It’s been almost two years since my last review of a ramen-centered meal in the Twin Cities metro (well, if you exclude my report on El Sazon Tacos & More, which included a bowl of their birria ramen). That last ramen report was from Itton Ramen in Bloomington. We were not terribly impressed. I noted in that review that there is better ramen available in the Twin Cities but it has taken me almost two years to get around to writing some of it up. This is partly because it’s been a busy two years with a lot of time spent outside Minnesota; but frankly, it’s mostly because a good chunk of that time spent outside Minnesota has been in places with far better ramen and so eating ramen here has not felt like a huge priority. When looking for noodle soup here we’re more likely to look in a Southeast Asian direction. That said, Ramen Kazama in Minneapolis is a pretty decent option. I’ve eaten stray bowls of ramen there over the years while running errands in the area; here, finally, is a report on a larger meal with the family. Continue reading
Category Archives: Minnesota
India Market (Eden Prairie, MN)
As I said on Sunday in my look back/look ahead post, we didn’t go out to eat last weekend. And so I do not have a Twin Cities restaurant report this week. I do have a Twin Cities food report though, albeit on a market. It’s been a while since I last reported on an immigrant grocery store in the Twin Cities (Bodega 42 in Apple Valley). The one before that was my last report on an Indian grocery. That was a look at Spice Bazaar in Lake Elmo off Highway 94, which turned into India Market. Today I have a look at the other location of India Market, out in the western suburbs. This is the original location which has been in Eden Prairie since 2018. As with the newer Lake Elmo location, it is a very large store, containing within it both a butcher counter and a cafe with a fairly extensive menu. I’ve shopped there a few times before/after other appointments in the area (usually after a lunch thali at Godavari). This look at the market is put together from pictures taken on a couple of these visits in the last year and a half. I cannot promise that the layout of the store now is exactly as pictured—it changed a bit between my last two visits—but this should give you a pretty good idea of what you can expect to find there: in short, pretty much everything you need if you’re interested in cooking Indian food. Continue reading
Bull’s Horn (Minneapolis)
It took almost eight years but we finally made it inside Bull’s Horn. As you undoubtedly know by now if you live in Minneapolis, Bull’s Horn is the South Minneapolis restaurant/bar opened by Doug Flicker and his partner Amy Greeley in 2017 after the closing of Piccolo. Piccolo had been our favourite high-end restaurant for some years at the time and we mourned its passing mightily, even as we we came to love its successor, Tenant. Chef Flicker, however, was out of the fine dining game. Bull’s Horn is very much a dive bar in aesthetic and its menu too is in keeping with that. We were already fans of Chef Flicker’s burgers etc., having eaten several times at Sandcastle, the concession stand they had operated at Lake Nokomis for several summers. So you might think we would have high-tailed it to Bull’s Horn. But somehow we never did. I put this down to a mix of things. A bit of mourning/denial for the end of Piccolo; more than a bit of the fact that they’re only open for dinner and we rarely eat this kind of food for dinner; and distance: a 45-50 minute drive is a long way to go for diner food, no matter how good it is. Well, our older boy turned 16 last week and for his birthday dinner out he voted for a good burger. And so there we finally were. Continue reading
Mañana 2 (St. Paul, MN)
It’s been a bit chilly in Minnesota since the end of last week. We left the house anyway on Saturday. The plan had been to lay down a protective layer of paya at a Pakistani restaurant in South St. Paul; but we arrived there with friends to find they’re on hiatus till early February. Fine, we said, since we’re in South St. Paul let’s go to Las Islas; and then we discovered that they are unfortunately permanently closed (not sure when that happened). We batted a few ideas around and then decided to head to Mañana, the Salvadoran restaurant on 7th St. in St. Paul. I’d said at the end of my report on our very nice lunch there in the late summer of 2021 that we’d likely be back within the year. Well, it ended up being 3.5 years till our next visit but I’m very glad we did finally go back as it was again a very good meal. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Restaurant Alma XIV, January 2025 (Minneapolis)
[A reminder: my regular restaurant reports are now being posted on Wednesdays, not Tuesdays.]
