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.