I was startled recently to see that we had not been to Bangkok Thai Deli in over two years. Along with On’s Kitchen, Bangkok Thai Deli had been one of our Thai mainstays in the Cities forever—we’ve been eating there since we arrived in 2007, back when they were still in their original, pokier location. I hasten to add that we did not stop eating there because we stopped liking their food. It’s just that the summer of 2024 is when we first ate at Hot Grainz, and they’ve done such a hoodoo on our palates that it’s been hard to go anywhere else in the Twin Cities for Thai food since then. But a return to Bangkok Thai Deli was long overdue; and so when other family business pulled us not too far from University Avenue last Saturday we decided to combine it with lunch at our old favourite with friends who live in the area. I am very glad to say that the meal did not disappoint. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Category Archives: Minnesota
Bucheron II (Minneapolis)
Hey, look, I’m behind schedule again with the week’s restaurant reports! What a surprise! But I’m less than two days late. Please remember: this is not my job; you’re lucky I post at all. You’re welcome.
This week’s restaurant report comes to you from Minneapolis, from Bucheron. We ate at Bucheron for the first time last summer and I immediately added them to my “Once a Year” tier in the 2025 edition of my Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation. Unsurprisingly, it was one of the places I wanted to go back to for sure this year. And so it came to pass. We returned a couple of weekends ago with the same friends we’d eaten that first dinner with. And it was another excellent meal, though with some non-food hiccups that may be more meaningful to point out now that Michelin is coming to Minneapolis. Read on to see what I’m on about. Continue reading
El Taco Riendo (Minneapolis)
So, I didn’t end up posting restaurant reports from the Twin Cities, Seoul or Delhi last week. And I also missed this week’s Bombay report. The ramp-up to the new term plus a sudden and short deadline on a major project killed any hope of that. But I’ll hopefully be able to catch up with extra posts in the next couple of weeks and not have my backlog get really backed up again.
Here now is the Twin Cities report that I was planning to post last week: a quick look at a quick lunch at El Taco Riendo up on Central Ave. in Northeast Minneapolis. Continue reading
Myriel III (St. Paul, MN)
After taking three years after our first dinner at Myriel to get around to our second, here now is my review of our third dinner there, eaten just over a year after the second. Indeed, after our second dinner I had promoted them to the “Once a Year” tier in the 2025 edition of my Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation, and I am very glad to say that our meal in 2026 did not cause me to want to reverse that decision. Instead, over the next few months I’ll be thinking about whether I want to promote them further in the 2026 iteration of the list, which will be out at the end of the year. So it was a very good meal again—read on for the details. Continue reading
Tenant XV (Minneapolis)
Only about two days late, here is this week’s Twin Cities dining report. It covers dinner at one of our favourite restaurants in the metro, Tenant. In the last iteration of my Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation I had them in the “Several Times a Year” tier along with Alma. However, this was only our first dinner there this year. This is partly because of all our/my travels in the spring and summer and partly because Tenant had gone into a different mode during the ICE siege of the Twin Cities, doing not their usual six-course menu surprise but functioning as a soup kitchen of sorts, feeding their community at whatever price people were able to pay. Since the summer they’ve retooled and returned to their normal format, but not exactly to what it was before. In place of the six-course menu they now do a four-course menu. You still won’t know what each course comprises till it reaches you at the counter or a table. In terms of the amount of food it appears to be the same as it was before. This menu costs $75/head and includes service. They also now have an optional set of supplements, served before, between and as add-ons to courses that adds on an additional $35/head. And there’s still an optional wine pairing as well at $45. Here’s how it all looked at our dinner just about two weeks ago. Continue reading
112 Eatery VI (Minneapolis, July 2026)
If in recent years the missus and I have been ending up at Alma for dinner when in town for our anniversary at the end of June, we’ve also been ending up at 112 Eatery for dinner when in town on the younger boy’s birthday as well in mid-July. So it was in 2024. Last summer we were in Delhi in July (and I’m realizing now that I have not yet reported on that special lunch we ate there on that occasion). This July we were all in Minnesota (just barely—I left for Delhi by myself a few days later) and so it was to 112 Eatery we went for dinner to mark his 15th birthday (where does the time go?). Here’s a quick look at the meal. Continue reading
Restaurant Alma XVIII (Minneapolis, June 2026)
No booze review this week either—though I will have one next week for sure. Instead, this week’s booze review slot is taken by the Twin Cities restaurant report I failed to post last Wednesday. This is of the missus and my anniversary dinner, eaten at Alma in Minneapolis at the end of June. Between lunch at Grand Szechuan the weekend after our return from our travels and this dinner at the end of the month, you could say we were well and truly back in the Twin Cities dining scene. Of course, there’s been big news in the fine dining part of that world this year: the announcement that Minneapolis will be part of Michelin’s new Great Lakes regional grouping. I followed some of the local food discourse about all of that in the spring and early-summer—not without some amusement—and may have some thoughts to share about it in the next few weeks that will surely make me even more friends in the local scene. But that’s for later; here now is a quick account of what was a very nice dinner at Alma. Continue reading
Hot Grainz V (St. Paul, MN)
I’d thought I’d post this Twin Cities report on Thursday after getting back to Minnesota; but, thanks to a two-hour flight delay, it’s coming to you instead from Schiphol airport in Amsterdam where I have run out of things to do.
