my bloviating over the theory and principles of the Reuben until I actually eat one of these damned things and seeing, “Could it work?” (Preview of my own thoughts on the subject: If they can’t commit to just sauerkraut and have to go with “pickled cabbage”... Uh... Nuh.) †    Now, going to Broder’s would be fine and dandy but it wouldn’t be anything to write about because I can’t keep praising them. And the more I thought about Northbound, the more I didn’t want to go in, alone, get spotted by neighborhood regulars taking a picture of my food and have to explain to them what a blog is nor did I want to wait, so I went to Lowry Hill after a ride around Cedar Lake, went in, asked young Jason Priestly looking homie if he recommended the mysteriously titled “French Exit” which is really just your choice of meat and some fancy cheese with mustard and aioli on a baguette or the Turkey Melt which, you guessed it, is a grilled cheese with turkey on it, here billed identically on the website and in the physical space (psst! Will every other deli in Minneapolis catch up to that? Please and Thank You.) as turkey (obvs), house made American cheese (you read that right, hell, I read that right), aioli, and mustard on brioche.    Jason Priestly tells me the turkey melt, if he has to pick between the two, nothing wrong with the French Exit, it’s just that he likes hot sandwiches and the French Exit is cold. I say let’s do that and grab a Mexican Coke.    Wow, that’s kind of a catchy line. Take it a different way and I could employ that in multiple situations. “Let’s do that and grab a Mexican Coke.” Yeah. I like the way that sounds. Going to put that on a t-shirt, man.

LET’S DO THAT AND GRAB A MEXICAN COKE

   Look at that. That’s US$24.95 on Etsy, baby. That’s a moneymaker.    ANYhoo, after I remind you I exist and drag you along on this journey, I’m sure you’re wondering how this sandwich tasted, especially since last time I went there, I disparaged them a little as all I could taste on their roast beef was vinegar.    Well, I want to make a musical reference. Will this work?

   Get it? Because they’re redeemed, see, and - Wh- No? No good? Not working for you? Fuck you, then.    So the turkey itself was I want to say oven roasted as opposed to smoked as it was perfectly juicy and they seasoned it just right, to get rid of that cardboard turkey taste. The cheese was mildly tangy and didn’t have the same sodiumtastic flavor of, say, Kraft Singles. It paired nicely with the turkey. But the real socially progressive third party candidate embattled by their controversial past in this key battleground state during a midterm election whose discourse has largely been dominated by muck raking and accusations (and acknowledgments) of scandal is, surprisingly, the sweet coarse ground mustard paired with the aioli.    This is a study in the condiments steering the flavor of the sandwich away from just a hot turkey & american, though these were quite good turkey and american, to something semisweet and complex. However, I will note that I didn’t find the sandwich complete until I added the seeded jalapeño slices on the sandwich, giving it a mild kick.    Now, was this anything to lose my mind over? Nah but I was pleasantly surprised. Would I pay nine dollars for this again? Mm, like if I was on a date but I remember where I’m from: I’m from being broke. So twelve dollars for a sandwich and a pop? That’s not something I want to make a habit out of. But considering they probably slaughtered this turkey and they actually made their American cheese and their aioli and their mustard (and Cecil’s charges you the same price for shipped in and say they just don’t have the space to do that themselves), that’s the price you pay for - I hate to use this word - artisanal. That’s what’s going on there: Artisanal meat craft. Their meat case? Has actual parts of animals in it. Not smoked and wrapped in plastic, no. Just bare-assed parts of animals. Pink and red flesh on white bones. It’s the real deal.    It’s just too bad they don’t have kielbasa.    Go give them your money. †  Update, 27 October 2018: Icehouse doesn’t have a Reuben anymore for reasons unknown. They tried to sell me a pastrami and egg sandwich instead and I was all, “Nah.”

[sandwichbully]

