5 Things: April 5th

April 5, 2019

On Monday, April 1st, we cut our menu down to just the Cajun Finn. It is our most popular sandwich by a wide margin, so we figured we'd do everyone a favor and eliminate the paralysis that comes from too many good option. Streamlining our sandwich menu received mixed reviews on our social media.

By popular request, we brought everything back. After just one day, we realized that sandwich menu diversity has always been a core part of our identity (at least since we started serving sandwiches, several million minutes before I began working here), and we restored the menu to its full glory, with a new sandwich, to boot——

We added The Bloody Mary to our sandwich menu. Usually all it takes is saying "Bloody Mary sandwich" and people salivate and groan with desire, but for anyone unconvinced, allow me to describe the process by which we make it:

It starts with a Kaiser roll from Johnson's Bakery. For those of you who have spent any time in Duluth and have not checked out Johnson's Bakery: Why not? They have a fantastic assortment of baked goods, including my favorite donuts and quick breads in the area, and NWS uses their rolls for several specials—BBQ Brisket on Wednesdays, Hot Pastrami occasionally on Wednesdays, Hot Porketta on Thursdays, and the Kaiser roll for our MN Pulled Pork on Fridays—and now for our April Sandwich Lab special.

We top the bottom slice of the roll with sliced green olives and dill pickle, then lay a slice of cheddar cheese on each side of the roll. We toast this for a couple of minutes alongside some smoked pancetta. It all gets nice and hot and crispy. Once it's toasted, we throw four thick slices of beef and pork summer sausage over the melted cheese, olives, and pickles, then cover that with the pancetta. The pancetta is doused in a hausmade spicy tomato Bloody Mary sauce, then we finish it off with a cold slice of tomato, thin-cut red onion and a cilantro garnish.

The Bloody Mary costs $12.50+tax. Try it this weekend on our patio with a liquid Bloody Mary from Lake Avenue Café, if you're feeling extra saucy.

Like all of our Sandwich Lab specials, this sandwich is only available for a month. It comes off the menu on May 6th. It also earns you two stamps on your punch card, if you're into that sort of thing.

Perfect for brunch on the patio.

We are popping up all over town. We're taking our small catering game to the next level with regular pop-ups at some of our favorite local watering holes. Our tentative (but nearing on fixed) monthly pop-up schedule looks something like this:

First Wednesday of the month: Bent Paddle Brewing Co. Taproom 5-8 p.m.
First Friday of the month: Hoops Brewing Company 5-8 p.m.
Alternating Thursdays: Cedar Lounge (April 4th) & Duluth Cider (April 11th) 5-8 p.m.

Next Friday, April 12th, we're making a special appearance at the Cedar Lounge from 4-7 p.m.

(Tonight we'll be at Hoops from 5-8 p.m.)

What we're serving is bound to change at some point, but for now we're really vibing on smoked chicken wings, sauced to order with maple sambal, soy ginger, or buffalo, and served with a delicious hausmade bleu cheese dipping sauce.

Our resident pickler/fermenter, TK, threw together some spicy zucchini kimchi for these pop-ups as well, and we keep a grip of smoked sockeye buddies and an assortment of our latest baked goods on hand.

To keep up on our poppings-up, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Patricia is just rude. I kid, of course, but she keeps making all of these cookies that make me want to spend all my money. It bears repeating that all of our cookies are available as Box Lunch options.

Her latest creation is a savory potato chip cookie sandwich with a sweet date filling.

She's been making pasties with ingredients from our daily specials as well. So far, she's made MN Pulled Pork and Maple Breakfast Sausage and Gravy (like finger-food biscuits and gravy) varieties. Look for them in our deli this weekend, and ask around if you don't see any.

Forgive me my unskilled smartphone photography.

I'll see you back here for more Things™ next week. Same Thing™ time, same Thing™ place.

5 Things: March 29th

March 29, 2019

What a week it's been! Spring is finally here. The temperature as I'm writing this is in the mid-forties. The sky is blue and Canal Park is teeming with cars and pedestrians.

Let's take a look at the week here at NWS.

Tonight, we're at the 25th annual Taste at Fitger's event. From the website: "From 6-9 pm, over forty of the area’s finest local restaurants and beverage vendors will be serving up their tastiest culinary masterpieces, beers and most exquisite wines...100% of the proceeds will go to the Second Harvest Northern Lakes Food Bank." Tickets are $45, and you are sure to leave satisfied.

We opened up our patio. Not that it was ever really closed, per se. It just consisted mostly of snow piles and had no furniture. Last weekend, in anticipation of warmer weather, we put out a couple of tables and benches. This weekend, we're returning it to its former glory. All of the tables and benches and umbrellas will be there. Lake Avenue Café's liquor license still extends out there, so you can enjoy a local craft brew or cocktail with your Smokehaus digs. You can/should even bring your dog(s).

