Here, finally, almost exactly four months after our return, is my last restaurant report from Dublin. We spent six very nice weeks in the city across July and August, and had some very nice meals (at Fish Shop, Mister S, Sichuan Chilli King and other places). This dinner at Bastible was, however, easily the best of our meals in Dublin, and indeed it was one of our best restaurant meals of the year (I’ll have the full list this weekend in my year-end post). The main thing that drew us to Bastible over various other contenders in its price range—not cheap but not crazy expensive either—was the fact that it was just about a 10 minute walk from where we were living. But I can tell you that if we ever go back to Dublin, we’ll be happy to take the bus across the city to eat there again. Herewith, the details. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Global Cosmopolitan
Restaurant Alma IX, Winter 2023 (Minneapolis)
For my last Twin Cities fine dining report of 2023, I have for you another dinner at Restaurant Alma, our favourite high-end restaurant in Minnesota. We ate there on two previous occasions this year (in the fall and in the spring). And, of course, back in February I did a pop-up Indian dinner with them in the Cafe Alma space. I mention this last to remind you that while I was already on record well before that with my high opinion of the restaurant, at this point I am obviously a “friend of the house”. As far as I can make out, we’re not treated any differently now than we were before but you should feel free to make whatever adjustment you see fit to account for possible bias in my estimation of our meals there. For, yes, it’s true: I am about to give you the details of another excellent dinner. Continue reading
Delahunt (Dublin, Summer 2023)
Back to Ireland, back to Dublin. The missus and I ate two high-end dinners in the city. By “high-end” I mean contemporary Michelin-bait restaurants. While Delahunt—unlike the second place—does not currently have a Michelin star, you will find it to be very much in a familiar one star genre now found pretty much all over the globe, particularly in the West. The setting is casual, evoking an unspecified vernacular aesthetic, while the cooking is fussy and mostly presented in the form of a tasting menu. This tasting menu seems spare—the one at Delahunt lists six courses—but unfurls to reveal a number of secondary flourishes and curlicues. The unkind might describe the effect of much of this as revealing a sort of culinary attention deficit disorder in the kitchen and encouraging it at the table. There is so much going on that it’s hard to be taken by very much of it. But this, as I say, is a problem with the genre writ large, not just at Delahunt. Nonetheless, it’s the general feeling we left the meal with, even as we enjoyed many elements of it. Herewith, the details. Continue reading
Mister S (Dublin, July 2022, August 2023)
Back to Dublin, back to another restaurant that I ate at both in the summer of 2022 and in the summer of 2023 (Fish Shop was the other). I first ate at Mister S (located on Camden St. Lower in a hotbed of hip places) in July 2022 when visiting Ireland for program planning. I ate dinner there with a colleague. In August 2023 I was in Dublin for a longer period, this time for the program we had been planning in July 2023 and I ate at Mister S again; this time, with an old food forum buddy: we have known each other, we calculated, for almost 20 years online but only met for the first time this August. She now lives in Germany but visits Ireland often on work and happened to be in Dublin for a few days towards the end of our stay. Both meals were very good indeed. I took notes from the earlier meal last year but never got around to posting that review—and so here is a combined report. Continue reading
Restaurant Alma VIII, Fall 2023 (Minneapolis)
Our tour of our Twin Cities favourites after a summer away continues. I’ve so far reported on meals at Homi, Tenant and Krungthep Thai. This past weekend we went back to Alma for our dinner. At this point I need to specify that it was to Restaurant Alma that we went for dinner; this because Cafe Alma (in the same building) now also serves dinner till 8 pm from Thursday to Sunday. Maybe someday we’ll give their more informal space a go for a meal as well (I do after have sentimental ties to it myself). For now, though, it was back to the flagship restaurant. Having missed out on eating one of their summer menus (the menu turns over every 6-8 weeks or so), we were very much looking forward to the current fall menu. We’d really enjoyed our dinner there at the end of September last year and we had particularly fond memories of the sweet corn-centered dishes on that menu. We were hoping for more of the same at this meal; we were not disappointed. Continue reading
Tenant X (Minneapolis)
