Two weeks ago, I posted the second edition of my Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation. At the end of that post—and also at the end of my most recent review of Oro, posted a week earlier—I referred to another upcoming Twin Cities restaurant list, one whose purview would not be limited only to “fine dining” restaurants. Here now is that list. I call it the Twin Cities 52. The title might put you in mind of the long-running Eater 38 but, unlike that list, mine does not seek to provide a “heat map”. Indeed, many of the Twin Cities’ hottest restaurants are not on this list (just as they’re not on either edition of the Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation). I wouldn’t know what was hot if I were sitting on it. Instead, this is simply my current list of the 52 Twin Cities restaurants that I would go out to eat at in the Twin Cities over the next year if I were here all year and wanted to eat at a different restaurant each week (we very rarely eat out more than once a week when not traveling) with an eye on variety and our budget. As such, it will give you a better sense of my/our family’s preferences than the Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation might. Continue reading
Sanmikouan (Kyoto, July 2025)
Back to Kyoto. I’d hoped to get this and another report from the city out late last week but things were a bit chaotic in Delhi. Among all the other mayhem, I also managed to screw up the site design and broke everything and had a panicked half day wondering whether I’d lost most of my images from the last 13 years. Thankfully, the folks at WordPress.com support got me back and running again without much hassle once I managed to get in touch with them. Anyway, here I am now with a report on the best meal we had in Kyoto in July, at Sanmikouan, a soba specialist. Continue reading
Talisker 30, 2017 Release
My first whisky release of the month was of a 3 yo American craft malt whiskey, the Zeppelin Bend from New Holland Distillers in Michigan. For the second, let’s go across the Atlantic to Skye for a much older single malt whisky. This is the Talisker 30 that was released in 2017. It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed a Talisker 30. The last was a bottle from the 2015 release, which I quite liked. Before that I’d reviewed the 2006 and 2012 releases. Of those three only the 2006 was at cask strength. The last of the cask strength releases of the Talisker 30 came out in 2010, I think (I have a bottle of that in reserve). After that, all the releases have been at Talisker’s standard 45.8%. Despite the lowered strength, I had quite enjoyed my bottle of the 2015 release and I’d hoped this will be in a similar vein. Early pours were promising and now that the bottle has been open for a week or so, here are my notes. Continue reading
Holiday Gift Guide, 2025
This is what happens when you’re out of town for a few weeks and aren’t able to post your regular content. Last week, in lieu of the usual Wednesday Twin Cities restaurant report, I posted the second edition of my Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation. This week, I have for you something else entirely: a gift guide for the holidays. Every idiot on the internet writes one so why not me as well? You’re welcome. Because I am a person of great integrity, I am only listing things that I purchased with my own money this year and used frequently, and which which genuinely improved my life. Let’s face it, your life can use improvement too. Because I also a person of compromised integrity, some of the links here go to Amazon (because that is where those things are available). If you can find them elsewhere, by all means buy them there. But if you do follow the Amazon links and purchase from them, please know that I will get a tiny cut. And if you don’t like these things after you buy them, then don’t tell me about it. Continue reading
Tori Shin (Kyoto, June 2025)
Here, finally, is my first report from Kyoto in the summer.