We rearranged our shop. Don't worry. It's nothing too drastic, though anyone who has been a repeat customer with us over the past decade knows that our shop has undergone some radical changes. This new shift is meant to highlight our inedible merchandise. T-Shirts, hats, totes, etc. Before, it was just tucked away almost out of sight, but now it is a fixture of our deli. We love seeing folks in our gear.

There are more Box Lunch cookie options. In addition to Lake Superior Bakehouse Chocolate Chip cookies, you can now opt for a Peanut Butter Curry cookie, Ginger cookie, or whatever flavor-of-the-month cookie Patricia may have come up with for no additional charge, or a Carrot Cake Cookie Sandwich with Honey Cream Cheese for an extra dollar.

This is the last weekend to eat the Spinderella. Turkey, salami mix, mayo, mustard, dill pickle, onion, and cilantro on a hero roll, with a side of scallion cream cheese for dippin'. This Sandwich Lab special has been quite popular during its run, and like the rest of the Sandwich Lab specials, gets you double stamps on your punch card. Catch it while you can. We're not going to Push It much longer. Beginning April 2nd, we're offering a new Sandwich Lab creation, the Bloody Mary, just in time for patio brunch season.

Last week's 5 Things™ was a disaster. It quickly devolved into another "I am not sure what to write about, so I'm going to write about not knowing what to write about" post, and as a result, it failed to launch, but it had some great images. Here they are, without explanation:

As this 5 Things™ post comes to a close, I'd like to share my favorite photo of our Friday special, the Minnesota Pulled Pork. It is my favorite because it reminds me of a Kraken breaching the water's surface to ruin your day. Open your mind, then squint at it a bit, and let me know afterward if my imagination is too unhinged.

5 Things: March 15th

March 15, 2019

This week, though still classically slow-season Smokehaus, was full of excitement.

1- For starters, we launched our first official NWS Happy Hour, which runs Mondays through Thursdays from 5-7pm and features our new Chicago-ish Haus-ki Dog. Happy Hour specials and hours may change seasonally, but we're excited about our current lineup.

2- Many of our employees have skills and backstories worth highlighting, if only there were enough hours in the day to interview and write about all of them. But we're making a start. In honor of her swift and popularly-heralded rise to NWS excellence through phenomenal baked goods, we published a profile of new deli employee & baker, Patricia.

3- Our cookbook dreams are coming to fruition. While specific details aren't yet available, we've been producing a ton of content. Our vision is intact, we've already produced a mock-up of an entire chapter, and last weekend we took care of one how-to photo shoot about porketta.

Enjoy some behind-the-scenes photos while you wait for the finished product.

Rustic

Captain Greg

Grace & Control

Gorgeous

Those flames!

Meat art.

In which the lid is placed atop the "R2D2"

Smoked out.

This is not how you smoke a porketta. This is just for fun & warmth.

4- Tonight (March 15th) we'll be popped-up at Hoops Brewing, selling smoked chicken wings, sauced to order with a variety of Northern Waters Restaurant sauces—maple sambal, soy ginger, and hausmade buffalo, to be specific. NWR may no longer exist with us on the Material Plane, but its legacy survives through the Smokehaus.

As far as I know, smoked chicken wings are a rarity in the Twin Ports, not to mention our particular variety, which are brined, “dried” to help form the crispy outer layer, kippered, then hit with a lot of smoke to finish them off.

5- I know the weather comes up frequently, but the battle between dwindling Winter and impending Spring rages on, and alongside the standard freezing rain, we also had a day of one of my favorite weather phenomena: creepy, heavy fog. Inevitably, we'll get a blizzard in mid-April, but for now, it appears the thaw is on its way.

Here are some more photos by Jacob in our media department, in lieu of pretty words. See you here again next week.

5 Things: March 8th, 2019

March 8, 2019

Welcome back, friends.

Glad to see you. The sun is shining where I'm writing, and this week had several discrete events worthy of the title "Thing™." Let us not tarry long on introductions, but hasten to the investigation of these Things™.

A couple of auspicious visits:

Northern Waters Smokehaus is pretty well accustomed to high-status visits. We've had the privilege of appearing on a few national cable network programs in the past decade, and while I'm not going to name-drop, there are a number of well-known individuals with local roots who join the masses and wait in line for our food when they happen into town.

Secretly, many of us behind the counter recognize them and get excited when they stop into the shop, but, consummate professionals that we are, we play it cool.

