All Saints opened in North East Minneapolis just about four years ago. They received acclaim from the local press almost immediately. Cynics—not me, of course—might say that it’s hard to find a high-end restaurant in these parts that hasn’t received high acclaim from the local press. But in this case the acclaim from the press was matched by a number of regular readers of this blog who wrote in behind the scenes to recommend I eat there or to ask why I hadn’t already eaten there. The answer to that question is partly that the thing that had impressed itself on my mind from the early press was that this was a restaurant with not much meat on the menu. Now, I like my vegetables but when I go out to eat I do like to have a number of fleshly options. And so they receded from view a bit. When I looked at their website again recently I noted that the menu is described as “veg forward, meat friendly”. Perhaps this slogan has always been on the menu but I’m not sure what it means right now when 50% of the menu comprises meat dishes. Well, one of the things it means is that I made a reservation and we finally descended on them this past weekend, accompanied by a couple of friends we eat out with often. Here’s how it went.
We found parking easily enough in the small lot behind the restaurant (and were pleasantly surprised to find it reasonably priced as well) and arrived right on time for our 7 pm reservation. The restaurant turned out to be quite a lot larger than I’d expected. I guess I’ve been conditioned by other more recently arrived luminaries on the local scene—your Oros, your Bucherons, your Myriels, your Diane’s Places—-that are all on the petite to cramped end of the spectrum. All Saints, however, has a long, large dining room and quite a a lot of seats on the patio alongside the restaurant. The dining room includes a number of tables that can accommodate larger groups as well as quite a bit of bar/counter seating. Last Saturday almost all of it was taken for most of the evening.
We were seated at the end of the dining room closer to the front and quickly got down to perusing the menu. First, drinks. There’s a long list of beers etc. as well as a number of bespoke cocktails and a small wine list (with wines by the bottle and glass). We got cocktails to begin with. One of our friends got the Gibby, a take on a Gibson and it was rather nice. Also rather nice were our other friend’s Old Saint (a take on a Manhattan) and the missus’ Saturnalia (featuring aquavit passionfruit etc. along with a chaser of sparkling wine). My cocktail was the Tangerine Dream, a take on a Margarita. I liked the first few sips a lot but then after that the massive amount of ice in the drink diluted it double quick. Well, I guess it looks cool with all the ice.
On to the food. The menu right now is composed of a larger section of small and less small dishes and a smattering of larger plates (3/4 of which feature meat) and a couple of desserts. We decided to pass on the larger plates and just get a bunch of smaller plates to share. Our server recommended three small plates per person. This would have been madness. We got two person and added on an order of focaccia to start. And it was more than enough food for four people, with dessert to follow.
What did we get? Other than the focaccia (we liked the charred scallion butter more than the bread itself), the first wave of dishes included the following:
- Golden Beets, burrata, serrano vinaigrette, dukkah
- Halloumi, jicama, ginger-lime vinaigrette, hazelnuts
- Fried Chicken, harissa honey
- French Fries, malt vinegar aioli
We quite liked the beets (though the serrano in the vinaigrette didn’t register for any of us) and really liked the fried chicken (the chicken is fried perfectly but the harissa honey makes the dish) and the french fries. The halloumi made no impression on us though we really liked everything else on the plate.
The next wave of slightly larger plates included the following:
- Flanken Short Ribs, soy pickled shiitake mushrooms
- Scallops, carrot hummus, walnut tabouli
- Duck Confit, bitter greens, currants, banyuls vinaigrette
- Cabbage Steak, lox, pickled mustard seed, pumpernickel vinaigrette (?) etc.
The short ribs were cut and done in a Korean style but cooked a bit inconsistently, with some pieces uniformly tender and some a little too chewy even by the standards of galbi. All the scallops, on the other hand, were seared really well (this normally comes three to the order but they readily gave us a fourth with a $5 upcharge) and the dish as a whole was quite nice if a little anonymous. The duck confit was better still; the confit leg had been crisped up perfectly and once again the accompanying salad was excellent. The star of the round, however, was the cabbage “steak”, a current special (this was verbally described and I hope I haven’t made any errors in listing the major components). The roasted cabbage and the dressing were great (I’m not sure the lox was really necessary).
And then to dessert. There were two options and we got one of each.
- Matcha Panna Cotta, strawberries, oat crumble
- Chocolate Cake, buttercream, sumac
Both were unobjectionable, neither really made much of an impression.
Oh yes, two of us got glasses of a Nebbiolo to go with the second round and one got an IPA; the missus nursed her cocktail slowly.
For a closer look at everything we ate and drank, launch the slideshow below. Scroll down for thoughts on service and the meal as a whole, and to see how much it all cost.
Service was mostly fine, though our server did commit the cardinal sin (in my view) of enthusiastically recommending a special but not mentioning the price (and when I asked she had to go find out). For the first half of the meal she was generally on top of things (though when one of our friends knocked the last bit of his cocktail over she tossed a couple of napkins on the table and walked away). She got a little hard to find later—perhaps because a large (and increasingly louder) party of 10 got seated in her zone.
Cost? With tax and tip the total came to just about $360 or $90/head. That’s not bad at all in the Twin Cities for a meal like this. As you can probably tell from the above, we liked the meal reasonably well. But as we talked about it at the end, we all felt that perhaps the roasted cabbage was the only dish of the ones we ate that we would want to come back soon to eat again. Well, there’s many more dishes on the menu that we did not try—and I’m told their mushroom “Bolognese” is particularly good—so a visit again some time next year may not be out of the question.
Okay, what’s next on the food front? More from Seoul and Delhi before another Twin Cities report next Wednesday. I’m not sure where that will be from as our weekend plans are complicated by a chess tournament for our boys. Let’s see how it goes.
By the way, my laptop screen died last week and the replacement part is taking longer to come in than the college’s excellent IT department had anticipated. As a result I’ve been using the laptop at home connected to an old Samsung tv. I mention this because the colours, brightness and resolution using this tv as a monitor are what you might call crappy. And so I apologize if the pics on this review are particularly lousy—it’s not easy to fix white balance etc. when the display can’t be trusted.