Mpls.St.Paul Magazine March 2001 By Ingrid Skjong Care and Feeding Lucia Watson's abiding respect for ingredients and her craft, and its influence on a generation of local chefs makes her our restaurateur of the year. Lucia Watson slips behind a table at her namesake restaurant in south Minneapolis just as an employee tells the restaurateur she's been nominated for a slot on Food and Wine magazine's list of the ten best chefs in America. An earth-shaking honor for a little chef on the prairie, but Watson merely blinks, utters an "Oh, that's nice," through a small smile, and casually turns back to her cappuccino. Fixtures in the Twin Cities dining scene for the past sixteen years, Watson and her Lucia's Restaurant and Wine Bar display a decidedly down-to-earth midwestern nonchalance in a city of such high-wattage dining impresarios as Richard D'Amico and Parasole's Phil Roberts. Her low-key demeanor and unwillingness to buy into her publicity has engendered a profile profoundly at odds with her place in the local culinary firmament. Watson defined a genuinely regional cuisine while launching the careers of chefs steeped in her values who have gone on to open noteworthy restaurants across town and beyond. All the while Watson continues to toil in her kitchen on Thirty-first Street as if she were just another restaurateur, her ambitions almost shockingly organic and modest in a trade where fad, fashion, and ubiquity are the order of the day. Lucia Watson's vision remains original. A Minneapolis native, Watson, forty-six, attended Kenwood Elementary School, high school at what's now The Blake School, and the University of Minnesota. Cooking was a passion-she studied under her mother, Ann, and grandmother Lulu-and after graduation in 1977, with her degree in French, she followed the culinary siren song to Washington, D.C., joining a small, now-closed French restaurant in Middleburg, Virginia, as a server. After two years and a crack in the kitchen, she returned to Minneapolis in 1979 and signed on at the newly opened 510 Restaurant on Groveland. "I did everything," Watson remembers, sitting at a Lucia's table on a quiet Friday afternoon in December. "I started at pastry chef, I did...sauté, broiler, I managed lunches for a while. I just learned by doing." The immersion paid off, and two-and-a-half years later she teamed 510 co-worker Janice Cole and opened Center Cuisine, a catering business based in the Minnetonka Center for the Arts that also served lunches to the school's students. With a minimal initial investment and a built-in clientele, the venture took off, but six years later Watson found herself restless and ready for her own spot. She nabbed a storefront in Minneapolis's upscaling Uptown. The original, thirty-six-seat Lucia's opened Valentine's Day 1985 with eager customers from Center Cuisine and a staff that was green, to say the least. "There were no systems in place that you could rely on the way there are now," Watson recalls. "Now I can hire a new person and ask any number of other people to train them. But then, there was no one to train anybody else. It was just sort of a free-for-all." After two years of tending to the restaurant's daily changing menu and rapidly growing following, Lucia's expanded to seventy-two seats and, in 1994 added a wine bar. Despite times, Watson kept Lucia's relaxed and neighborhoody and resisted a pricey "special occasion" label-a strategy not overlooked by her peers. "She was the first to really start the whole trend of neighborhood restaurants," says Lynne Alpert, cofounder and original owner of the New French Cafe. "She did that far in advance of all the discussions about people cocooning and not going out of their neighborhoods." Along with neighborhood loyalties, Watson champions local farmers-whenever possible the ingredients used at Lucia's are local and organically grown-and is an ardent supporter of Youth Farm, a program where nine- to thirteen-year olds learn to grow and sell produce. She talks of her favorite summertime ingredients with rapture-baby carrots and beets are doted over like children-and she subscribes to the philosophy of working with foods rather than constantly trying to go beyond their essential qualities. "There are no tricks when your ingredients are that good. They just speak for themselves," she says. "Rather than visualize new things, it's more like bringing out the character of what you've got-maximizing it." Maximized but not muddied, the dishes on Lucia's still weekly changing menu reflect a homey, unfettered style that also manages to be creative via entrees like spicy charmoula-cous-cous crusted eggplant with garbanzo beans, mint yogurt, and date chutney; bacon-stuffed Wisconsin Star Prairie trout with mixed grains; Kobe organic hanger steak with caramelized shallots and rosemary. "[She] has remained consistent in what she does-and that is what is in producing a light, tasty cuisine with a little bit of homemade touch to it," Alpert notes. As for food trends, Watson pays little attention to the Next Big Thing and lets ingredients guide her instead. Like the organic baby lambs she buys from a boy in Arkansas, Wisconsin, which are so tiny she's ended up serving a lamb entree of braised shank, leg, chop, and shoulder (with cauliflower and fennel grown by the boy's mother)-a carefully crafted dinnertime story. "When we plate a twenty-five plates of food of five different entrees, it's really hard to see it objectively," she explains. "It's going to be set down in front of ones eyes, so you have to keep that [customer] perspective." The accolades validate Watson's approach, to be sure. She appeared on the cover of Fine Cooking with cookbook coauthor Beth Dooley (the two collaborated 1995's Savoring the Seasons of the Northern Heartland) for the magazine's Thanksgiving issue last year; Lucia's scored high on the Twin Cities Zagat Guide and Gourmet magazine's restaurant issue last fall; and then there was the peach-pie love-fest from Gourmet editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl in August 1999 ("We had people calling us for takeout orders on that peach pie," Watson says, a bit incredulous). But for all the national attention, she remains focused on her hometown. "It's more important to me that people in Minneapolis, and south Minneapolis, and in the neighborhood like me than that someone in San Diego," she says. Watson's local influence is undeniable, and the list of former Lucia's staff turned independent restaurateurs is long: Locally, Susan Muskat and Tracy Singleton at Birchwood Cafe, Scott McKenzie at Scott McKenzie Catering (formerly Center Cuisine), Julie Steenerson and Tanya Sibenthaler at Sapor, and Chris Paddock at Bobino, plus Steve Knowlton at Easy Creek Bar and Bistro in Arkansas, Wisconsin and Jimmy Watkins at Jimmy's Table in Seattle. Asked what her former cooks and assistants gleaned from her, Watson focuses on organization, management, and the nuts-and-bolts aspects of running a restaurant. But, of course, they learned more. Watson, who also teaches cooking classes a few times a year a Cooks of Crocus Hill in St. Paul and Edina, has a deep respect-almost a reverence-for her craft, its medium, and its effect on customers. She makes every effort to pass along that passion. "I really try to instill in the cooks and my own cooking a sense of integrity around food," she explains. "That covers using ingredients wisely in quantity, in how you combine certain things-aesthetics, flavor, texture, smell-and not being wasteful in portion size." Watson, who is single, lives just blocks from Lucia's and cooks in the kitchen at least twice a week in a supporting role. She recharges with yoga; plays with her dogs, Audrey and Roger; whips up the occasional dinner party for friends; and keeps her life nice and simple-just the way she likes it. "I try to instill...that kind of mentality of just being careful," Watson says. "[Of] being kind of appreciative that we have so much stuff and that I have the luxury of working in a restaurant with so much bounty.