After a week in Tokyo, we took the shinkansen to Kyoto (where we barely managed to disembark before the train continued to Osaka: the missus and I had dozed off and the boys were lost in their devices and the train stops for just a couple of minutes). We were in Kyoto for just three days before heading to Seoul. Our eating out in the city had not been scoped out ahead of time quite as much as our meals in Tokyo had been. We’d eaten lunch on the train—having picked up excellent bentos at Tokyo station—and after a spot of touristing it was time to think of dinner. The younger boy had not been able to eat much at Hinai Stand the previous week and so he put in a request for yakitori. As our plans were to wander the Gion neighbourhood after dinner, I checked Tabelog to see what the yakitori options in the area were and hit upon Tori Shin (or Torishin). After a bit of absurdist comedy on arrival, we had a nice dinner there. Continue reading
Zeppelin Bend
Two words that strike fear in the heart of any reasonable person: craft whiskey. Not all the bad whiskeys I’ve had over the years have been craft whiskeys but most of the craft whiskeys I’ve had over the years have been bad. This may explain why this bottle of Zeppelin Bend has sat umolested on my shelves for many years now. My friend Greg bought it at the New Holland Brewery in Michigan sometime in the last decade and gifted it to me. I must not have been very motivated to open it and then I forgot all about it until I noticed it on the shelves of the ever-shrinking whisky hoard last week. For whatever reason, I was suddenly driven to open it. And, what do you know? it turned out to be quite drinkable. It’s somewhere between Scotch whisky and bourbon in that it’s double distilled from malted barley (a la Scottish single malt whisky—though whether in a pot or column still, I don’t know) but matured in heavily charred new American oak casks (a la bourbon). I believe the maturation process lasts 3 years—very young by classic Scottish standards, even in these days of NAS, but older than most Amerrican craft whiskeys (or at least older than they used to be in the bad old days). I’ve enjoyed it straight on several occasions since I opened the bottle but have enjoyed it even more as a rye/bourbon substitute in Manhattans. Alright, let’s get to the notes. Continue reading
The Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation 2.0 (2025)
In August of 2024 I posted the first version of this list of “fine dining” restaurants in the Twin Cities, organized by the number of times in a year we—as in the missus and I—would like to eat there if opportunity allowed. You can go read the introductory paragraphs of that post to see in more detail what the logic is and to see why I have “fine dining” in quotes. Or you can read the compressed version here. Basically, this is not a comprehensive survey of the Twin Cities’ “fine dining” scene or a ranking of those restaurants per se. It is rather an ordering of the places we’ve eaten at in recent years in terms of the maximum frequency at which we would be likely to eat there given the constraints of time and budget. This determination is made not merely in terms of the quality of the food on offer but also price/value and the likelihood of novelty on the menu. And “fine dining” is in quotes because no one knows what that term means anymore. Since posting the first version of the list, we’ve eaten at a few newer restaurants and have also gone back to others. And some of the restaurants on last year’s list have since closed. This means there’s been a fair bit of movement on the list. Read on to find out how I see things this year. Continue reading
Coming Soon…
On November 1 I did not post my usual look at the months past and to come. A not insignificant part of the reason for this is that I was extremely busy and lost track of it. But it’s also true that I was feeling—and continue to feel—iffy about the traffic numbers reported by WordPress for my blog. At some point this summer my overall numbers spiked quite dramatically with a lot of traffic being reported from mainland China—which had historically not been a major source of traffic for my blog. Indeed, I’m not sure if prior to this summer mainland China had ever cracked the top 10 list of countries from which readers were coming to the blog. But for the last few months China has been #1, and that by an immense margin over the usual #1, the United States. I have no idea why this is or if this is something being noticed by all WordPress.com bloggers (I have not yet asked on the WordPress forums). But for November traffic from mainland China was almost 4x that from the United States—compare with August when traffic from the US was more than 30x that from mainland China. Do these numbers represent real traffic? I doubt it. And so I’m not going to bother telling you which the top posts in November were in terms of page-views. Let’s instead just look ahead to the last month of the year. Continue reading
Oro IV (Minneapolis)
We first ate at Oro in late 2023, not too long after they opened. We liked that meal very much. Our second dinner there was in the summer of 2024. And we liked that meal even more. Accordingly, I listed them in the “Twice a Year” category in the first edition of my Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation last year. But then our second meal there last year was not so great. This was largely due to some service missteps but none of the dishes got us quite so excited either as those at our first two meals there had. As a result, they were not high on our list for this year’s dining out in the Cities. But as I get ready to issue Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation 2.0, I figured we should go back and see how things stand a year later. And so we descended on them last week for dinner on Saturday night. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Theodora (New York, October 2025)
Now that my Seoul reports from July are in the books, I should really get started on Kyoto, where we were for a few days before heading to Seoul. Accordingly, here is a report from the weekend trip the missus and I took to New York in October. I’ve already reported on our first meal on that trip: excellent pizza for lunch at L’Industrie in Manhattan. After wandering a bit after that lunch, we headed to the Brooklyn Museum. After spending some time there—I highly recommend the exhibition of Seydou Keita’s photographs, A Tactile Lens—we wandered the mean streets of Brooklyn for a bit and then headed to dinner in Fort Greene. Our port of call? Theodora. This is not a restaurant I had heard of prior to the planning for this trip. But it came recommended by my friend Ori (of Foxface Natural), and as Ori is not generally disposed to over-praise, I resolved to get a table. This was not going to be a slam-dunk. Their tables become available a few weeks out and it was clear as I was tracking them that they go very quickly—especially for prime time on a Saturday, which is what we were aiming for. But by setting an alarm and logging on to Resy as soon as seats for our date became available, I was able to snag a pair (and, yes, they sold out right after that). I am happy to say that the clamour is for good reason: it was an excellent meal. Here are the details. Continue reading
Banhez Ensamble
One last mezcal to close out the month. This is an ensamble from Banhez that I purchased primarily for use in cocktails. The price is in the neighbourhood of $30 in the Twin Cities and was recommended from a number of different directions as one of the best choices in that end of the price spectrum. As it turns out, it’s also a decent sipping mezcal and so I thought I would also review it as such.
