Since getting back to Minnesota a couple of weeks ago, after a summer away, we have been slowly getting back to our favourite restaurants in the Twin Cities metro. I’ve already posted a report on our lunch at our favourite Mexican restaurant in the Cities: Homi in St. Paul. Here now is a report on dinner at one of our favourite fine dining restaurants in the Cities, Tenant. We ate dinner there a week ago Tuesday. It was our second meal there this year and our tenth overall. We particularly look forward to eating at Tenant in the summer—especially on account of one genre of dish that reliably shows up in the summer, and only in the summer. And so as our stay in Ireland came to an end, this was the first reservation I made. I am very pleased to say that the meal did not disappoint us at all.
Tenant’s meal structure remains the same: a set price for 6 courses, the identity of which you do not discover until they are delivered to you. You can expect certain genres: in the late summer you are very likely to get a course involving tomato water (this is the course we were particular looking forward to); at all times of the year you can expect a pasta course and a dessert involving some kind of custard (and also an extra palate cleanser course featuring a very tart citrus slushy). The set price was $70 until last week; I believe starting this week it has now gone up to $80. Fans of Tenant will likely not be undeterred by this increase. The fact of the matter is that food costs, as well as other restaurant costs, have risen, and if there is a place you enjoy eating at—wherever it falls on the price spectrum—you have to be okay with a reasonable increase in price.
As usual in the last couple of years, we began our evening at their adjoining bar/lounge, Next Door. We started there with a couple of cocktails, which we then finished alongside the early courses at dinner. Our cocktail orders seem to have got stuck in a rut there: the missus once again got the Paloma and I once again got their dirty Martini. The Paloma was not the same as previous though. It now contains cucumber and has a green rather than orange hue. My Martini was the same as it’s ever been and I liked it as much as I have in the past.
And so on to dinner. Here is the menu we ate (no physical menu is provided at dinner; the restaurant kindly sent it to me afterwards as they always do):
- Course 1: Tomato Watermelon Gazpacho. tomato water, watermelon juice, compressed watermelon, green beans, grilled pickled carrots, cucumber, grilled shishito peppers, sweet and sour beets, tomatoes, and hamachi
With the presence of the watermelon, this was quite different from the previous tomato water courses we’ve enjoyed there but we really liked this one. The hamachi was almost superfluous: it’s the flavours and textures of the vegetables that are the real stars here.
- Course 2: Crab Cake Sando. fried breaded crab cake, dijonaise, napa cabbage slaw, pickles, grilled sourdough focaccia
Continuing Tenant’s takes on comfort food, this was an excellent crab cake sandwich, albeit a small one. I would have happily eaten one large one for lunch
- Course 3: Taco Salad. fried masa tortilla, romaine and grilled corn, yellow tomatillo crema, radish, chorizo, ricotta salata cheese, pickled banana peppers, mint
Yet another in the comfort food vein. The fried masa tortilla was very good but the showstopper here was the grilled corn. I’m not sure it really needed the hard cubes of chorizo; if there had to be animal protein, I might have preferred scallops or shrimp instead.
- Course 4: Lasagna. vegetarian lasagna, maitake mushrooms, braised kale, eggplant, chicken bolognese, bread crumbs, parmesan, basil
A third carb-heavy course in a row and the de rigueur pasta course. The flavours came together very well, and I really liked the chicken “bolognese”, but the pasta sheets themselves were just a little too hard for my liking.
- Course 5: Grilled New York Strip. new york strip, ratatouille, horseradish potatoes, harissa jus
An excellent piece of beef, very tasty ratatouille and fantastic horseradish potatoes. And the harissa jus was great as well.
- Course 6: Custard. lemon custard, fermented blue berry, candied pine nut streusel
Excellent, as the fruit custards at Tenant always are.
In between courses 5 and 6 came the usual tart citrus slushy. The missus only had the one cocktail. After I finished my Martini I drank three small pours of wines with the meal (adding up to one glass of wine).
For a look at what we ate and drank, click on an image below to launch a larger slideshow. Scroll down for thoughts on the meal as a whole, cost and to see what’s coming next.
My quibbles with components of a few courses aside, we enjoyed each course quite a lot. That said, the meal did seem a lot heavier from the second course through the fifth than we’ve previously encountered at Tenant. The crab cake sandwich was followed by the taco salad and the lasagna and then the horseradish potatoes alongside the steak in the fifth course. Another lighter course either before or after the tomato-watermelon gazpacho might have made for a better progression—I’m thinking a little wistfully here of the excellent salad we ate in August of 2022. Still, it was a very good meal, on the whole.
The rest of the experience was very good as usual. We always sit at the bar and very much enjoy interacting with the chefs. And chatting with Grisha Hammes between courses is always fun as well.
With tax and tip the total came to $229 or just about $114/head. Certainly not cheap but you can pay as much or more in the Twin Cities for not quite as good food. We certainly have. We’ll probably be back before the year is out.
Alright, where will our “old favourites” tour take us next? You might expect Grand Szechuan to be on the itinerary, and we’ll certainly get there before too long. But we actually—and to our great surprise—had very good Sichuan food in Dublin and so Sichuan doesn’t seem very urgent. What we haven’t eaten all summer is Thai food—and so that is what we will probably eat this weekend. Where? I’m not sure yet. Before that report—which will be posted next Tuesday—I’ll have another Italy report.
Loved the review. Grisha’s hospitality is always a highlight.
Side bar question as my wife and I are about to go on our honeymoon to Italy. How did you decide a majority of your restaurant picks? And do you ever have issues eating as much as you’d like on vacation?
For the Italy restaurant picks it was a mix of looking at Katie Parla’s website, consulting friends who’ve been often to the cities we were going to, and trusting my gut. It was also the case that we did not have any desire to eat at “top” restaurants. It was the first time for my family (I’ve been before) and touristing was the #1 priority. We knew we’d be too tired to eat at formal places, especially with the kids along. I was confident that with the little research I’d done we would be eating well, and that proved to be the case.
As for how much we ate out, very rarely—if ever—more than one sit-down restaurant a day. And even with that schedule there was a day in Florence—at our dinner at Ghianda—where I felt like I would die if I ate dessert (gelato was also consumed on most very hot days, which was all of them). In Tuscany, we had informal lunches out most days and I cooked dinner every night at the agriturismo we stayed at. We also had meals in our flats in the cities that were centered on salumi and bread and cheese purchased at supermarkets (the baseline for all three of those things is so much higher in Italy that we even enjoyed very much the quick sandwich lunches we ate at museum cafes and even train stations on occasion). What I do wish we’d done more of is eating at the great neighbourhood markets in Florence and Rome (and also Padua).