Since getting back to Minnesota a couple of weeks ago, after a summer away, we have been slowly getting back to our favourite restaurants in the Twin Cities metro. I’ve already posted a report on our lunch at our favourite Mexican restaurant in the Cities: Homi in St. Paul. Here now is a report on dinner at one of our favourite fine dining restaurants in the Cities, Tenant. We ate dinner there a week ago Tuesday. It was our second meal there this year and our tenth overall. We particularly look forward to eating at Tenant in the summer—especially on account of one genre of dish that reliably shows up in the summer, and only in the summer. And so as our stay in Ireland came to an end, this was the first reservation I made. I am very pleased to say that the meal did not disappoint us at all. Continue reading
Petite Leon II (Minneapolis)
We first ate at Petite Leon in late 2021, after the end of the Delta wave and right at the start of the Omicron wave. The pandemic isn’t over yet, of course, but those days do seem behind us (I hope not to jinx anything). Anyway, Petite Leon then was our first indoor meal in months and we really liked it. I said then that the menu as we experienced it then was not so much Mexican as a hybridizing of Mexican ingredients and approaches with ingredients and flavours from other parts of the world: the kind of cooking, in short, that once might have been thought of as fusion but which in this incarnation I prefer to describe as Global Cosmopolitan. Anyway, though not everything at that meal was great, the average was pretty high. And so we’d expected we’d be back in 2022. Well, it took a little longer but we finally got back there with a couple of friends this past weekend. And though there were a couple of dishes that didn’t land for us, this meal may have been even better than the first. Herewith the details. Continue reading
Demi II (Minneapolis)
We first ate at Demi in early 2020, not so-very long after they opened (in 2019, as the sign outside their door proclaims). There were dishes at that dinner that we liked very much indeed. But, on the whole, we thought there were a few too many courses that looked better than they tasted. The highs were very high but the mean was quite a bit lower. Still, we liked the meal enough that I said that we’d probably come back in the summer of 2021 and perhaps make a dinner at Demi an annual indulgence. Well, courtesy the pandemic, it took another year for us to finally make our return. We ate there midweek, last week to celebrate a big number birthday for the missus. I am happy to say that we liked this meal more than the first (which is not to say that, as a renowned miserable bastard, I won’t be noting some reservations about it as well). Continue reading
Vann (Spring Park, MN)
Even by my very low standards this is a very low-utility restaurant report. I’ll tell you why in a bit. But first a bit about the restaurant. Spring Park, a western suburb of Minneapolis is located alongside Lake Minnetonka, and Vann—Norwegian for “water”—is located just across the street from the lake and boasts lovely views of it from its large windows. The chef is Erik Skaar whose path to Spring Creek included stops in Tampa Bay, Denver and Seattle before a return to the Twin Cities where he cooked at the Bachelor Farmer and Tilia before finally opening his own restaurant in late 2019. No, it wasn’t the most fortunate timing. But they made it through the first two years of the pandemic and have now seemingly hit their stride again. We finally made the trek out to Spring Park earlier this month to try their food, and we were very glad we did. Continue reading
Sooki & Mimi (Minneapolis)
As you probably know, Sooki & Mimi is the new restaurant from Ann Kim of Young Joni fame (she won a Beard award for her food there). You probably also know that it is one of the buzziest restaurants to have opened recently in the Twin Cities. The buzz really picked up two months or so ago when the New York Times included it in a list of the most exciting restaurants in the country or some such. You see, here in Minnesota we are so confident in our identity that we manage to both tell the New York Times they know nothing when they say things about us we don’t like and to fall all over ourselves in excitement when they offer the slightest bit of praise. Well, we are famously a very emotional people here in the upper midwest and it probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that we can be so volatile. Continue reading
Petite Leon (Minneapolis)