Banhez is an interesting outfit. It is a cooperative comprised of a number of families in Ejutla in Oaxaca: the U.P.A.D.E.C Cooperative. They release mezcals made from single varietals of agave and those bottles have the names of the distilling mezcaleros on them. The ensamble, however, a 90-10 blend of espadin and barril, is a collective bottling by the entire cooperative and does not bear the name of an individual mezcalero. Here are my notes on the first few pours from the bottle. Continue reading
Yongsan Wonjo Gamjatang (Seoul, July 2025)
Here, finally, almost four and a half months after our brief visit to Seoul ended in July, is my last meal report from the trip. This was not our last meal in the city and there was nothing particularly special about the food but I’ve saved it for the end as it was eaten at a neighbourhood restaurant just a few minutes away from where we were putting up: Yongsan Wonjo Gamjatang. It’s the kind of restaurant, open 24 hours a day, every day of the year, that together with others of its type makes up the heart and soul of food obsessed cities like Seoul (or Tokyo or Los Angeles or New York). Restaurants like these are never going to get any recognition from international guides or tv shows or have long lines of influencers or influencer-persuaded people outside their doors; but they serve good, tasty food to a lot of people every day. As Yongsan Wonjo Gamjatang’s name indicates, the food they mostly serve is gamjatang or potato and pork neck/backbone stew, a dish that spells comfort at any time of year. We walked past it every day on our way to and from the subway lines in Seoul Station and finally made it in a couple of nights before we left. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Spice Village, Restaurant & Grocery (Apple Valley, MN)
I’ve speculated before on the likely growth of the Indian population in the South Twin Cities metro. In recent years there’s been an explosion of new home construction along the Cedar Avenue corridor extending from Apple Valley down to Lakeville; and this has been accompanied by an uptick of Indian restaurants and groceries in the general vicinity. Most of this has been concentrated in Eagan but now Apple Valley appears to be on the move as well. Kumar’s opened right before the pandemic in the massive strip mall at the north-west corner of the intersection of Cedar and 140th St (I think it might be called Times Square), as did Mantra Bazaar, the grocery run by the restaurant’s owners. Mantra Bazar has expanded quite a bit from its original store (which I reported on a while ago). This in itself is evidence of the growth of the desi population in the area that it feeds. Now, both Kumar’s and Mantra Bazar have competition in their immediate vicinity. Spice Village opened this summer on the other side of the strip, with a restaurant and grocery adjacent to each other. I finally made it there this past weekend and here is a look at both. Continue reading
Ikseondong Mokjang (Seoul, July 2025)
Here is my penultimate report from our week in Seoul in July. One of the first meals we’d eaten on the trip featured barbecue. That was at Hwapo Sikdang near Namdaemun Market, and that meal was centered on pork. The boys had asked to eat a beef barbecue meal as well and that is what we did at Iksundong Mokjang on our penultimate night in Seoul. We were going to be in Jongno-gu in the early evening and looking around for a well-reviewed bbq restaurant, I happened on Ikseondong Mokjang (or Iksundong Farm in their English signage). All signs pointed to a good meal and so it turned out to be. Here is a quick look. Continue reading
Cinco Sentidos, Cuishe, Tio Tello
