PARTNERS

The Loring Pasta Bar is the sorts of place savvy Twin Cities residents make a point of showing off to visitors from New York, Los Angeles, and London - certainly not without reason. Invariably, they're blown away by the sheer indefinable grandeur of this palace of affordable luxury (not to mention its comfy booths, impeccable service, imaginative cuisine, and a thousand other details). In constructing the LBP, the Loring Design/Build Guild crew completed a massive undertaking: removing almost an entire floor and buttressing the building with 40 ton of exposed flying steel beams and trusses 35 feet in the air. Tens of thousands of recycled Chicago bricks were laid-up to improbable curves which twist and knot, reel and stumble through the rooms like a drunken mason on a bender (or the set of a Dr. Seuss film). Tile work and paint, meticulous artisan workmanship of booths and bars, steel and ironworking, live in stunning relief amidst the blown-out, remnant legacy of antiquity of the 120 year old former Northwestern Book Supply ne Gray's Campus Drugs.

The Loring Pasta Bar's younger sibling, The Kitty Cat Klub, opened its doors on November 25, 2002 - to considerable jubilation, we might add. This joint project of building owner John Rimarcik and manager/designer Jason Mclean offers the LPB's tasty victuals and affordable elegance in an intimate setting that reminds many of the original Loring Bar/Cafe complex. This could potentially have something to do with the fact that the KCK's seating, as well as the art, antiques, and artifacts that decorate the labyrinthine, seven-room (or is it eight?) hideaway all came from the old Loring. As with the LPB, Jason McLean's singular vision permeates every square centimeter of the Kitty Cat Klub - from its homey outdoor seating to the gloriously decadent "blue room," whose super-casual opulence recalls both the more deluxe hippie pads of the 1960's and the opium dens of Paris thirty years earlier. (It's also one of the KCK's three non-smoking rooms.)