Herbst opened on Raymond Avenue in St. Paul in May, just before we left the country for the summer, and I started hearing almost immediately from people who said I should eat there. The early reviews from the professionals were also positive but grade inflation in Minnesota being what it is, I place more stock in the recommendations from blog readers and friends. I put it on the list for when we’d be back in town but a measured review in September from Jon Cheng at the Star Tribune—the one local food critic who doesn’t seem to think the job requires being a booster—took the wind out of my sails a bit. I decided to give them a couple more months to hopefully fully hit their stride. And so it wasn’t till this past weekend that we finally ate there. Here’s how it went.

As you may know, Herbst is what used to be trumpeted as a farm-to-table restaurant (do people still use that term?). This is an admirable proposition in general but a somewhat dicey one in the Upper Midwest between October and May. But they’re rolling with it. The restaurant is located in an old building that once housed a market named…wait for it, wait for it…Herbst, and they’ve preserved the signage on the exterior. They’ve also included a shop of their own to the right as you enter. A wide range of things are available here, from vegetables to pickles to pottery. (We looked in briefly on arrival and as we were leaving and I didn’t really pay attention to the prices on anything.) The restaurant itself is apparently supplied by small farms in the broader vicinity.

It’s a nice space, not over-large but not small and not cramped either. The kitchen is right by the entrance and there’s one set of seats at a counter overlooking it. The anchor of the dining room is a large bar and there are more seats all around it. Tables proper take up the rest of the space. On a Saturday in November it was dark outside and in. The dining room was full when we arrived and quite loud between the diners and the music. I am old.

We were a party of four adults and were seated immediately. The menu is optimized for sharing and this required careful perusal. It also required quite a bit of eye straining as the font size on the menus is not very large. Did I mention I’m old? Once I retrieved my reading glasses from the car, I was able to take the measure first of the cocktails and then of the food. The cocktail menu is organized around themes: Mineral, Bitter, Funky, Earthy and Seasonal. Within each category is a full proof, low proof and non-alcoholic option. Interestingly, the price remains the same whether you get a cocktail with a full or low measure of booze or one with no alcohol in it. I’m sure they have a convincing sounding story for why this is, but I suspect they make a much larger margin on the “no proof” options.

We ordered a couple of cocktails and a glass of wine, and the teetotaler in the group got the Seasonal Soda. The missus got the Seasonal Full Proof, which featured Spanish brandy, pear, rosé vermouth and lemon. I got the Earthy Full Proof, which featured mezcal, tequila and sumac demerara (whatever that is). We both liked our cocktails and our friends enjoyed their wine and soda (he who drank the latter noted that our server’s description of it as being “like Sprite” didn’t do it justice).

Having taken a while to order our drinks, we placed our food order along with the drinks order. And then the food began to show up almost immediately after the drinks arrived. We’d barely taken a sip of our drinks before the table began to fill up with the smaller plates (which weren’t that small). We’d ordered five of these and four arrived literally a minute after the cocktails. While one server was describing a dish on the left another was pouring parmesan broth into another bowl on the right while we were moving our drinks out of the way, and it was all a bit hectic. After this first course of four dishes was done we then sat for a long time before the rest showed up. Or rather before most of the rest showed up. They seemed to have lost track of our fifth small plate which turned out to have been waiting at the pass. It was put down alongside the three larger plates. For a restaurant that recommends sharing it would have been a nicer, and better paced experience if the eight dishes had come out in three regular waves of 3-2-3 rather than as though we’d ordered a regular app-main per person coursed dinner. Pacing aside, service was good.

Okay, so much for my cribbing about pacing. What did we eat and how was it?

We got the following small(er) plates:

• Roasted mushrooms, speck ham, hazelnut, parmesan broth. The roasted mushrooms were very good and the parmesan broth complemented them nicely; we all thought the speck was superfluous.
• Whipped ricotta toast, roasted winter squash marmalade, black cocoa, bergamot. This we had no complaints about. A nice blend of textures and flavours.
• Crispy duck leg, dry rub, hot honey. The duck was fried to a perfect crisp but somehow left us all unmoved. Perhaps if the hot honey had actually had some heat to go with the sweetness it would have made more of an impression. This seemed like it might be a take on Southeast Asian fried poultry with hot-sweet sauce but while the execution on the duck was perfect the final effect was somewhat anonymous.
• Grilled seppia, burnt eggplant puree, cauliflower, pickled chillies. I am sorry to say that the seppia/cuttlefish didn’t make much of an impression either. The other stuff on the plate was good though.
• Smashed turnip & daikon, juniper poppy seed vinaigrette, walnut. This was the late arriving of the first five dishes. It may have been my favourite of the five with the earthiness of the root veg set off perfectly by the vinaigrette.

To follow, three larger plates:

• Creste de gallo, milk-braised pheasant, pickled collard greens. The pasta was cooked perfectly, the pheasant was braised to a near mousse softness and the greens accented it all nicely. This was our unanimous pick of this round.
• Sea bass, green chile cream, charred kale succotash. The fish, on the other hand, was cooked very nicely but none of it was very interesting.
• Grilled lamb, radicchio salad, walnut-anchovy yogurt. The lamb turned out to be two loin chops—which is not very easy to share among four people (in a dark restaurant with a not-very-sharp knife). Again, the lamb was cooked very well but didn’t make a big impression. I much preferred the radicchio salad and the yogurt dressing.

There were three desserts on offer and to make life simple we got them all:

• Buckwheat panna cotta, pumpkin butter, pickled ground cherries. This was very good indeed.
• Basque cheesecake, citrus marmalade, oatmeal molasses crumble. As was the cheese cake.
• Salted nut tart, rosemary, lemon curd, aged cheese. This would probably have been a bit too cloying for one person to get through on their own but shared by four it was pretty good.

For a look at the restaurant and 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, to see how much it all cost, for thoughts on service and value and to see what’s coming next.

So, what did I make of the meal as a whole? As you may have noted from my brief descriptions of the dishes, there weren’t any that were misfires. But among the savoury dishes there were also not very many that got us very excited. I think we all agreed that the only dishes we’d want to eat again in a hurry of the eight we shared were the ricotta toast, the smashed turnips & radishes, and the creste de gallo pasta. The two larger mains—and the other smaller plates—were executed fine but were missing some verve. Dessert was by far our favourite course.

The other thing I’ll note is that despite it being a menu seemingly designed for sharing, many things on it are not actually easy to share if you’re a table of more than two. There’s two duck legs for instance and two lamb loin chops: neither duck legs nor lamb loin chops are easily divisible into four equal portions. Sharing the roasted mushroom also means that most of the parmsan broth gets left behind in the bowl (there’s no bread to mop it up with). The seppia meanwhile was a fairly small portion, which didn’t help it make an impression when divided into four servings.

These quibbles aside, we did like the meal on the whole. We also appreciated that the prices are not too out of line (though I’m not convinced by $44 for two lamb loin chops or the pricing structure on the cocktails). With drinks and the included 21% surcharge the total came to a little less than $85/head. Which is pretty good in the Twin Cities. My guess is we’ll be back next summer.

Oh yes, we were also a bit surprised that the restaurant seemed to be not very busy at 9 pm on a Saturday. It had been very full when we arrived but seats that opened up at the bar at 7.20 didn’t get occupied again and the bar was almost completely empty when we left at 9, as were a number of tables. I suppose it’s possible there was a wave that arrived after we old people left.

Alright, what’s next on the food front? Another couple of vacation reports this weekend. I’m not sure if we’re going to go out to eat this weekend—though it will be nice to eat something other than Thanksgiving leftovers without having to cook again. Let’s see how it goes.