This week, however, I couldn't contain myself. I was working my first deli shift in what felt like several weeks, so my filter of professional boundaries was perhaps off-kilter, when I received a call from my dear friend, Flo, in the marketing department. The Pitchfork Music Festival had just announced its line-up, which featured, among other exciting acts, local global music legends, Low.

Flo and I have attended the festival together on more than one occasion, so I was excited to hear that the lineup had been announced, but I was doubly-excited to see none other than a member of Low—and co-creator of our famous Cajun Finn sandwich—waiting for a sandwich from our deli. This individual's identity will be kept vague, since I didn't ask permission to tell this story in a public forum, and even beloved artists deserve privacy, but they were quite understanding and played-along generously when I held the phone to my chest and shouted,

"Hey, you're playing Pitchfork [Music Festival](?),"

and again, slightly louder, when they didn't hear the first time.

It was a moment that has subsequently been described to me as "very Duluth." And that is the story of how I finally lost my cool and shouted details about someone's life to them while on-the-clock.

Listen to my favorite Low record below:

Another visit came from someone who, like it or not, has chosen a path that puts them right in the public eye: the 41st Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz. Truth be told, I probably would not have known about this had I not chosen to unburden the office's Wi-Fi, and blog out of the deli.

As I typed away in a corner of our small seating area, Minnesota's public servant-in-chief enjoyed a sandwich—maybe a salad, I didn't ask—behind me. It wasn't until the hunger hit me, and I stepped behind the sandwich line to make myself some lunch, that he revealed himself.

Yes, I participated in an electoral process that prominently featured him, but I did not recognize him less than five feet away from me. Is this a tale of his humility, or of my obliviousness, or of something else altogether? The jury is out. The jury, in fact, has neither been consulted, nor even informed of the known facts.

He thanked us for the delicious food, introduced himself to us, and engaged with a few customers who overheard him. The details get hazy from there. Honestly, I checked out at that point because preparing my lunch was of greater urgency to me at that time.

I'm not going to take any political stances on the company blog, fear not, except that being kind and showing gratitude to service industry employees is good praxis.

A pop-up and a new event:

On Wednesday, we had a pop-up at Bent Paddle Brewing Company's tap room in the Lincoln Park Craft District. Such pop-ups are pretty old-hat by now. NWS setting up shop for a night at a local tap room wouldn't be much to write about—rather, I and others have written about it so many times that it seems unfair to count that among the Things™—however, we debuted a new item at this pop-up: The Haus-ki, our very tangential take on the Chicago dog. More about the Haus-ki, and our new Happy Hour, which is when we'll be selling it, is available here.

The Haus-ki. — The marketing department is all out on a project I’m about to tell you about, so here is a placeholder Haus-ki until I receive pop-up photos.

Some cookbook content fun:

This morning, a handful of the marketing & design staff are taking a break from their typical workday to prepare for a photo-shoot. It should be no secret that we have dreams of releasing a cookbook in the near future, and though we have a wealth of photography related to our business and products, there will never be enough.

This particular photo-shoot pertains to producing a porketta in a backyard smoking apparatus. Today's tasks are a lot of shoveling, creating the mise en scene for the shoot, and rolling the porketta. Tomorrow, we'll be enacting and documenting the rest of the process. It's supposed to snow tomorrow, which could undermine our work, or result in some pretty cool action shots.

A New 'Wich:

The Spinderella is in full-effect until April 1st! Worth trying at least once, worth double stamps on your sandwich card.

Baker appreciation:

Volumes could and will be written about the impact that our recently-establish Baking Department has had on our business, but I'll keep it brief:

Jerry's White Bread, Prince Myshkin Rye, Chorizo-Cheddar-Chive Biscuits, Rosemary Potato Rolls, and Ciabattas have further increased our pride of ownership in the food we make. I've always liked the bread we've used at NWS, and there are certainly some baked items we're still buying from outside vendors, but being able to say, "on a hausmade [bread of whatever variety]" feels good, and to top it off, it is high-quality product they're baking down there.

If you've noticed some bright yellow pasty-looking items during your recent forays into our shop, and been confused or intrigued, those are Lucy's Jamaican Hand-Pies, made with our fresh chorizo, and yes, they are a very delicious, filling, easy to eat (with one hand!) item that you should definitely not pass up.

And, of course, what would a 5 Things™ post be without a shoutout to Patricia, who used up all of the Royale With Cheese trimmings we've accumulated—since we began cutting our Buddies to a specific cost rather than selling them by weight—to make savory bacon-cheeseburger snack stick and tomato scones.

Closing thoughts:

We have a new sink! The other one was falling off the wall from years of overuse.

Do I even keep track of my Thing™-count anymore?

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