Here is this week’s Twin Cities report, only a day and a half late. I’m still working on my backlog, which means this report is of a meal eaten not recently but back at the end of February. After nearly two months, the federal government’s siege of Minnesota had finally begun to ease a little and so we’d decided to keep our reservation at Dario. It was a cold late-February night but fortunately, the weather did not otherwise cause problems and so we arrived on time for a 7 pm reservation. Here’s how it went.

Dario opened in the spring of 2024 to a fair bit of local attention. This ranged from a rave review from Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl in MSP Magazine to a more measured take from Jon Cheng, the Star-Tribune‘s previous restaurant critic. The two reviews are emblematic in a way of the tensions of the local media’s coverage of the Twin Cities’ food scene. One—not always generically distinguishable from a chef’s profile or a press release—promised faultless dishes in a restaurant that represents the new, the happening; the other described a number of dishes that often looked better than they tasted, but because this is Minnesota—or perhaps because of editorial intervention—still gave it a “Highly Recommended” rating. Between all that cognitive dissonance and reports of a deafeningly loud dining room, we didn’t get around to eating there till almost two years later.

What did we find? Well, a loud restaurant for sure. There are a number of seating areas and as far as we could make out it’s hard to hear each other across the table in all of them. And yes, the restaurant’s design does have a bright colour palette. But I was hard-pressed to find very much novelty in any of this. The Cities have been littered for years with over-loud restaurants with high design budgets that did not have a line item set aside for acoustics. The menu too is mostly drawn from a contemporary template: tartare and crudo among the starters, south-east Asian accents on an otherwise Italian/Mediterranean menu. But where in a more traditional Italian menu the pastas would show up as a middle course, here that section is the culmination and emphasis of the menu (though fortunately the pasta dishes are not priced above or on par with the meat and fish in that abbreviated section of the menu).

Fine, so in form it’s a more-or-less standard contemporary high-end American restaurant; what of the food?

I am happy to say that we liked most of it. We were a party of four—the missus, me and our boys—and we got everything to share. To start: the aforementioned Beef Tartare, Quail Saltimbocca, Fennel & Apple Salad and the prosaically named Potatoes. The tartare was one of the dishes with south east Asian touches, effectively a take on larb right down to the greens served on the side to make wraps with. We liked it a lot as a dish even as we found it a bit of a non-sequitur alongside most of the rest of the menu. The two vegetable dishes were very good: the missus and I were more partial to the fennel and apple salad (crisp textures, sweet/acidic flavours) and the boys were more partial to the potatoes—the prosaic name belies the complex construction of the dish: shredded and layered potatoes, pressed and cooked with caramelized onion and doused with an airy Comté sauce. The one dish in this round that we were none of us very excited about was the quail saltimbocca, the sauce in which—made with saba/grape must—was too sweet for our liking.

We eschewed the pricey fish and meat and went straight to the pastas. The crowd favourite here is the doppio but it has hazelnuts in it and the boys are allergic and so we passed. But we were very happy with what we did get, none of which we had any complaints about. In fact, I think each of us had a different one as their favourite: the younger boy particularly loved the Spicy Rigatoni alla Vodka; the older boy had the Mafaldine (with a short rib ragu) at the top; the missus was partial to the Capelleti cacio e pepe (with truffle butter also involved); and I liked the Kale Bucatini (with cauliflower, brown butter bagna cauda etc.) most of all.

Alas, we were not quite as enthused by either of the two desserts we got. Both the Cake & Ice Cream and the Toffee Cake were fine but not much more.

Oh yes, drinks. The missus got the Lion’s Spritz (apricot liqueur, orange bitters, sparkling wine) and liked it. The boys got a house soda each (the Dario Rootbeer and the Dario Cola). I also started with a branded cocktail, the Dario Old Fashioned. It is a law in the Twin Cities that every restaurant must have a bespoke Old Fashioned on their cocktail menu; Dario’s is made with rye and fernet and was quite tasty. I later got a glass of a Sicilian orange wine to go with the pastas.

For a closer look at the meal, launch the slideshow below. Scroll down for thoughts on service and value and to see how much it all cost.

Okay, service: not great. Perhaps our server was offended by our failure to take him up on his invitation to explain the menu to us at the start (it didn’t seem particularly complicated) but we only occasionally saw him for the first half of the meal. Our drinks didn’t come out till we were well into the starters and he didn’t really check on us. Later, he disappeared altogether. We had to wait a while to order dessert and ended up having to track someone else down to do so. It took a few tries before someone actually took our order. Another  long wait transpired before we got the check. When a meal costs $321 before tax and tip for four people, as this one did, you might expect a little better attention to the guests.

Even taking the lackluster service out of the equation I’m not sure that I’m persuaded by the value proposition at Dario at almost $100/head with tip. Indeed, the price was on par with the far superior dinner we ate at Foul Witch in Manhattan not too long before it closed. Are costs in Minneapolis really on par with Manhattan? Yes, we liked most of what we ate but there were very few dishes that we left wishing we could eat again very soon, especially at those prices. Nor am I persuaded that Dario has the best pasta in the Twin Cities: they were very good,yes, but the pastas at Alma, and especially at Tenant (which, by the way, had been serving doppio for years before Dario opened) are nothing to sneeze at either. And so while we’ll go back at some point, it’s unlikely to be anytime very soon. Your mileage may vary.

Alright, I’m now almost done with my Twin Cities backlog as well—I think I might only have one more report to go from the winter. Before I get to that one though I’ll have another report from Seoul in May and another report from Bombay in April. And I might also just throw in a quick look at that aforementioned dinner at Foul Witch even though the restaurant has closed. No one ever accused me of being timely or relevant.