Lowry Hill Meats, 11 September 2018

   The very tippy-tip Lowry Hill East, wedged between Lowry Hill to the west and the Loring Heights half of Stevens Square to the east, is not a safe place to bike. As long as you keep this in mind as you venture into the area, you are still going to fucking die. Motorists in this area, enraged and dyspeptic over the bottle neck of Hennepin, Lyndale, five ramps on & off 94, the intersection of Franklin “Fuck You, Die” Avenue, and the Loring Greenway, operate with the intention of murdering everybody they can see. And this is where I went to lunch today.    Being on vacation, I decided to do things I don’t normally do. So I’ve been going to wildflower gardens and bird sanctuaries and cemeteries and making it a point to eat lunch at places I’ve never eaten before. To pull it off today, I Googled “deli near me” and got handed my usual list of places that I’ve been to already and then I see Lowry Hill Meats and I look at their menu and I think, “This looks like, uh... Huh.”    And that, my friends, is how you can tell I’m excited.    I bike over there and, yep, nothing here has changed. Everybody in possession of an internal combustion engine attached to four wheels is out here playing like they’re Rutger Hauer in Hitcher and I can only wait for the walk light to allow me to bike into oncoming traffic because the laws of right-of-way don’t exist here in Lowry Hill East, fuck you, you pussy-ass “bicyclist”, why don’t you get a car and a job, you commie scum fuck, this is America where I’m the most important person in the world and you’re making me late by crossing in front of me just because “a sign” told you and your gay dreadlocks you could. I AM AN AMERICAN FOOTBALL LOVING CARNIVORE AND ME AND MY CAR ARE IMPORTANT SO IMPORTANT SO GODDAMNED IMPORTANT AND YOU DARE NOT RESPECT ME!? I SUPPORT TROOPS, MOTHERFUCKER!!!    What?    Oh, sorry. I just, uh, saw a guy look at me funny while I was crossing the street and I can only imagine that’s what was going on in his head.    Anyway, I bike over to the Lowry Hill Meats and it’s pretty much in the old Rye space - actually looked it up. Rye’s old address is 1930 and Lowry Hill Meats is 1934. Whatever. I go inside and I take a look at the menu board and this dude at the meat slicer asks if I’m looking for some lunch and I says yeah, I says and he says there’s a sandwich menu right ovah heah and he points like to this chawkboad, see? And I walks over theah, I does, and I reads the menu and this gothic hipstah chick, she stahts rattlin off the specials fuh the day at me-    No, you know what? I can’t keep doing the nineteen thirties New England accent.    Anyway, I tell her I’ll just have the roast beef.    Oh, and this ginger ale.    And it comes out to ten something, OK, that’s cool. No biggie.    So what’s on the roast beef?    Look out, because this aint Arby’s.    They take roast beef and put it on filone with beet horseradish, shaved red onion, butter, oil & vinegar.    So, how did it taste?    Like fucking vinegar.    You know how roast beef when cooked to rare, still bloody as the red tent - I was going to go with the crude menstruation joke, instead, I went with the literary one, you’re welcome - has a metallic taste to it? How it’s savory and has that low buttery saxophone drone on the bottom but it just has that high-pitched iron taste that’s complimented so well by marjoram and oregano? You know? Well, I was expecting that. That’s what I want when I go to a butcher shop / deli with “meats” in their name. I’ve made the conscious decision to eat red meat - tell my doctor - I should taste red meat.    Instead I tasted a lot of this beet horseradish, or, rather, the vinegar in it, that was complimented by more vinegar. I think it was a Nero Wolfe movie where Nero chides his assistant (not Archie Goodwin) over fucking up his salad, “How many times must I tell you? Be a spendthrift with the oil, a miser with the vinegar!” Or something like that. Might not even have been Nero Wolfe. It might have been a different fat-detective-who-solves-crimes-from-his-La-Z-Boy-while-his-right-hand-man-goes-out-and-does-all-the-work movie.    Anyway, that was all I could taste, vinegar. I can’t tell you shit about the onions, nothing about the butter or what it was doing there when there was oil, the bread was chewy and resistant without being a bastard, that was nice, the meat was chewy, wished I could have tasted that, you got me drawing a blank on the horseradish, the beets gave up a little sweetness so I guess I had sweet & sour beef for lunch, and the goddamned ginger ale was some organic fuck you job from some place in Wisconsin that burned my throat going down.    I don’t want to disparage the place, clearly they put thought and consideration into what they do. They could just slap some roast beef on rye and hand you a couple mustard packets (Brother’s, Cecil’s), but they want their sandwich to be worth your time, worth your visit. So, without trying to be too chefy about it, they probably sat down and thought long and hard over their sandwich menu. When it came to roast beef, what works with roast beef? Onions and um... Why, horseradish, of course! But does horseradish cut it? Does horseradish stand out? Does horseradish say “us”? Not really. What if we make it - Well, what if we make it - There’s this stuff they serve at Passover, beet horseradish. What if we try that?    Probably a conversation like that.    With the exception of oil & vinegar, nothing about this sandwich sounds like it doesn’t belong on or with roast beef. But they need to back away from the vinegar because there’s plenty of that in the beet horseradish, and while they’re at it, nix the oil, too. There’s already butter there for the fat.    So, it’s one sandwich, one visit, I can tell they care about what they produce, I can tell that they’ve carefully considered their sandwich construction, they’re erring on the conservative side which is nice because I don’t want to walk in some place and find steamed salmon with a pear marinara on pumpernickel pita or some wonky horseshit like that on the menu. I’m tempted to give this one a pass and see what else they can do. They’ve got pork shoulder, they’ve got turkey, they’ve got this sandwich called the French Exit which sounds like either a Third Reich joke or a poo joke, I might try that. But after today’s sandwich, I can’t tell you to give them your money.

   Because I’m telling you to give me your money! (Oh, shut up, you saw this coming.) That’s right! I made a book. It’s called Batpussy: A Speculative Fiction and it’s all about how the movie Batpussy (which is a thing that exists, you can look it up) was made except it’s all just straight up lies because nobody knows how it was made and nobody has ever come forward to take responsibility for it.    For ten dollars, you get cocaine, you get fried chicken, you get murder, you get an old racist Greek guy whose name is Irving Spanakopita, you get oil changes, and you get some sex but mostly you get just straight up fucking lies! Get it here: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/batpussy-charlie-pauken/1129374780?ean=9781538094839 

[cumbriacrack]

A7 Scotland Road / Kingstown Road Resurfacing Works Cumbria County Council intends to carry out night time resurfacing works to the A7 Scotland Road / Kingstown Road, starting on Tuesday 29 August and expected to last 9 nights (excluding weekends) Full story: http://www.cumbriacrack.com/2017/08/17/a7-scotland-road-kingstown-road-resurfacing-works/

[cumbriacrack]

Jewellery stolen in Carlisle burglary Officers are appealing for information after a burglary at a property in Kingstown Road in Carlisle. Full story: http://www.cumbriacrack.com/2016/11/28/jewellery-stolen-carlisle-burglary/