December is not yet over but as I will be in Los Angeles till the end of the month dinner at Sooki & Mimi was my last meal in Minnesota for 2021. Which means I can give you the usual quarterly round-up of meals eaten in the Twin Cities metro in the last three months before those months are completely up.

When 2021 started I think we all hoped/expected that by the middle of the year we’d be back to something approaching normal life, which in the world of dining out would have meant going back to dining in person at restaurants as the norm. Of course, most restaurants in the Twin Cities went back to this even in the face of the rise of the delta variant in the late summer and many, many diners did too. We did not until early December, waiting till our younger boy had also received his shots. And so this list is also dominated by meals eaten as takeout and outdoors at restaurants. That doesn’t mean, of course, that we didn’t eat a lot of good stuff, because we did.

The list includes both some of our absolute favourite restaurants in the Twin Cities—whose continued existence through the pandemic so far we are very thankful for—as well as a couple of places that opened during the pandemic. Unexpectedly, it also includes a restaurant in our own town in southern Minnesota.

In reverse order, here are the meals covered in this report (the links will take you to the full original reviews): Sooki & Mimi, Petite Leon, Tin Tea, Grand Szechuan, India House, Bangkok Thai Deli, Moroccan Flavors, Spoon & Stable, Colita, Bombay Pizza Kitchen, Meritage, and Andale. As with the other iterations of this list during the pandemic it is not a short list of favourite dishes per se but a list of up to three favourite things eaten at every meal. The best meals on the whole were our dinners at Meritage, Spoon & Stable and Petite Leon and takeout from Grand Szechuan and Bangkok Thai Deli. But each meal had at least one dish to recommend highly, and some of those dishes at the other restaurants were among my absolute favourites: for example, the tacos with tripe at Andale and the whole trout at Sooki & Mimi.

Launch the slideshow to see what these dishes were, and click on the links in the restaurant names above if you want to read about them in more detail in context.

Hurts so good.

I’ll probably have a little more to say about  our Twin Cities meals in 2021 in my year-end round-up at the end of next week. I’m not sure if we’ll get right back to eating out when we get back from Los Angeles though. For one things, we’ve been eating one meal out every day since we arrived in Los Angeles—we’re currently at the midpoint of the trip; for another, things with omicron are looking a little uncertain. We’ll probably take a week or two off from restaurant food when we get back and then do takeout-only for a while. And, of course, I’ll have a lot of Los Angeles restaurant reports to post as well.

In the meantime, I wish you all good health and good eating through the rest of the holiday period.