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
Tacos El Kevin (Minneapolis)
We really need a historical survey of the Twin Cities metro’s casual Mexican restaurants. As I never tire of telling people who don’t live in Minnesota, there is a large and growing Mexican (and more broadly Hispanic) population here and a large and growing Mexican food scene to match. This is, of course, true almost everywhere in the US now, but casual Mexican is probably the most dependable category of food in the Twin Cities metro now. No matter where you go you are probably not more than a 5-10 minute drive from some excellent tacos, quesadillas and more. Someone more steeped in the scene than me should map all these places (to the extent it would be possible to map them all) and annotate them briefly with years of founding, names of proprietors and chefs and so on. I am not equipped to do that for you; but I can tell you what we thought of our lunch this past Sunday at an excellent place to grab tacos and more in South Minneapolis: Tacos El Kevin. Continue reading
Tim Ho Wan, Yongsan-gu (Seoul, July 2025)
Just a few more reports to go from our trip to Seoul in July. We made a few returns on this trip: to Gwangjang Market, to Gwanghwamun Gukbap, and to Oreno Ramen (the first visit for me, the second time for the missus and the boys). This report is of a lunch that was also a return of a kind. One of our very last meals in the city in March 2024 had been an excellent dim sum lunch at the Samseong location of Tim Ho Wan, the famous Hong Kong-based dim sum chain. Now, it’s not like eating Chinese food would normally be a high priority in Seoul but when you live in a dim sum desert like Minnesota, you have to take every opportunity to eat high quality dim sum that you get. As it happens, we thought that lunch was even better than at the better dim sum places in the San Gabriel Valley outside Los Angeles. And so it was a given that we would return on this trip as well. And we did—but not to the location we’d eaten at in 2024. Continue reading
Vago Ensamble, Tio Rey
Mezcal Vago has a colourful origin story—which you can read on their website—and bottles with colour-coded labels that are not very easy to read. The most important information comes—since, I think, their brand design a couple of years ago—from the colour of the label, which indicates which of the four Oaxacan mezcaleros they work with has produced the spirit in the bottle. The deep red label of this bottle, for instance, identifies the mezcal as the handiwork—and I do mean handiwork, as the cooked agave is mashed by hand before fermentation and distillation in barros or clay pot stills—of Salomon Rey Rodriguez, better known as Tio Rey. The broad strokes are legible enough on the front of the label: the mezcal is an ensamble comprised of spirit made from the espadín, arroqueño and coyote magueys. But if you want to find out the exact composition from the side of the label, you’ll need very strong eyes and/or reading glasses. As the owner of eyes that are weaker every year, and of very cheap reading glasses, I needed to take a picture with my phone and blow it up to read the text. I was eventually able to make out that this batch contains 68% espadín, 20% arroqueño and 12% coyote; and also that every ensamble produced by Tio Rey is unique in composition and therefore profile. (And it turns out that, in keeping with the general handmade ethos of the operation, even the labels are produced from the recycled mash from the distillation.) So unless it’s from the same batch as mine (see the lot number below), these notes may not have much to do with your bottle of Vago Ensamble from Tio Rey. With that caveat, let’s see what this is like. Continue reading
Oreno Ramen, Insadong (Seoul, July 2025)
My last meal report from our brief trip to Seoul in July was of dinner at a place we’d eaten at on our previous, longer visit in February/March of 2024: Gwanghwamun Gukbap. This report too features a return, but not to a place I had eaten at in 2024. Towards the end of that trip, after an afternoon’s wandering in one part of Seoul or the other, I had abandoned the family and headed off to Noryangjin Market to take a few of my students whose birthdays had fallen during our Seoul sojourn out to dinner at a seafood restaurant there. The missus and the boys meanwhile, accidentally emerged from Entrance 1 of the Anguk subway station near where we were staying in Insadong, turned into an alley in search of dinner and randomly walked past and then into a ramen restaurant. There they ate what they—particularly our younger boy—described to me as the best ramen they’d ever had. However, they couldn’t remember the name of the place—and since the last days of the program we were on were incredibly hectic, I never chased it down. But when we made our plan to return to Seoul this summer, the younger boy had it high on his wishlist; partly because he wanted me to try it as well, but mostly because he wanted to go back in his own right. So, we took Line 2 to Anguk and emerged from Entrance 1 and without too much trouble found the place again: Oreno Ramen. We were all curious to see what we would make of it after eating ramen in Tokyo just a few days previous. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Soul Lao (St. Paul, MN)
Soul Lao started out as a food truck some six or seven years ago. About two years ago they finally opened a brick and mortar location (on W 7th in St. Paul). They flashed upon my radar at the time but then I lost sight of them till long-time blog reader and commenter (and backchannel intel-provider), Jim Grinsfelder wrote me a note a few weeks ago to recommend them. Accordingly, we sallied forth two weeks ago, Saturday to finally check them out. We arrived shortly after opening time to discover that…they were randomly closed that day. We were disappointed but the day was not lost—we drove 10 minutes to the other side of W. 7th and had an excellent lunch at Hot Grainz. And this past Saturday we finally made it into Soul Lao. Was it worth the wait? Read on to find out. Continue reading
Gusto Historico, Madrecuixe, Victor Ramos
I opened this month’s booze reviews with a mezcal (this excellent ixterro amarillo from Chacolo) and so I may as well close the month’s reviews with another mezcal. This is a release from Gusto Historico, an outfit set up by Marco Ochoa, one of the founders of Mezcaloteca, a well-known mezcaleria in Oaxaca. They are relatively new to the American market. They feature mezcals that are all made, I believe, in Miahuatlán in Oaxaca. They work with a number of maestros but the few releases I’ve seen in stores in the Twin Cities all seem to be made by Victor Ramos (whose mezcal has also been released by Mal Bien). Such was the release, a tobala, that I reviewed just about a year ago and such is the release I’m reviewing today: made from the madrecuixe maguey. This species of maguey apparently takes a long time to mature and has a low yield, which means it mostly appears in small-batch releases. I think this may be my first-ever madrecuishe—I’ve only taken baby steps into the world of mezcal over the last couple of years—and so I can’t tell you how typical this particular expression is of the broader varietal. I can tell you that I’ve had the bottle open for a few days now and have really been enjoying it. Here now are my notes. Continue reading