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Hours: Breakfast 6:30 to 11 a.m. weekdays, 6:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. weekends; lunch 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. weekdays; dinner 5 to 10 p.m. daily; bar menu 11 a.m. to 2 a.m. daily.
Atmosphere: The historic Ivy Tower’s wowzer potential isn’t fully realized.
Service: Uneven. For every smooth pro, there’s an eager but untested neophyte.
Sound level: Given all the hard concrete surfaces, the gentle acoustics are a welcome surprise.
Recommended dishes: Charred ahi tuna, crab, sausages, terrine, soups, arugula salad, arctic char, rib-eye, gnocchi, Reuben sandwich, pizzas, chocolate tart, lemon baba.
Wine list: A marvelous, user-friendly assortment, especially the well chosen roster of three dozen labels sold by the bottle or in 3- or 6-ounce pours. Lovely handcrafted cocktails.
Price range: Appetizers $7 to $26 and entrees $13 to $49 at dinner; soups and salads $7 to $16, sandwiches $8 to $12 and entrees $9 to $16 at lunch; desserts $8 to $9. Breakfast buffet $16, or $22 with entree.
No one else cooks like Steven Brown.
First impressions from his dinner menu at Porter & Frye, the new restaurant inside the Hotel Ivy + Residences in downtown Minneapolis, might understandably be otherwise. At least given its opening salvo, an ahi tuna appetizer. Hasn’t that been done, oh, a thousand times?
Not like this, a joyous example of Brown’s unique ability to twist the familiar into the novel. He barely chars the yellowfin before fanning slices of it against a pile of wrinkly, finger-like Japanese peppers, their hot bite tempered by the coolly acidic pang of preserved lemon. While your taste buds are reveling in the maverick combination, your eyes are soaking up the color-wheel relationship between the tuna’s crimson and the peppers’ deep avocado. Then your tongue catches a final kicker, the tickle of lime-scented salt. It’s a synopsis of the novel that Brown and his gifted crew seem to be writing: "Love at First Taste."

startribune.com

Down dooby doo down down, comma comma
Down dooby doo down down …
SOME readers may be mystified by the above nonsense, but baby boomers won’t need any further introduction to Neil Sedaka than the opening sounds of his 1962 pop classic Breaking Up is Hard to Do.
During his 50 years in the music business, the singer-songwriter has had dozens of hits and sold millions of records; his songs have been covered by performers ranging from the Carpenters to Frank Sinatra. He even has a street named after him in Brooklyn, New York.
Few artists would have survived Sedaka’s roller-coaster career: after initial pop success at a very young age, he disappeared from the charts in the mid-1960s. He spent a decade in the wilderness: the "hungry years" when he performed at leagues clubs and had only two hit songs.
Then in 1975 he came back with a vengeance, returning to gold and platinum sales with his Solitaire album, the song Laughter in the Rain and the enormous international success of Grammy-winner Love Will Keep Us Together for the Captain and Tennille.
He describes himself as a fighter, a survivor and an optimist.
"Australia has been very wonderful to me over the years," he says by phone from New York. "I have a very warm relationship with Australia, it’s an ongoing love affair."
Sedaka never lost his enthusiasm for work and is looking forward to collaborating with orchestras across the country, performing old hits and new compositions. The tour begins with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, which will premiere Sedaka’s first classical piece, Joie de Vivre.
"It goes back to my roots," he says. "I started out as a classical pianist at Juilliard School in New York."
Born in 1939, Sedaka was a prodigy from a working class family in Brooklyn. He had ambitions to become a concert pianist and practised for hours each day on a second-hand piano. His parents were shocked when at 13 he began writing pop songs.

theaustralian.news.com.au

My son and daughter are on the road to retirement. They are 11 and 4 years old, respectively. And, no, they don’t have jobs.
But for each of them, my wife and I are funding an annuity, an account that will grow larger over the coming decades — and that they’ll be able to draw upon when they hit their 70s. Ideally, it will allow them to live more comfortably in old age.
This column isn’t about retirement, though, or annuities or anything so specific. It’s about something a lot squishier, and a lot more important. It’s about values.
One of the messages all parents send to their kids — sometimes on purpose, sometimes blindly — is about personal priorities. And one of the main ways we do it is through money. How we spend money, save money and give away money say a lot about who we are, and who we want our children to be.
Our kids may eventually reject those values; that’s what kids do. But it’s important that we try. Because too often, we think of money only for the things it can buy. It’s even more important for the things it can teach.
Every family, of course, has its own set of priorities and values. For Anne, a friend in Minneapolis, “squirreling away dollars for someday is not at the top of my value system.” Instead, she values the life experiences that money can afford. So, that is a priority she has tried to instill through the years in her son, now 22.
“Spend your money on experiences such as travel, and on things of lasting value, such as art, that bring you pleasure while you’re alive,” Anne says she tells her son. “Being financially stretched is not a problem. Being devoid of a life is.”

online.wsj.com