Will this be an account of our last meal at Piccolo? I hope not but they seem to be entirely booked up from now through their closing on March 11. I’m hoping we can get in one more time but if not, at least our last meal there will have been excellent. After eating there in mid-December and again over the New Year’s weekend, we went back again in late-January with another set of friends who are also big fans and we were all well pleased.

This review and, if we can indeed get in one more time, that of our next meal there will be the exceptions to my recent shift of emphasis to smaller immigrant-run restaurants. Piccolo was our favourite restaurant in the Twin Cities and I wanted to say farewell. Next week we’ll be back to Somali food. 

As always we got the tasting menu option and between the four of us we ate everything on the menu (though I seem unaccountably to have failed to photograph one dish).

I’m not going to get into too much detail here. The descriptions and brief evaluations of the dishes are in the captions to the slideshow—please click on an image below to launch it. Spoiler alert: We loved almost everything; only one dish fell to the level of being merely liked.

Their trademark lemon infused butter.

A holdout from the New Year’s Weekend menu, the consomme was poured over chicken liver, almond oil and black trumpet mushroom.

This was mine and was just excellent.

A closer look.

A version of this was the amuse bouche’ish opening dish at the New Year’s dinner. This was more substantial and the scallop was sweeter. We preferred this iteration.

Another dish that appeared in a slightly different form on the New Year’s menu–we preferred this version.

Their signature dish—we are going to miss this a lot when it’s gone; and if we’d known Piccolo was not going to be around forever, I would have ordered it more often.

This was mine and it was excellent.

This hamachi loin, which sounded excellent on paper, was the only dish on the night that disappointed a little. Luckily, I was not one of the people who got it.

And even more luckily, this was mine. I’d never eaten salsify as the centerpiece of a dish before and it was great. A lovely balance of textures and earthy and acidic flavours.

Another look

This was excellent—perhaps the pick of the meat courses. Which is saying a lot because…

…this squab, which we loved at the New Year’s dinner, was excellent as well.

As was this unlikely sounding dish of skirt steak. This was mine.

This is no longer on the menu, which is a shame as if we do manage to get in again, I would have liked to eat it again!

Very good. A somewhat different version is on the menu now.

This was very good as well and is still on the menu too.

A number of things on the menu at this meal were things that had been on the New Year’s menu. We were not disappointed by that as some of these had been our favourite dishes at that meal. The new dishes were great as well. The current menu swaps in a few more new things, and I’m told that is what will take the restaurant through its closing. And the service was as good as it has ever been. All of this plus several glasses of wine, tax and tip came to a little over $100 per head.

Well,if you don’t already have a reservation you’re unlikely to be able to get in to verify but this meal suggests they’re very much going out on top.