Stuff We Like: Creamy comfort at Midi Restaurant

• Midi European Club

The European Club sandwich from Midi Restaurant is good, but you may forget about it after trying the cream of mushroom soup. (Jana Hollingsworth / jhollingsworth@duluthnews.com)

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Wednesday was the first gloomy day this September after a string of gorgeous days.

I found myself sitting in a golden room accented in deep red, overlooking our inimitable and gray-that-day Lake Superior. I was cold, and I was eating alone. All of that was forgotten with my first hot spoonful of cream of mushroom soup.

Midi Restaurant in Duluth serves that soup; a soup that has appeared on the former “Rebecca’s Garden” Home and Garden Television show and also is served at Midi’s sister restaurant, Winzer Stube, in Hudson, Wis. When you say “cream of mushroom soup,” the mind often goes right to that ubiquitous red and white Campbell’s can. This is not Campbell’s.

Made with simple ingredients including marjoram, a roux, heavy cream and sliced button mushrooms, the result is intoxicating. Probably not a soup one should eat daily, but as a special treat on a dreary Duluth day.

My soup was paired with the European Club, consisting of chicken, country ham, Dutch Edamer cheese, onions caramelized in balsamic, lettuce, tomato and a delicious honey-lemon-tarragon mayonnaise on rye. The sandwich was good, with nice rosemary-flecked chicken, but I didn’t think much about it after I fell into my dreamy soup haze.

Owner and sometime-chef Marie Schmidt, who left Weiskirchen, Germany, in 1982, said the menu is influenced by the Mediterranean and Europe, with a small section of German favorites from Winzer Stube.

Schmidt, who was invited as a guest on “Rebecca’s Garden” because host Rebecca Kolls lived in Hudson, still receives requests for the recipe, which she gladly releases. Midi has been open two years in the former Bennett’s on the Lake in the Fitger’s Brewery Complex. The restaurant has a wine bar and hosts dinner theater.

If you go

Where: Midi Restaurant, 600 E. Superior St.

What: European Club, $9; cup of mushroom soup $3.50 alone, or $3 with sandwich.

Contact: (218) 727-4880, www.midirestaurant.net.

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