This report on lunch at our current favourite Thai restaurant in the Twin Cities, Hot Grainz, represents the end of my Twin Cities winter backlog. It’s not quite a current report, though. We ate this meal a week after returning from our spring travels in mid-June. It’ll probably take till mid-September, at least, before I’m fully caught up. Fascinating, I know. Continue reading
The Sunday Buffet at Homi (St. Paul, March 2026)
Here is the last of my Twin Cities backlog from the start of the year. The federal government’s siege of Minnesota—and particularly the Twin Cities—during the first two months of the year had transformed life in the state. Hispanics were among the groups most targeted by ICE and if this meant that restaurants and other businesses that rely on Hispanic labour were among those hit hardest by this assault, it meant that Mexican and other Hispanic restaurants were hit really, really hard. Most shut down for most of that period as both employees and diners stayed away for fear of being caught up in ICE’s terroristic raids. As February came to an end things began to ease up and the restaurants began to re-open. Among the first to start back up was Homi, in St. Paul, one of our favourite Mexican restaurants in the state. I saw their announcement on Facebook of their reopening on March 1 with the Sunday lunch buffet they’d started last year and sent the call out to our usual dining crew. A large group of us showed up that day to welcome them back to operation and also to eat some very good food. Here’s a belated look. Continue reading
Dario (Minneapolis, February 2026)
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 decided to keep our dinner reservation at Dario.
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 then-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. Here’s how it went.
Pho Tempo IV (Burnsville, MN, Winter ’25/’26)
I’d said I would have a Twin Cities restaurant report up on Wednesday and there’s still 15 minutes to go till Thursday in Minnesota. Never call me a liar again!
I’m now closing in on my Twin Cities metro area backlog from the winter. After this one, there will only be two more to go, I think. This report from Burnsville’s Pho Tempo actually encompasses two meals: one I ate by myself in November ’25 and another with the entire family and a couple of friends in February of this year. The first was eaten on the go after a quick shopping stop at Saigon Market—inside which Pho Tempo is located; the second was the reason for the trip. I clarify this in case you think I mean that Pho Tempo is a place to eat if you’re going to Saigon Market for groceries; in fact, it’s one of our favourite Vietnamese restaurants in the Twin Cities metro. Continue reading
Hmongtown Marketplace, Feb ’26 (St. Paul, MN)
Here is the catch-up Twin Cities metro restaurant report for the week. It covers not a restaurant per se but a food court, at Hmongtown Marketplace in St. Paul. This meal was eaten on a weekend in early February, during ICE’s depredations in the state. Living almost an hour south of the Twin Cities, we were not affected by ICE’s actions in the way that people in Minneapolis or St. Paul were. But that’s not to say that ICE was not active in our town as well or that we were completely unaffected. We are, of course, fairly privileged people in terms of class but we are also visible minorities. While all four of us are citizens—the two of us naturalized, the boys born in Minnesota—it’s not like details like these were keeping people from being harassed or abducted or worse by agents of the federal government. We were operating therefore with a low to medium hum of worry at all times, especially for our boys as they made their way across town and back for school and other activities. We also weren’t sure if it was a good idea to keep going out for our usual weekly meals in the Cities. In the end, we chose to keep doing it—both to exercise our privilege and support immigrant restaurants and businesses that were still open, and to assert our own autonomy as citizens of colour. Continue reading
Grand Szechuan, January/June 2026
God, the World Cup is doing a number on my mission to get four restaurants reports off my backlog every week. My report from Bombay was posted in the evening on Monday and my Twin Cities report for the week is now being posted almost two days late. The good news is it is in fact two reports for the price of one—so if you do the conversion you actually come out ahead. You’re welcome.
The two reports in question are of two meals eaten at Grand Szechuan in Bloomington. By any measure, the best Chinese restaurant in Minnesota, Grand Szechuan is our family’s favourite restaurant in the state and so it’s no surprise that one of our first meals of the year was eaten there in January and that it was also the first place went out to eat at after returning from our travels in June. Continue reading
Restaurant Alma XVII, January 2026 (Minneapolis)
Alright, so I didn’t post this yesterday after all. Why should I be more reliable after a five-month hiatus than I was for the 13 years before that?
This meal was eaten at Alma, our favourite fine dining restaurant in the Twin Cities, in mid-January. The menu format at the meal was same as it had been on our previous visit in the late summer of 2025: the classic seasonal three course menu for $97 with choices for each course; dessert priced separately. Since then the format has gone through some more evolution but I’ll have more on that in my next report from Alma, which should post in a couple of weeks (we are due to eat there again at the end of next week). As this meal was eaten more than five months ago and the menu is no longer on the go, I’m not going to go into very much detail. I do have my notes from the meal but I’m going to keep it relatively brief. Continue reading
My Top Twin Cities Restaurant Dishes of 2025
I’ve already published two Twin Cities lists this month: the second edition of my Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation; and a new list called The Twin Cities 52, which covers more than just “fine dining restaurants”. Here now is one last list to close the month and year. This one lists my favourite dishes eaten in restaurants in the Twin Cities this year. Not my favourite Twin Cities restaurant meals but my favourite dishes across all the meals I wrote about this year. Like the Twin Cities 52 list, this one is not segregated by price point: it includes dishes eaten at restaurants nominated for Beard awards as well as dishes from far more casual restaurants. These are all dishes which made me particularly happy this year and which I would happily eat again and recommend without reservations to other people. Though as I say that last, I realize that in the case of some of the fancier restaurants these dishes may not always be available on their menus. You take your chances. Continue reading
The Twin Cities 52
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
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