We ate at Myriel for the first time almost exactly three years ago. They had then been open for just about a year and had already received rave reviews locally. We liked our meal fine but it did not blow us away (and there were some aspects of the meal we found a little cloying). This, by the way, was also the experience of the friends we had originally been supposed to eat there with. Our original reservation had been scuppered on account of a positive covid test at the restaurant and we ended up eating instead at St. Genevieve. And then we ate separately at Myriel a couple of months apart. We had both independently set them aside in our minds as “decent enough but nothing we need to go back and try again in a hurry”. And when I posted the first edition of my Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation last year, I put Myriel in the “Once Every Few Years” tier. Well, three years is certainly a few. In the intervening period their local reputation has become even stronger and they’ve also picked up a fair bit of national recognition, including a finalist nod for Chef Tomlinson in the “Best Chef: Midwest” category in the 2025 James Beard Awards (I guess results will be announced soon). We checked with our friends to see if they were available and interested to finally go back and eat there together. They were and so we did. Did we like this meal better? Read on to find out.

Okay, let’s kill the suspense right away: yes, we did. We thought the execution on the food was much better across the board; and the service too had a very different vibe than the enthusiastic boosting we’d both encountered from our servers in the summer of 2022. There were a couple of missteps, one of them a big one (see below) but not enough to keep any of us from saying that we would want to come back again within the year. And, yes, when I post Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation 2.0 later this year, they’ll be getting a promotion. I’m sure this will mean far more to them than recognition from the James Beard Foundation or Food & Wine. (Though I suspect their p.r agency will be very happy if my original middling review stops being the second search result on Google for “Myriel St. Paul”.) They’re still lauded for their local and seasonal ethos and so forth, by the way—though the presence of apple pie on the menu in May suggests that they’re not doctrinaire about it.

Alright, here are the details on the meal. We had a reservation for 8 pm last Saturday and arrived a little early. We expected to wait a bit for our table but it was ready and so we sat down and got right down to business. The dining room was completely full at this point; it stayed full till about 9 pm and was still buzzing when we left at about 10.30. We had the brightest table in the house to start (right by the open door to their postage stamp-sized sidewalk seating) and then it slowly became the darkest table in the house as the sun set. I note this only by way of explanation for the varying white balance you’ll see in the photos in the slideshow below (I couldn’t be arsed to keep re-adjusting it). I can’t imagine though that there could have been a table anywhere in the house at any point in the meal where sound levels would have been lower. This is not something they can do anything about, I guess. It’s a small restaurant and when it’s full, it’s loud. It was hard to hear our server on most occasions. Yes, we are old; at one point in the evening one of our friends went out to yell at a cloud.

What did we old people eat and drink? We started with a cocktail each. The missus got the Sunshine Recorder (which she’d enjoyed at our first meal); one of our friends got an aperitif featuring makrut lime and tonic; our other friend got the Bishop (armagnac, rye etc.), which he described as checking all his Manhattan boxes; and I got their Old Fashioned (which I had enjoyed at our first meal). Everyone was very satisfied with their drinks. Thus fortified, we got into the eating portion of the evening. We decided to get a bunch of smaller plates to share and then go our separate ways for our mains.

Out first were their Charcuterie and Cheese (we got the small) and their Carrot Salad. The charcuterie plate featured bresaola (house-made, if I heard the server correctly, but nothing special even if so), excellent duck liver paté and a bit of Little Lucy, a very nice brie-style cheese from the local Redhead Creamery. Also on the plate were an excellent—and very sharp—house-made mustard and jam (lingonberry, I think—did I mention it was hard to hear the server?) and a very small portion of crackers, completely inadequate to the task of eating everything on the plate with. The carrot salad I had no quibbles with: it was one of the highlights of the meal with wonderful interplay between cream and acid in the dressing. Following them on to the table was an order of their Pain Rustique with Cultured Butter. As is the style in our fallen world, $7 gets you two slices of bread and a small pat of butter.  It’s good bread and butter but by gum, I remember back in two thousand dickety three (“we had to say dickety because the Kaiser had stolen our word for twenty”) when it was all you can eat bread and butter at every fine dining restaurant in the land. And Donald Trump wasn’t President. Those were the days. Where was I? Oh yes, at Myriel.

