My last two Twin Cities restaurant reports have been from the high end of the market: Oro and Tenant. Let’s now go back to the more affordable end of the price spectrum. Price, of course, has no necessary bearing on quality or enjoyment of a meal; and it certainly doesn’t when the affordable meal is at Grand Szechuan in Bloomington. As I’ve said before, it is our family’s favourite restaurant in Minnesota, and is the place we eat at more than any other. It having been a dangerously long time since our last meal there (about two months ago), we went back this weekend for a bit of a blowout lunch. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Category Archives: Minnesota
Oro III (Minneapolis)
It’s been a big year and change for Oro. They opened in the summer of 2023 and at the end of the year were named the Restaurant of the Year by the Star Tribune. This spring they were on the shortlist for a James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant (in the entire country). And just last month they landed on the 2024 edition of the New York Times‘ The Restaurant List, which they describe as a list of “[O]ur 50 favorite places in America right now”. It was already not easy to get prime time dinner reservations in Oro’s small dining room and now it’s going to be that much harder. Thankfully, I had made reservations for our next dinner there not too long after our second visit in July (the first was last November). And so this past weekend we ate there for the second time this year. Did we enjoy the dinner as much as we had the the first two? Read on to find out. Continue reading
Tenant XII, Fall 2024 (Minneapolis)
We ate at Tenant at the beginning of June, right before we headed off to California. Though there were things we enjoyed at that meal, it was not our favourite of our recent meals there. But as I said at the end of that report, it wasn’t going to keep us from going back. Given how much we enjoy their take on fine dining, odds were good that we’d have no quibbles about the next meal, especially if it included their usual end-of-summer tomato water course. I am happy to report that our meal there two weekends ago did include a tomato water course, that it was very good, and that the rest of the meal was excellent as well. Here are some details. Continue reading
Godavari, Summer 2024 (Eden Prairie, MN)
It appears that it has been more than a year since I last reported on an Indian or other South Asian restaurant meal in the Twin Cities. And that was a review of lunch at Pizza Karma in Apple Valley—not exactly the kind of thing most people think of when they think of Indian food. What can I say? We don’t go out to eat Indian food in the Twin Cities very much more than we go out to eat Korean food. Given how much I cook at home, it’s just not a priority, even though—as I have noted on many occasions in the past—the Indian food scene in the metro has improved dramatically in the last 5-6 years as more South Indian restaurants have opened to feed the new population of South Indian immigrants in the area. Anyway, let’s address my neglect of my people’s restaurants with a look at a couple of lunches eaten this summer at the place that has topped my previous rankings of Indian/South Asian restaurants in the Twin Cities metro: Godavari. Continue reading
Restaurant Alma XIII, Late Summer 2024 (Minneapolis)
My term starts on Monday which means summer is truly about to end. But in a way summer already came to a close at the end of August for it is then that Alma served their last bowl of chilled corn soup for the year. Despite this soup having been a recurring staple at Alma since they opened in 1999, we somehow ate it for the first time in September 2022. We utterly loved it. We ate another version in September 2023—this one was also very good (even if it wasn’t chilled). We were planning to go back this September to eat it again but seeing repeated mentions of it on Instagram, I was not able to wait and we grabbed a table for Saturday, August 31. And it turned out to be a close call: our server informed us that it was the last weekend of the late summer menu featuring the corn soup! This means this is an even lower utility restaurant report than my usual: you couldn’t go eat this menu at the restaurant if you wanted to. Anyway, the soup was outstanding and the rest of the meal was not far behind. Here are the details. Continue reading
Homi, August 2024 (St. Paul, MN)
It’s been a while since we’ve eaten at Homi, almost exactly a full year in fact (my last write-up of a meal there was posted on August 29, 2023). Homi has long been our favourite affordable Mexican restaurant in the Twin Cities metro—and until Oro came along it might even have been our favourite Mexican restaurant of any kind in the Twin Cities metro. This is not on account of just their food (which has always been very tasty) or their menu (which has always been far more expansive than those at most other affordable Mexican restaurants). It’s also because of their hospitality. The pandemic and then inflation has been very hard on small restaurants (and other small businesses) that don’t have very many resources to fall back on. But Homi has managed to stick it out through it all so far with their trademark warmth. This is their 15th year of operation—that’s a pretty good number in this business but in truth they feel like an institution that’s been around longer. They deserve all the support they can get to keep things going. To that end, here’s a quick writeup of a recent lunch there with friends we’ve eaten with at Homi many times before. Continue reading
Lèpot (Minneapolis)
No, not fondue, Chinese hot pot.
