“There was no internet, and there was no way of reliably knowing if there were other teenagers like us, out there every weekend, rabidly exploring international cuisine.”
Nathan Pyle / BuzzFeed
As a nerdy teenager growing up in a small town in southern Minnesota, I spent an awful lot of time sitting around unpromising all-night restaurants like Perkins thinking and talking about qualities that I didn't possess. Like many 15-year-olds, I wanted a girlfriend, and I came to the conclusion that I hadn't earned one just because I didn't do anything that the girls in my town would find interesting.
Girls seemed to love boys who played sports, and while the local coaches somehow let me wander onto a field during regulation, I was too dreamy, distracted, and fearful to be a competent teammate. Girls liked music, but I couldn't sing or play an instrument, and I hated the music that was played on the radio, which was the kind that most girls seemed to like. Some girls loved boys who, like me, were neither jocks nor musicians, but in my town, these boys drove lifted trucks and went muddin' in the flats. Sadly, the lone vehicle I had access to, my mom's Volkswagen Golf, was not and would never be lifted, except perhaps by a tornado. And lacking Oakley blades and a feathered mullet, I didn't look the part anyway. Not that I was following any other popular fashion trends — I didn't look like Axl Rose in 1988 or like Eddie Vedder in 1992. At best, I looked like a rural Canadian's idea of Michael Stipe: lots of layers, lots of hats, lots of REI.
I knew if I wanted to have a girlfriend I'd have to try harder than most to bring something to the table. At home, I found joy in reading about 19th-century presidential elections and playing computer baseball games with fictional teams, and I suspected that each of those activities was somewhat hostile to romance. If Kevin Costner wooed starlets with sweet talk about Henry Clay, he kept it out of the press.
There was one thing I liked that I knew many girls also liked: travel. I wanted to see the world, and so did a lot of the Midwest's most interesting young women. The problem was, with the aforementioned borrowed Golf and my earnings as a janitor at the Steamboat Inn, I could take a girl maybe as far as Duluth before our parents would get mad. International travel and the other fervid promises of adulthood would have to wait.
Chris Ritter / BuzzFeed
Somehow, an issue of Minnesota Monthly featuring new Twin Cities restaurants fell onto my parents' coffee table. I don't remember if my parents intentionally subscribed to it or if it just appeared in our home, passed on like rhubarb from a neighbor's garden. Either way, I read about the ethnic restaurants less than an hour away in the Minneapolis–St. Paul Metropolitan area, and I was transfixed. I had no context for these places as a diner. My parents' kitchen plated dishes that were perfunctory and sustaining; our lone occasional meal outside of the Midwestern comfort zone was "stir fry," and it would take a generous or benighted palate to confuse it with Asian cuisine. Here, at last, through Minnesota's versions of the globe's culinary pageant, was my chance to experience other countries. Although I would've gladly gone to any of these restaurants alone or with friends, I felt that with this issue of Minnesota Monthly as my flying carpet, I could share this whole new world with a special lady.
When I first proposed a date to Natalie, a young woman I met through the high school theater, I knew she had an interest in world travel, and therefore, possibly, world cuisine. It sure is a confidence booster, I discovered, to have an idea of what you actually want to do on a date before you ask a person out on said date. She said yes, and, like any reasonable person, asked what the hell my plan was for our evening together.
How about North African food, I said. I was sure she hadn't heard that one before.
Sure, she said. What's North African food, exactly?
I have no idea, I said.
Natalie and I ended up dating for the next two years.
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