Let me lay out all my clever little cards on your eager table with one simple, adjective-deficient, highly subjective sentence: Dinner at Chester Creek Café was stunning. It has been a long time since I had one meal at a restaurant that was so impressive, so flawless and so joyful all at once. I wanted to wait awhile before I wrote up this experience but I just couldn’t bring myself to depend on scrawled notes in a dirty menu’s margins. I need to write down the experience while it’s still fresh in my food-loving mind. Ahhh!! Cilantro! Free-range animal flesh! Kilos of fresh freakin’ basil! Crustaceans galore! White wine reductions! Weird Indian spice infusions! Duluth has a neighborhood café that pushes the edible envelope right into my taste buds’ G-Spot, and I’m freaking out. The chef (who shall after this point be referred to as “Evil Genius”), who is practicing his unctuous alchemy on the line five glorious nights a week (I’m told), comes up with a small handful of dinner specials every night. EVERY NIGHT. This guarantees an adventure with every visit to the restaurant—it could mean ruination of Hindenburg-like proportions. In six months, if you see a dark clothed, smelly, 300 lb. figure balled up under Chester Creek Café’s food window demanding a seared marlin with turnip-dusted potstickers and macadamia chutney “fix,” you can be sure that that poor lost soul was once called Mary Tennis.

It’s one thing to describe a dish with fancy verbage and exotic ingredients, but a whole other thing to successfully execute a truly different, truly delicious dish. This restaurant in particular is one that could easily skate by on prepackaged butter pats and preservative-packed hard rolls. Instead, there is an honest element of skill and attentive care to both the menus and execution of said menus that is both unique and surprising.

The night started out with a big critical faux pas: The waiter was a friend of mine. That being said, rest assured that I will not go into the service in this column. I’d feel inadequate about this if I didn’t already cover this subject in my previous CCC/AST review. Also, I have every assurance that he didn’t blow my cover by alerting the rest of the staff to my presence. Immediately upon sitting down at the table of our choice, the waiter began his Salomé act—rattling off the appetizers, soups, steaks, pastas, vegetarian choices and fish specials of the evening like so many deliriously tempting veils. I had to suppress sticking my arm in the air grade-school style after he announced one of the appetizers: prawns (I think marinated, then cooked in a court bullion, Thomas Kellar-style) served cold with greens, wasabi powder and a yogurt/cucumber/dill sauce. I could taste it before it hit the table—which it did, about five minutes after I eagerly ordered it. The prawns were perfect, mellowed in texture via absorption and salt until they were nearly buttery. The sauce tasted like one of my (many) favorite guilty pleasures, whole milk yogurt, and was a rich, even accompaniment for the spicy, succulent crustaceans. The entire affair was arranged seductively on bone china, and I ripped into it like a starving, spoiled killer whale.

The next course was entrées, and luckily, I was with a small group of people who were “plate-passers,” so I had the enormous pleasure of sampling four terrific dishes. Number one was a slab of Atlantic salmon, dredged in fabulously refined panko breadcrumbs, seared off, resting on a citrus sauce and touched with a bright green Indian spice (I can’t recall the name of it now, and was too infatuated to whip out my notebook at the time). Beside was a mass of rice noodles and shredded vegetables. Citrus, sweetness, dusty pinpricks of spiciness and a slightly fishy taste wound all around my dazzled head, and I devoured as much as I could before it was time to pass it and try a heaping plate of delicately cooked mussels in a thick white wine cream sauce over fettuccini. I have never eaten mussels cooked so remarkably well. There was no rubber in their texture; instead, they were little creatures made of disintegrating silk, tasting of sweet, briny cream. I reached across the table several times to snatch up another mussel even as the next plate was put in front of me. The steak was a New York strip, a great hulking piece of free-range steer flesh that bled out pink, fatty juice with every cut, saucing the already splendidly sauced cilantro mashed potatoes. Magnifique! Next up was a regular menu item, a halved chicken with herbs, mashed potatoes and vegetable. The potatoes alone were heavenly, reminding me why God (or Escoffier, as I like to call it) made chicken stock. The potatoes, fortified with what I assume to be a poultry reduction of some sort, were almost more chicken than chicken, transcending side-dish status and becoming a feature of the composition. The chicken was startlingly tender, flavor packed, and out-and-out delicious.

Do I sound like I’m raving here? Let me tell you, it was a few bites into the devil’s food cake with a ganache layer and buttercream frosting that I actually said, “This is one of the best restaurant experiences I’ve had in Duluth.” And I’ve had a lot of great dining out sessions in this little Land that Summer Forgot. It was simply one of those rare times at a restaurant where everything just came together, and the evening became a seamless ribbon of great food, great atmosphere, the cream of the crop in dinner company, and a check at the end of the night that didn’t break the bank.