[A reminder: my regular restaurant reports are now being posted on Wednesdays, not Tuesdays.]

My first restaurant report of 2025 was of a couple of lunches at Hoa Bien in St. Paul. Those meals were, however, eaten in 2024. With the missus off in Los Angeles by herself through the first week of the year, we didn’t go out to eat in Minnesota for the first time till this past weekend. I am glad to report that we managed to start the year off very well in gastronomic terms, with dinner at our favourite fine dining restaurant in the Twin Cities: Alma. As it happens, Alma is also doing something new in 2025 and we ate a very early iteration of it. Read on to find out more.

I should also remind you at the outset that my relationship with Alma is not like my relationships with all other Twin Cities restaurants, where I am just a regular diner. I did a pop-up with them in February 2023 and we are now friends of the house, so to speak. This doesn’t get us any comps or special treatment—or at least nothing beyond what any regular customer might occasionally receive at any fine restaurant—and I’d like to believe that I still evaluate our meals there with critical distance. But full disclosure is good; you can make up your own mind on the reliability of my reports.

Okay, with that out of the way, let’s get to this meal. As I said, Alma is doing something new in the new year. The menu model they’d had for most of the last few years is now gone. I’m referring to the all-inclusive set multi-course menu with everything on the menu being served to each table in a sharing format. They’d already made some changes to this in the second half of last year with individual diners being given a choice of dish for the main course. Now the only course that comes without choices is the first round of “Snacks”. Your table still gets the marinated olives and spiced almonds when you sit down and their lovely hearth breads show up next with three more dishes served to share. Well, on this night only two of the others were served to share: Pleasant Ridge Reserve cheese with a lovely savoury onion jam/relish and crisp Japanese yams; the last dish we each got a cup of: pho broth made with Limousin beef (and I believe black truffles may also have been involved). The pho broth was our pick of this round and we particularly appreciated the direction to have a last big sip with a bite of the cheese and onion relish to create an ersatz French onion soup experience on the palate (it worked really well).

After the opening snacks the next three courses now have each diner at the table make an individual choice from two options. In our case we shared everything anyway but let’s say that the missus chose the endive & poached pear salad and I chose the duck liver paté (served smeared on grilled sourdough with poached apricot etc.). I very much liked the paté ensemble but I liked the salad even more. The missus had them the other way around. For the middle course, the house-made rigatoni with butternut squash, caramelized garlic and bresaola was set in front of me and was just dynamite despite presenting pleasures of a subtle variety. The Meyer lemon orzo (with poached prawns etc.) set in front of the missus was almost as good (which is to say it was excellent). We were in agreement on this course.

The main course featured salmon and duck and more agreement. We both thought the salmon was the pick of the round and probably the dish of the night. The salmon was glazed with miso and presented at barely cooked tender perfection over a lovely spinach dashi that I could have eaten an entire bowl of; slices of sweet marinated cucumber presented nice acid to cut through the richness. The other dish was duck two ways: breast seared to just south of medium and confit leg and served with creamy polenta and a very nice jus. Everything was executed perfectly but it didn’t get us going the way the salmon did. For dessert there was no choice. But when the dessert is as good as the caramel tarte with bitter chocolate ganache and passionfruit curd we were served, no one is going to be complaining. We certainly didn’t.

Oh yes, drinks. I began with the Opuntia which is still my favourite cocktail in the Twin Cities (not that I’ve explored the Cities’ cocktail scene very assiduously). The missus had a glass of Riesling. With the larger courses I had a glass of a Chilean red that I rather liked.

For a look at the menu and everything we ate, launch the slideshow below. I am glad to say that while my photography skills have not improved markedly, I do have a better camera now (my Christmas gift to myself) and so my photographs of dinner in dimly-lit restaurants in Minnesota in the winter are now not as bad as previous. Scroll down for thoughts on service and cost and to see what’s coming next.

Service was excellent as always. Is there a fine dining restaurant in the Cities with better service than at Alma? I don’t think so. The staff are hospitable and friendly without being cloying, and present when needed without ever hovering; and they don’t try to convince you that you’re going to have a good meal: they let the food do that for them.

Price? One thing you’ll notice at first is that the price of the seasonal tasting menu has risen sharply: from $95/head to $115/head. But then you’ll realize that the cost of the meal has not changed. This because they no longer add a 21% hospitality/service charge to the check (in keeping with the new law about that). Instead the cost of the tasting menu has essentially gone up by 21% and no further tip is expected. And so we paid the exact same amount (+/- a few dollars) as we had at all our meals last year at the $95 price. Which is to say that Alma in January 2025 is still as excellent a deal for the quality of the food and the hospitality as it was in 2024 (and for that matter every year before that).

Okay, what’s next on the food front? I still have to close out my India trip from December and will really try my best to get to that this week. I’m not entirely sure where next week’s Twin Cities report will be from. Chances are good it will involve either Uzbek food in the western suburbs or Pakistani food in the south-eastern suburbs. Let’s see how it goes.