I was alerted to the existence of Lèpot (or is it Lè Pot?) about a month ago in the comments on my writeup of Kung Fu Hot Pot. I actually ate lunch there just a few days after that but it’s taken me a long time to get to writing it up given my ongoing backlog issue. Anyway, here is that writeup now. I ate lunch there by myself on a Saturday in mid-July en route to Surdyk’s to check out their summer sale (I restricted myself to just one bottle of mezcal, because I am restrained like that). Getting to and away from Lèpot was a bit of a trial on account of road construction on surface streets and ensuing traffic snarls but the meal itself was simple enough to sort out. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Hot Grainz II (St. Paul, MN)
Back in early June I posted a quick write-up of lunch eaten with friends at Hot Grainz, the (relatively) new Northern Thai restaurant in the Sunrise Plaza on University Ave. (where else?) in St. Paul. At the end of that review I noted that we’d be back soon. For a change, I am not a liar. We’ve actually been back for lunch twice this summer, most recently late last week. Here is a quick writeup of both meals. Spoiler alert: we loved both of them and I think I am ready to pronounce Hot Grainz the best Thai restaurant in the Twin Cities, even though we just also ate a very good lunch at Bangkok Thai Deli in July. Is this too high praise? Should I wait till we’ve gone back again to On’s and Krungthep Thai? Probably; but I didn’t get where I am today (nowhere) by being temperate. Continue reading
The Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation
If you thought you saw a version of this post yesterday but then couldn’t find it again, no, you were not imagining things. A first draft of this post was accidentally posted yesterday. Here now is the complete version, though you may not find it to be so. By this I mean that this is not meant to be a comprehensive survey of the Twin Cities “fine dining” scene. I have not eaten at every Twin Cities restaurant that aspires to or is covered by that label. Nor is it intended as a ranking per se or at least not in the usual sense. For one thing it’s not based (only) on the pure merits of restaurant kitchens and dining rooms, on how good the food or hospitality is. Instead, it’s based on the question of how often we (usually meaning the missus and me, with or without friends, but also occasionally our kids as well) would likely return to a given restaurant; i.e what our personal rotation is, given the limited number of meals per year we can give to this expensive genre. Continue reading
Hai Hai 2 (Minneapolis)
We ate at Hai Hai for the first time in 2019. Despite some service-related hiccups—beginning with an unconscionably long time to be seated—we quite enjoyed the meal and at the end of my write-up of that meal I said there would certainly be a second visit. Well, it’s taken more than five years for that second visit to happen. As you may remember, things went topsy-turvy for a few years in early 2020. And then when we got fully back into the eating out swing of things, Hai Hai somehow fell off our radar. It took a James Beard award nomination and then win this year for Chef Christina Nguyen to put it back on there. I’d grabbed a reservation earlier in the summer and this past weekend we descended on them for dinner with friends we eat out with often. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Grand Szechuan, Summer 2024 (Bloomington, MN)
Yes, I am aware that I did not post the last New York and Seoul restaurant reports from my winter and spring travels that I’d said I’d post this past weekend. Let’s not dwell on that. Let’s instead look to the present and to the Twin Cities metro. It has been a dangerously long time since my last Grand Szechuan report—a full four months, in fact—and so here is a mid-year check-in. It comprises a look at two separate meals eaten just a couple of weeks apart in July and August. The first was a small affair with just the four of us in attendance; the second featured a larger group of seven. At the first meal we placed a fairly basic order of ye olde Sichuan cliches; the second was quite a bit more extensive (and also had more than twice as many dishes). Both meals were very good; the second was truly excellent. Here is a quick report on both. If you haven’t been eating at Grand Szechuan this summer, it’s not too late to correct your error. Continue reading
Bangkok Thai Deli, July 2024 (St. Paul, MN)
