September/October 2025

Apologies if you came here today looking for a Twin Cities restaurant report. I’d said at the end of my previous restaurant report (featuring grilled pork in Seoul) that I would have a review of a Twin Cities Mexican restaurant today. But my “Wednesdays are Twin Cities restaurant report days” rule ran into another that supersedes it: “the first of the month is when I post my look back and look ahead”. So you’ll have to wait another week. I don’t know how you’ll manage. Well, probably very easily.

September was another boffo month on the blog in terms of the visitor statistics that WordPress.com reports. I’ve never known how seriously to take these numbers; and after a month like the one just reported, I really don’t know how seriously to take them. As per the official stats, the blog had more page views in just the last 30 days than it had in the entire year of 2015 and also the entire years of 2016 and 2017. Wow, I must finally be getting the recognition I so richly deserve, I am tempted to think, but, alas, I suspect there’s something artificial about these numbers. I don’t mean that I think that WordPress is making up the numbers but that there may be some bot-related action happening. Another sign of this? All of the top 10 most-read posts in September are whisky-related, all are from long ago and most have not had any interest shown in them for years. Well, for what they’re worth, here are last month’s rankings anyway.

I should say first, however, that the one sign that the numbers may not be entirely wonky is that they also correlate with a sharp uptick in traffic from a country from which I’ve not previously seen much traffic: China. While I’ve always had a decent amount of traffic from Hong Kong, mainland China has generally not been much of a factor in the blog’s statistics. Between January 1 and August 31 of this year, for example, as per the WordPress stats engine, traffic from mainland China accounted for a measly 3741 page views. How many page views are reported from China for September alone? 95,125. Well, I suppose it’s possible something turned the spigot on in China last month. Maybe someone posted a link to some of my old whisky posts on a Chinese whisky forum whose existence I know nothing about. Or maybe it’s all random and not really worth thinking about. I guess we’ll see what things look like in October.

With all those caveats, here are 10 most-read/viewed posts for September:

I have to admit that I had myself forgotten about some of these posts. But I went back and read them and they all hold up. If very many real people read them I hope you enjoyed them. It’s hard to believe now but some of these posts got a lot of people very angry with me (and one very prominent whisky blogger in particular).

In a normal month my report from early September on our lunch at Hot Grainz would handily have been at the top of the stack but in this anomalous month it was just outside the top 25; as was my most recent report on Grand Szechuan, which would normally have made the top 10 too. Indeed, the only restaurant-related post that came close to cracking the top 10 was my original ranking of Twin Cities Metro Indian restaurants, which came in at #11. My reviews of our dinners at All Saints and Tenant were much further down.

Okay, shaky stats aside, what can you expect in October? Well, you should not expect any Twin Cities fine dining reports. We were scheduled to eat at Vinai this weekend but our plans clashed with Homecoming festivities at our boys’ high school and associated shenanigans that we will need to provide chauffeuring services for. So we will unfortunately be letting those go today. And since the missus and I will be in New York for a long weekend in the middle of the month, and spending some money there on a couple of fancy’ish meals, we’ll be sticking to the affordable end of the spectrum in the Twin Cities metro. I’ll also try my best to finish up my reports from Delhi (only three remain), Seoul (quite a few still to come) and then circle back to Kyoto in early July. Meanwhile, booze reviews will keep showing up on Mondays.

Onward!