Sauce Pizza and Wine

I finally ate something at the Shops At West End.

For you non-locals, or even you locals who don't partake of the western border of Minneapolis / eastern border of St. Louis Park, the Shops At West End is a new, huge retail complex installed at 394 and 100, where the Costco and the new, frequently irritating, St. Louis Park Rainbow are.

In addition to the very nice movie theater and the horrible shops I will never walk into and the open-air PA system with music and announcements that make me feel like I'm in a suburban version of Blade Runner's LA (Live the good life in the off-city colonies!), there are restaurants. Restaurants I've never eaten at.

There's Crave, which is way out of my price range and, from what I've heard, underwhelming. How out of my price range? One appetizer under $10, and it's $8 edamame. The day I pay $8 for fucking boiled soybeans is the day you can punch me in the head.

There's Ringo, which is also out of my price range but somewhat better regarded - more like something you wouldn't mind being taken to, but wouldn't choose to go to given all the other options at your disposal.

There's Cooper's Pub, which I would go to if the Irish pub thing were my thing, but it's not. And there's Toby Keith's I Love This Bar And Grill, which I will never set foot in as long as firebombing remains illegal. And there's a Subway, which is fine, but there are at least three Subway's closer to my apartment than this one. A semi-upscale Mexican grill just opened, but I need to research it before I know whether to deride it.

And then there's Sauce. Counter-service modern-Italian-American. A few pastas, a few salads, a bunch of thin-crust pizzas, and a few sandwiches. Really right in my wheelhouse, as they say. Everything's about ten bucks and covers a solid range of good flavors mainstreamed in the past decade - pestos and pine nuts and roasted things.

Cathy and I split a pizza and a salad. The pizza was sausage and pepperoni with roasted red peppers, mushrooms, and red onions. It was fine. I would have thought it was excellent, but I live near Punch's, and Punch's is some excellent fucking pizza. Sauce's crust isn't as nice and it's ingredients aren't as nice, so it suffers by comparison, but it was still perfectly acceptable and quite nice.

The salad, "chicken and pine nut", surprised me on a number of levels. The first being that the chicken was a finely shaved/shredded deli chicken, which actually worked pretty well in the tossed salad compared to chunks of grilled chicken, even if its clearly the same chicken they use in the sandwiches.

Second, it wasn't overdressed. The dressing was light and lemony and there somehow wasn't too much of it - too much dressing on salads being an endemic problem, especially in the counter-service fast casual environment. And third, there almost wasn't too much cheese - in this case a medium-strength gorgonzola. It was two to three large chunks away from being just right.

Looking at the rest of the menu, I can say that none of the pastas sound the slightest bit appealing - they all seem very plain and heavy.

Sauce isn't really a destination restaurant. There's nothing it does so exceptionally well that I'd choose it over a handful of other restaurants that do similar things similarly well. But it will be a useful option to have in the general area when we're going that way anyway and in the mood for what they serve.