I guess this is a month of mezcal reviews. I kicked off the month with an excellent ensamble by Tio Rey in Oaxaca for Vago. Last week, I reviewed a cenizo made for Legendario Domingo by the Colon family in Michoacán. This week I’m back in Oaxaca. This mezcal was distilled from cuishe/cuixe, a variant of wild agave karwinskii (from which come a number of magueys used to distill mezcal). The mezcalero is Eleuterio “Tio Tello” Perez Ramos and the bottler is Cinco Sentidos, the brand from El Destilado restaurant in Oaxaca. As per the label, the production process was pretty artisanal: the maguey was roasted in conical ovens with mesquite and oak for five days, chopped by hand with machetes, and then mashed with hammers also made of mesquite. Fermentation took place in tanks made of cypress before distillation in a copper alembic still. Interestingly, the label also says that this was distilled in 2008 but only bottled in 2024. Since it’s still a joven I guess that means it spent 16 years in glass containers. I don’t know enough about mezcal to be able to say for sure but I think that’s a pretty long time compared to most. Technically, I suppose the spirit shouldn’t change in the glass but anybody who has opened bottles of whisky that were filled decades prior knows that “bottle maturation” is a thing. Anyway, having enjoyed Cinco Sentidos’ offerings before (well, their mole pechuga, a little less), I’m looking forward to this one. Let’s see what it’s like. Continue reading
L’Industrie (New York, October 2025)
I have two meal reports to go from our week in Seoul in July and another two to go from our two weeks in Delhi after that. And I still haven’t started on the meals eaten during our brief stay in Kyoto between our time in Seoul and our time in Tokyo in June. It makes sense therefore that today I have for you a report from a weekend trip the missus and I took to New York/New Jersey in October. Our fall breaks lined up again this year and we took the opportunity to abandon our children and go enjoy ourselves by ourselves. This involved a fair bit of eating out and my first report is of a casual lunch eaten just a few hours after our arrival, at the West Village location of L’industrie. This was one of a few places recommended by my friends on Mouthfuls when I asked for suggestions for pizza by the slice within walking distance of the Whitney Museum. As it happens, we didn’t actually end up going to the Whitney that afternoon (we ended up at the Brooklyn Museum instead) but we did eat pizza at L’industrie. Continue reading
Vinai 2 (Minneapolis)
Over the last year, a few people have written in to the blog to ask why I did not include Vinai in the first edition of my Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation last year. Well, the answer is very simple: at the time I posted that list, I had not yet eaten at Vinai. We ate there for the first time at the end of October last year. And we really liked that meal. We’d expected to go back in just a few months but it didn’t end up happening; partly because of travel and other constraints, but also partly because their menu didn’t change much for those first few months after our first meal. After we got back from our summer travels I eventually got around to making a reservation for early October to celebrate the missus’ birthday but we ended up having to give those seats up just a few days prior. Luckily, I managed to snag a table for four for just about a month later and so this past weekend we descended on them again for dinner with our boys in tow. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Legendario Domingo, Cenizo
Legendario Domingo bottle mezcals made in various states of Mexico. As far as I can make out from their website, they currently have five labels, each covering batches of mezcal from a producer in a different region: Guerrero, Michoacán, Oaxaca, San Luis Potosi and Durango. This particular bottle is from the Colon family mezcalera from Nombre de Dios in Durango. It is made from a variety of maguey that I have never tried before (though that’s true of the majority of them): Cenizo; and I believe this is also the first mezcal from Durango that I have reviewed. The mode of production is quite different from that of the Vago Ensamble I reviewed last week. That one is a mezcal ancestral, the agave ground by hand and the spirit distilled in clay stills. This is a mezcal artesenal. The agave is roasted in an undeground oven but milled with an electric shredder; and the distillation happens in an alembic still. What it does have in common with Vago, however, is the general illegibility of the label. Thankfully, the labels are at least colour-coded for the different producers, so if this review inspires you to go out and look for this one, just keep an eye out for the purple label (though I’m not sure, I think each producer makes mezcal for Legendario Domingo from the same maguey each time). Okay, let’s get to it. Continue reading