It’s been two months since my last writeup of a meal in St. Paul and somehow it’s been more than two years since my last writeup of a meal at Bangkok Thai Deli. I am happy to fix both oversights in one go. Since my last report of lunch there in May 2022 we’ve eaten Thai meals in St. Paul at On’s Kitchen, Friends Cafe (okay, that was really a Burmese meal), Krungthep Thai, Thai Cafe and most recently at Hot Grainz. I have in the intervening period proclaimed both Krungthep Thai (Bangkok Thai Deli’s satellite location) and then Hot Grainz to be perhaps the current best Thai restaurant in the Twin Cities. Well, after a belated return to Bangkok Thai Deli I can only say that it would be a mistake to pass them over too quickly. Here’s how our lunch there this past weekend went. Continue reading
112 Eatery IV (Minneapolis)
We returned to 112 Eatery in 2022 after a long break (see here for my write-up) and since then eating there seems to be threatening to become an annual thing for us. We went back in October 2023 for the missus’ birthday dinner with the boys in tow—they’d also accompanied us in 2022 and loved the food (see here for the write-up of that meal). And when the younger boy was asked where he would like to go for his 13th birthday this year, he picked 112 Eatery. And so there we were again last weekend, sitting at the same table we sat at last year, feeling a slight sense of deja vu. Here’s how this year’s meal went. Continue reading
Oro II (Minneapolis)
Oro opened last year in the space next to Nixta in Northeast Minneapolis. We ate there in November for the first time and loved our meal. Indeed, it showed up in short order on my list of top 10 formal restaurant meals eaten in 2023. We would have loved to have come back again very soon to try the next iteration of the menu but we then took off for Bombay and Seoul for three months. By the time we got back to the Twin Cities in March, they had become a much hotter ticket and reservations were not available in the spring on days that worked for us. Then they got a Beard nomination for Best New Restaurant of the year (that’s for the whole country) and, as you might imagine, that did not help with the reservations situation. But back in May I managed to snag a table for four in early July and so we arrived there for our second dinner a week or so after we got back from California. After all this hassle and fuss, what was our experience? Well, the second dinner was even better than the first. Here are the details. Continue reading
Restaurant Alma XII, Summer 2024 (Minneapolis)
A couple of days after we returned from California at the end of June, I received a WhatsApp call from my mother in the morning, and that is how the missus and I learned that it was our wedding anniversary. This is an annual event: the next time we remember on the day of—or even a week prior—that it is our wedding anniversary will probably be the first time. But as it was a signifcant’ish number (21), we decide to try to go out and mark it with a nice meal, even though we’d been eating out pretty much every day for the previous two-and-a-half weeks. Our first choice, of course, was Alma. We couldn’t do that evening but I was able to grab the last table for two in the dining room for the day after (a Saturday). We arrived happy to eat their still new summer menu. And it did not let the occasion down. Continue reading
Tenant XI, Summer 2024 (Minneapolis)
Here is the long-promised report on the dinner we ate at Tenant in the beginning of June before going away to California. I don’t know why I’ve been apologizing so much for the delay in posting this when I still have three reports to come from Seoul in March. Well, that’s not entirely true: as Tenant’s menu changes every six weeks or so, my already-low utility approach to reviewing restaurants may have reached the point of total irrelevance with this report. By which I mean that there’s a good chance that this menu has totally turned over in the intervening period. Well, while this may not give you a good sense of what exactly you might find if you ate at Tenant very soon, it should, hopefully, give you some sense of the kind of thing to expect. Continue reading
Pho Tempo III (Burnsville, MN)
Last year I posted two reports on meals eaten at Pho Tempo, the current incarnation of the erstwhile Saigon Deli, the restaurant attached to Saigon Market in Burnsville (here and here). I pronounced it easily the best Vietnamese restaurant we’ve eaten at in the South Metro and among the very best in the Twin Cities proper. In mid-2024 I can tell you that I still do not have any reason to revise that evaluation. Pho Tempo has become part of our regular rotation and indeed part of our regular monthly grocery shopping routine. This routine involves a long outing with stops at Costco (for staples), Hana Market (for Korean ingredients) and Mantra Bazaar (for Indian ingredients). In between we stop at Saigon Market to buy pompano and greens and usually also to eat lunch at Pho Tempo. Since returning from our Bombay/Seoul program in late-March we’ve eaten there four times on this itinerary. Here now is a quick report on all those meals. Continue reading