Demi opened in Minneapolis in 2019. We ate there for the first time, not too long after, in January 2020. That meal didn’t blow us away but we liked it enough to say that we might make it an annual indulgence. But then some stuff happened in the world and we didn’t go out to eat very much for the next two years. When we did start going out to eat again they’d fallen off our radar a little bit. And so we didn’t get back there till the fall of 2022. Our response to that meal was similar to our response to the first: everything looked exquisite, a number of dishes were very good to excellent, but the whole didn’t quite add up to the sum of the parts. We left that meal thinking we’d be back two years later. Instead, it’s been four (almost exactly four, as it turns out). Did the third time finally deliver a meal that blew us away? Read on to find out. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Global Cosmopolitan
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
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
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
All Saints (Minneapolis)
All Saints opened in North East Minneapolis just about four years ago. They received acclaim from the local press almost immediately. Cynics—not me, of course—might say that it’s hard to find a high-end restaurant in these parts that hasn’t received high acclaim from the local press. But in this case the acclaim from the press was matched by a number of regular readers of this blog who wrote in behind the scenes to recommend I eat there or to ask why I hadn’t already eaten there. The answer to that question is partly that the thing that had impressed itself on my mind from the early press was that this was a restaurant with not much meat on the menu. Now, I like my vegetables but when I go out to eat I do like to have a number of fleshly options. And so they receded from view a bit. When I looked at their website again recently I noted that the menu is described as “veg forward, meat friendly”. Perhaps this slogan has always been on the menu but I’m not sure what it means right now when 50% of the menu comprises meat dishes. Well, one of the things it means is that I made a reservation and we finally descended on them this past weekend, accompanied by a couple of friends we eat out with often. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Tenant XIV (Minneapolis)
We ate a very good dinner at Tenant in June before heading off on our summer travels. At the end of my report on that meal I said that we hoped to be back later in the summer to eat the current version of their tomato water course. That tomato water course—more a genre than a specific dish—is one of our two favourite culinary ways to mark the transition from late-summer to fall in Minnesota; Alma’s chilled corn soup is the other. We ate the corn soup at our dinner at Alma in August; and I’m happy to say that when we did make it back to Tenant a couple of weeks later there was indeed a tomato water dish as part of the proceedings. I’m even happier to say that both it and the menu as a whole were excellent, surpassing our previous dinner. Here are the details. Continue reading
Restaurant Alma XVI, Summer 2025 (Minneapolis)
When summer in Minnesota begins to edge in the direction of fall, our thoughts begin to turn to two of our favourite restaurant dishes in the Twin Cities: the tomato water course at Tenant, and the chilled corn soup at Alma. Soon after our return from our summer travels, I pestered Alma’s executive chef, Maggie Whelan to find out when the soup would make a return to the menu. After the 20th of August, she said. And so I made a booking for Saturday, August 23 and arrived with my lawyer’s number ready to dial in case it (the soup, not my lawyer’s number*) was not in fact on the menu. I think you will agree that I would have ample grounds for a lawsuit if that were to be the case, my friendly relationship with the restaurant** be damned!. I am happy to inform therefore that there was no need for legal shenanigans: the soup was on the menu and we ate the soup; the soup was excellent but so was everything else we ate. Herewith the details. Continue reading
Tenant XIII (Minneapolis)
It doesn’t fully feel like summer in Minnesota till we’ve eaten dinner at Tenant. It now feels like summer in Minnesota. We went back to one of our favourite restaurants in the Twin Cities this past weekend and enjoyed another excellent meal.
We arrived a little early for our 8 pm reservation and decided to begin proceedings in their Next Door space. I am pleased to say that the vibe there is still chill and the cocktails still both priced and mixed very well. The missus got the current incarnation of their Collins (with rum, pineapple etc.) and I got their Martini. We enjoyed both drinks very much. We hadn’t gotten very far into them before we were summoned to the dining room through the interconnecting door. We were seated at the counter and it wasn’t too long before proceedings were underway. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Restaurant Alma XV, Spring 2025 (Minneapolis)
In my post, The Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation, which ranked restaurants by how many times in a year we’re likely to eat there, Alma was the only restaurant I had in the “Several Times a Year” tier. And so it should be no surprise that with less than four months gone in the year, I am posting my second report on a meal eaten there in 2025. The first was of an excellent dinner in January. That meal featured a change in how Alma’s presentation of both pricing and the menu structure. Last year a meal cost $95/head with an obligatory 21% hospitality charge added to the bill. Now a meal costs $115/head but this is an all-inclusive price with no further expectation (or ask) of tipping. And while you’re still paying for a set number of courses, the opening course of “snacks for the table” and the closing dessert courses are now the only ones in which no choices are made by diners. The three larger intervening savoury courses feature a choice of two dishes. This is a distinction without a difference for the missus and I when dining there as we share everything anyway. Which means we ate the entire menu on this occasion as well and so I can tell you from direct experience that the current early spring menu—which we were told will continue for another 2-3 weeks—was excellent as well. 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
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
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
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
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
State Bird Provisions (San Francisco, June 2024)
I had hoped to get my meal reports from our California trip in June done by the end of August; but that plan has gone the way of all my previous plans this year. The new goal is to get them all done by the end of September. This is totally going to happen!
When last seen in California, we were eating Cal-Mexican food at Mi Casa in Morro Bay. The next day we abandoned the Central Coast and drove north on the 101 to San Francisco. Our first meal after arrival was at State Bird Provisions in the Fillmore District. Here’s how it went. Continue reading