To most urban gourmands, Alaska may be the last place one would expect to find cutting-edge cuisine. But Jack Amon of The Marx Bros. Café is ready to show cultivated foodies that Anchorage is the next frontier in fine dining, blending its historic image of rugged individualism with a progressive approach to elegant fare. "The Marx Bros. Café...has probably done more for advancing Alaska's culinary appreciation than any other single restaurant," opined Corky Merwin in Diversion magazine.

The journey was not always an easy one for the restaurant, domiciled in a small wood-framed house beginning in 1979. Certainly Amon doesn't miss the days when he had to wake up in the middle of the night to make phone calls to Los Angeles to place orders for raspberries and fresh herbs. Today, fresh, local food has become more accessible for the restaurant, and a half-dozen varieties of red, gold, and purple edible flowers, along with more than 25 varieties of herbs, grow in the backyard of the downtown eatery, underscoring Amon's belief that a good chef creates as much as possible from scratch. "There's nothing as grand as a salad that was cut in the afternoon," he told Kim Severson of the Anchorage Daily News.

As a self-trained chef who credits himself with bringing the sun-dried tomato to Alaskan menus more than a decade ago, Amon embodies the spirit of the last frontier. His style is eclectic and progressive, drawing from American, Asian, and Californian cuisine, and relying on Alaska's regional ingredients. While the menu changes daily, a meal at the Marx Bros. Café might begin with gravlax and sevruga caviar on buckwheat blini, followed by medallions of tender blackhorn antelope swathed in a seductive red wine sauce, or potato-crusted Alaska yelloweye snapper.

You don't have to be a pioneer to enjoy the spirit of Alaskan cuisine--we're conveniently flying in a taste to a very local address.