Up next, in quick succession, were two orders of their Swedish Corn Waffles from the starter’ish end of the menu and two dishes from the side dishes end of the menu: the Stewed Lentils and the Gnocchi Parisienne. The corn waffles were topped with duck confit. For all I know, this kind of thing has been all the rage in Sweden since the Middle Ages but we all felt we’d have been happier eating the tostadas they put us in mind of. The gnocchi, however, we all thought were just outstanding in every respect. The stewed lentils were also very good but we were a bit surprised that they came out when they did. This because this is not really a dish to eat by itself but instead alongside a protein-centered main. We decided to hold on to most of it to eat with said mains. This turned out to be a very bad idea as there was a very long pause between our finishing these dishes and the mains finally coming out. And then we ran into the real misstep.

The missus had ordered the Whitefish. This came out and looked utterly beautiful. And the fish, cooked wrapped in chard, was exquisite. But the sauce was over-salted to the point of inedibility (and keep in mind that the missus eats kimchi and I eat Indian pickles with almost every meal at home; i.e, we are not salt-phobes). The server who’d brought it to the table heard us comment on this and immediately offered to take it back and have it re-fired. It won’t take very long, he said. But, of course, it took a fairly long time. The rest of us started out waiting for her dish to return but then decided to eat our own selections before they got cold.

What were these selections? One of our friends had the Barley-Fed Lamb Meatballs. About this I have two things to say: 1) the meatballs were very tasty but they were finally meatballs; and 2) I’m not sure what the point of being told what grain the lamb had been fed is as this was not in any way apparent in the taste or texture of the actual meatballs. The dish, as a whole, was fine. Our other friend and I both had the duck breast and it was just outstanding. The duck was cooked perfectly, with crisp skin and tender, pink flesh; and the gastrique it was sitting on was a wonderful complement to the duck. Also complementing the duck very well were the black lentils we had saved, even if they were south of lukewarm at this point. We were almost done with our dishes when the missus’ fish returned. The fish was still excellent and now the sauce matched it. A pity that no one had tasted the first sauce before sending it out as it would have been nice to eat all our mains together.

Oh yes, those of us eating the duck got a glass each of the Gamay on the menu to go with it.

To close, two orders of the Swedish Egg Coffee and one each of the three desserts on offer. These were the aforementioned pie made with unseasonal and doubtless non-local apples; a slice of Hazelnut Custard Cake; and a Creme Fraiche Panna Cotta. All three were very good; the pie was excellent.

For a look at the restaurant, the current a la carte menu (they still don’t post this on their website), and everything we ate and drank, launch the slideshow below. Scroll down for thoughts on service and to see how much it all cost.

It’s hard to blame the servers for either the noise levels, the long pause before the mains, or the fact that the kitchen sent out a sauce so salty that it would have made a sodium-deprived deer recoil. Someone should probably have figured out that the lentils should have been held to go out with the mains though (unless the chef intends them to be a stand-alone mid-course). These things aside, everyone we interacted with was professional and present when needed. And this time no one told us a single time, leave alone repeatedly, how much we were going to enjoy every dish—and nor did anyone bring us eggs from the kitchen to gawp at (this happened at our friends’ meal in 2022, a moment they described as “full Portlandia”, the eggs having been unremarkable to look at).

Cost? About $387 with tax and about $462 with tip added on. That’s just around $115/head. Did they offer to take a cup of coffee off the bill as a token gesture for the salty sauce and out-of-sync main course? No, they did not. Should they have? Probably. Can I ask a rhetorical question? Yes. But I don’t want to end on what will seem like a very churlish note. The missteps aside, it was a very good meal on the whole, and we’ll be back for sure within the year.

Okay, what’s next from the Twin Cities? I’m not actually sure I’ll have a Twin Cities report next week. That’s because this weekend we have non-food business occupying our Saturday and Sunday is Mother’s Day and I might just cook at home instead. Let’s see how it goes. I will certainly have one more Delhi report this weekend.