My first restaurant report of 2025 was of a couple of lunches at Hoa Bien in St. Paul. Those meals were, however, eaten in 2024. With the missus off in Los Angeles by herself through the first week of the year, we didn’t go out to eat in Minnesota for the first time till this past weekend. I am glad to report that we managed to start the year off very well in gastronomic terms, with dinner at our favourite fine dining restaurant in the Twin Cities: Alma. As it happens, Alma is also doing something new in 2025 and we ate a very early iteration of it. Read on to find out more. Continue reading
Hoa Bien (St. Paul, MN)
My Twin Cities restaurant reporting for 2025 begins fittingly on the Cities’ true “Eat Street”, University Avenue in St. Paul. And it finds me finally writing about one of University Avenue’s Vietnamese mainstays: Hoa Bien. They have been in their current location at the corner of University and Lexington Pkwy since 2005. But as per the staff, the original location—also on University—had opened in the late 1970s. I’m not sure if that makes them the oldest extant Vietnamese restaurant in the Twin Cities but it must certainly put them in the running. (If anyone reading knows more about which places, if any, have been around longer, please write in.) They’ve been at this location since before we arrived in Minnesota (in 2007) and we ate there fairly early in our time here. After that they fell out of our rotation well before I started reviewing restaurants on the blog and I never got around to going back and writing them up. I’m happy to be able to fix that now. We ate two meals there at the end of the year, on successive weekends. Here’s how they went. Continue reading
Grand Szechuan, Christmas 2024 (Bloomington, MN)
We bade farewell to Twin Cities dining in 2023 with lunch at Grand Szechuan on Christmas and it seemed only right to see 2024 off the same way. We once again descended on them with a bunch of the people we eat there with most often and once again had a bit of a blowout meal, comprised largely of old favourites—and also one dish that I ordered without telling anyone (look to the left). 2024 was a year in which we ate out a lot (see my post from yesterday on my favourite restaurant meals of the year). Our meals at Grand Szechuan were among the highlights of the year and this last lunch was no exception. Given the vagaries of the restaurant world—to say nothing of the additional stresses of the pandemic—we feel very fortunate that Grand Szechuan—our family’s favourite restaurant in Minnesota—is still going strong. And we are very grateful that they are still putting out food at a very high level. Continue reading
My Best Restaurant Meals of 2024
I began my recap of the 2023 version of this post by noting that we had been literally all over the map that year. Well, in 2024 we did not go to Europe at all (unless you count layovers in airports) but we/I spent even more time outside the United States. Our year began with an off-campus program: I took a bunch of students to Bombay for five weeks before we moved to Seoul for another five weeks. As you might imagine, we ate out a lot in both cities and ate a lot of fantastic food in both cities. On the way back to Minnesota from Seoul we stopped in Delhi for two weeks and ate out quite a bit there too. Then in May I was in New York/New Jersey by myself for a few days before the whole family did a trip to Southern and Northern California together in the second half of June. A long break from travel followed after that till I went off by myself again, this time for two weeks and to Delhi. In between we ate out at our usual weekly clip in the Twin Cities metro. And so there’s a lot of geography to draw on for this year’s top 10 list as well. As I did last year, I’ve tried to manage things a bit by separating more expensive/formal restaurants from more casual places into distinct top 10 lists. This year, however, I’m not doing an overall top 5 list that draws from both; instead each list is ranked rather than presented in chronological order. Continue reading
112 Eatery V (Minneapolis)
Here is my second report this year on a meal at 112 Eatery. No, I have not promoted them from the “Once a Year” tier in my Twin Cities fine dining rotation; After our meal there in the summer we’d expected to next eat there again a year later. But as it happened, a combo of a friend’s birthday dinner and a mini-grad school reunion brought us back there in mid-September. Two of the friends we were eating with were in the Twin Cities for the first time and while I don’t think it had been picked for that reason, 112 Eatery is really a very good way to introduce people to the Twin Cities dining scene. It was a nice meal again, on the whole, though it is probably fair to say that we were reminiscing and laughing a little too much to be able to pay close attention to the food. Once again, 112 Eatery is the perfect restaurant for that kind of a meal: the food is good if you pay attention to it; but it’s not striving to be a temple of haute cuisine and you don’t feel out of place if your table gets a little too loud. Here’s a quick look at the meal. Continue reading
El Sazon Tacos & More (Eagan, MN)
This is an extremely belated review. By which I mean not that it’s being posted on a Thursday rather than my usual Tuesday for Twin Cities reports (blame my heavily jet lagged condition in Delhi) but that the place I am reporting on is fairly old news at this point. Now, I don’t mean that anyone ever looks to my restaurant reports to discover new places to eat in the Twin Cities. It’s just that the buzz around El Sazon now is not centered on their gas station-based casual food counter in Eagan—which opened in early 2022—but on the higher-end brick and mortar restaurant they opened in South Minneapolis late last year and which has received strong reviews. We’d been planning to eat at the new place ever since we got back from our travels at the end of March but I felt that we needed to first finally get out to the gas station location. Plans to do so fell through several times over the summer before the missus and I finally made it out there towards the end of October for a quick lunch. We liked the food enough to want to go back with the boys—which we finally managed to do the day before Thanksgiving. Here now is a report on both meals. Continue reading
Petite Leon III (Minneapolis)
