over Porky’s onion rings when boosting a new Northeast location with Paul
Ostrow for the family owned fast food restaurant franchise on Central Avenue.
Onion rings were a side that I had ordered at the Porky’s St. Paul location,
now gone but famous for attracting aficionados of old and tricked out cars,
because I too love onion rings; however I often found particularly
disappointing ones at Porky’s with a chewy, thin, salty and floury armor full
of grease around single onion rings from thick slices of the onion that made me
doubt my love along with the taste and abilities of our mayor in just about all
things (of course in R.T.’s case, there was much, much more to consider than
lousy onion rings). Once upon a time there was a SW Minneapolis Porky's
location I gathered, so along with the ill conceived and long gone one on NE
Central, it is still a Minneapolis issue, albeit now an old one.
The issue set me on a quest that I resumed this afternoon as way back then, one
of you suggested I go to Cuzzie's, pretty much a dive bar on North Washington
Avenue and still there in the North Loop; I finally did. I walked over after
picking up some new glasses in the Skyway, and she was right (others might have
been just as right, but mentioned places outside of Minneapolis like Bernie’s
Deli, so useless to us here). Cuzzie’s has sort of the classic style with the
raw onion ring dredged in bread crumbs or some kind of meal after soaking in a
liquid or batter and fried to a brown and crispy crust around the well cooked,
soft, but firm and sweet onion. So many of the bars I that my quest led me to
had similar onion rings that I think there must be suppliers of processed
rings, battered, breaded, frozen, and ready for the deep frier that they all
use (fine with me). They’re nice as most Minneapolis proprietors are, have good
beer, some local ones, as well as the good onion rings, and I washed them down
with an extra pale ale.
Some places are different, though, like the rings I had in Seward at the
Flashback Cafe in Memory Lanes long ago and early on in the quest, thick slices
of onions broken into rings and disks with more than one layer and covered with
a thick layer of batter and crumbs or meal, very cakey stuff, but still tasty
as most onion rings are or should be.
Porky’s and a whole lot of the other fast food drive thru type places in
Minneapolis have the battered style that I don’t enjoy quite as much, unless of
course they are or are similar to vegetable tempura from Japanese restaurants.
Anyone have any onion rings off the ubiquitous food trucks around town?
I’ll continue the quest as I go out for a burger or a beer now and then, and
order the onion rings if they’re available.
I really should have made onion rings a campaign issue when I ran for mayor in
2013, but I was totally distracted by this Council-manager government issue.
Onion rings can be an effective litmus test for each candidate in November,
just as it was for R.T. (as true as all those stupid stadiums were). Porky’s
rings aren’t around to disappoint us anymore just like R.T., but I still think
that mayoral candidates should enter the Minneapolis onion ring of their choice
for our consideration. So ask the candidates where they had their last good
onion rings in Minneapolis; hurry up ‘cause there’s only a month left. They
could save us time and report their preferred onion ring locations, here, but
if they won’t say as some Minneapolis candidates for this or that refused to
answer that Strib survey with the question about whether they could imagine
Minneapolis without police, you can just eliminate them.