I placed Petite Leon in the “Once a Year” tier in my Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation, along with112 Eatery, Hai Hai and Spoon and Stable. We’ve eaten at all three of those restaurants this year and so to keep up appearances it was necessary that we eat at Petite Leon as well before the year runs out. Accordingly, after a bit of reservation shuffling, we ate there this past weekend with the same friends who’d joined us for dinner there in May 2023. I think we all enjoyed this meal at least as much as we had the previous and I am glad to say it did not make me think I’d been overly generous in my estimation of them in my rankings. Though not everything we ate got us equally excited, we enjoyed every single thing we ate, as we did our cocktails; and the meal turned out to be very reasonably priced as well. Hmm maybe we should eat at Petite Leon more than once a year… Continue reading
El Chivo Crazy (Minneapolis)
In the late summer when Minnesota was suddenly in the news and a lot of people who knew or little or nothing about the state were apparently feeling an urgent need to express their knowledge of stereotypes about it, I read a particularly ignorant post by some idiot on Threads to the effect that there is no good Mexican food in the Twin Cities. A lot of Americans have seemingly not updated their view of Minnesota since the release of the Coen Bros.’ Fargo. While it’s true that the state’s population is still predominantly white (roughly 77%), Minnesota’s racial diversity has been growing steadily in the last couple of decades and the Hispanic population, in particular, has grown significantly. The Twin Cities metro, as you might expect, is more diverse than the state as a whole, and as of 2022 Hispanics formed almost 7% of the population—that may not seem like much if you live in, say, California or Texas, but it stems from a >100% increase in the Hispanic population since 2000. Mexicans are the largest subgroup and indeed are the third largest ethnic group in the state (after Whites and African Americans). If you’re not from here you shouldn’t be surprised then to hear that there are a lot of Mexican (and other Hispanic) restaurants in the metro aimed at this growing population, a lot of them very good. Continue reading
Kolap 2 (St. Paul, MN)
It’s been a while since my last restaurant report from St. Paul (on lunch at Homi); and it has been even longer since my last report on a meal at Kolap. As you may know, Kolap is the Twin Cities #2 Cambodian restaurant. It’s hard to deny Cheng Heng the top spot, both because of how long they’ve been around and because of their extensive menu. Kolap’s menu is much more edited. As at Cheng Heng, there’s a fair bit on it that’s not Cambodian per se—though, as always, a lot of food in the region crosses national borders. But it’s not hard to suss out the Cambodian specialties on the menu and the friendly staff will be only to happy to assist you in any case. The Cambodian dishes are done very well and are well worth a trip. That’s what we’d thought when we ate there in 2018 and we’d planned to come back soon. We didn’t manage it in 2019 and then the pandemic intervened and we lost sight of many a restaurant. Well, I’m glad to say we finally made it back this past weekend, accompanied by friends who we eat out with regularly. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
House of Curry, 2024 (Rosemount, MN)
House of Curry, located in Rosemount, is, as you know, the Twin Cities Metro’s premier Sri Lankan restaurant. Okay, so it’s also the Twin Cities Metro’s only Sri Lankan restaurant. But as it happens they serve very good food. We’ve always enjoyed our meals there, usually eaten in combination with an outing to the nearby movie theater. They were in our pandemic takeout rotation in 2020 (here and here) but we lost sight of them after that. I ate their food at a couple of catered events at the college over the last couple of years and kept making a note to get back there in person soon. I’m happy to say I finally managed to do so twice in the last three months. The first occasion was lunch with a friend in August, after, yes, a movie outing (Deadpool and Wolverine, if you must know). The second was dinner this past weekend with an old friend in from out of town. Here’s a quick look at both meals. Continue reading
Vinai (Minneapolis)
Chef Yia Vang’s long-planned, long-awaited formal restaurant, Vinai finally opened in Minneapolis this summer. Along with Diane Moua’s Diane’s Place (which opened in the spring), it immediately became the standard-bearer for high-end Hmong food in the state. Vinai’s opening got a fair bit of positive press, both locally and nationally. Along with Oro, they were included in The New York Times’ 2024 list of 50 best restaurants in the US (or whatever that list is supposed to be about). Well, we’ve been disappointed before by Twin Cities restaurants that have received both local and national acclaim and so it was not without trepidation that I made a reservation in September for dinner at the end of October (by which point I figured the restaurant would have worked out any kinks). We descended on them for that dinner this past weekend. I am very happy to tell you that it was one of the most enjoyable meals we’ve had in the Twin Cities this year. Here are the details. Continue reading
Spoon and Stable V (Minneapolis)
I put Spoon and Stable in the “once a year” tier in my Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation a couple of months ago. It was then drawn to my attention offline that it had been two years since my last report on a meal there. To address this situation I made a reservation for dinner there to celebrate the missus’s birthday earlier this month. We descended on them with a couple of friends we have eaten there with before and had a meal that was both very good and simultaneously an illustration of why I have them in the “once a year” tier in the aforementioned rotation and not at a higher frequency. Allow me to explain. Continue reading
Andale, Three Years Later (Richfield, MN)
I think I’d said last week that this week’s Twin Cities restaurant report would be of either a dinner we ate at 112 Eatery last month or the dinner we were scheduled to eat (and did eat) at Spoon and Stable this past weekend. Here, accordingly, is a quick report on lunch eaten at Andale Taqueria in Richfield in August. You’re welcome. This was a quick lunch eaten after a family trip to IKEA. We chose it over Swedish meatballs with lingonberry sauce and had zero regrets about having done so. This is not a slam on IKEA’s Swedish meatballs and lingonberry sauce, which we enjoy greatly when we partake; it’s just that on this occasion we were in the mood for something with some spice to it. The prospect of also stopping in at Andale’s adjoining mercado sealed the deal. Continue reading