We were originally supposed to eat at Petite Leon (in Minneapolis’ Kingfield neighbourhood) in early September. We’d made those reservations in July before Delta took off. By the time September approached we were too wary about eating indoors and so cancelled the reservation. Now, of course, Omicron is the variant of concern—and Minnesota’s infection rates are still nothing to be happy about—but we still made Petite Leon our first indoor meal in the Twin Cities since our dinner at Estelle in late July. The missus and I have both received our boosters—as have the friends we dined with—and both kids are now fully vaccinated as well. As such, we are loosening some of our previous caution. Did the food at Petite Leon justify this change? Yes, it did. We thought it was very good indeed. Continue reading
Tenant V (Minneapolis)
It took till mid-July but we finally ate a meal inside a restaurant for the first time since March 2020. Sakura was the last time I ate inside a restaurant. That was not planned. We could tell restrictions were looming but we didn’t know when they would come or how long it would be before in-person dining would again become viable. Of course, in-person indoor dining’s been back in Minnesota for a few months—but we didn’t start to get comfortable with the idea until the end of June. Once we were ready to take the plunge there was not much doubt where we would go first. Tenant has become our favourite fine dining restaurant in the Twin Cities—as their predecessor, Piccolo was before them—and it was only appropriate that our return to dining in happen there. (Grand Szechuan would have been even more appropriate for the whole family but it’s only on our recent outing to Kansas City that we’ve finally taken the boys indoors to eat.) I’m happy to report that our first fine dining meal since the pandemic began was a very good one. Herewith the details. Continue reading
Demi (Minneapolis)
Demi is Chef Gavin Kaysen’s third fine dining restaurant (I think) in the Twin Cities metro. He made waves a few years ago when he returned from a long and successful stint cooking in New York to open Spoon and Stable in Minneapolis. That restaurant was an immediate sensation, receiving rave reviews and becoming almost immediately one of the hottest tickets in town. We’ve eaten there twice and enjoyed both meals (here and here). Indeed, we’d say that it is the best more or less traditional fine dining restaurant we’ve eaten at in the Twin Cities (this includes the long-gone La Belle Vie, which we found rather overrated on our one visit there). Kaysen’s second restaurant, Bellecour opened in Wayzata a few years later. It presents a menu in a more straight-ahead French bistro tradition (we have not eaten there yet). Demi, which opened in early 2019, offers a third expression yet of Kaysen’s cuisine. Continue reading
Tenant IV (Minneapolis)
We went back to Tenant for dinner a week and a half ago. This was our fourth visit. Our previous meal there was just about 6 weeks prior to this one and the one before wasn’t too much longer before that one. Both those meals were very good indeed, catapulting Tenant to the top of our Twin Cities fine dining list. They also took place at the height and end of summer respectively. We were interested to see, going into this one, how the kitchen would deal with the relatively depleted produce options of Minnesota in the late fall/early winter. Well, our experience was a little mixed. This was probably the least of our meals there so far. But only some of this was likely down to the market offerings of the season (no more tomato water!). It’s more the case that going every six weeks or so, as we’ve been doing since mid-summer seems to have resulted in a bit of deja vu. While none of the courses were identical to those at our last meal there was some sameness. Now you might say that this is an odd criticism—most restaurants have far more static menus. But one of the things we enjoyed most about Tenant on our previous visits was surprise and there wasn’t much surprise at this meal. Which is not to say, of course, that it wasn’t a good dinner in its own right—for it was. And keep in mind that this is not a problem you would have on your first visit there or if your visits were spaced further apart. Continue reading
Tenant III (Minneapolis)
I said in my review of our second dinner at Tenant—in July—that we were already planning a return trip in September. And for a change I was not a liar. We made reservations for the first weekend of September as soon as spots were available, and so it came to pass that at 6 pm last Saturday we sat down at their counter once again. Our second dinner had surpassed the first and we were curious to see what we would make of our third. Sorry to kill the suspense so soon but we thought it was excellent and perhaps, top to bottom, an even better meal than the previous. Indeed, it’s becoming hard to see how we will give our fine dining dollars to any other Twin Cities establishment. Herewith the details.
Tenant II (Minneapolis)
Tenant opened in the old Piccolo space, just a month or so after that great restaurant closed in the spring of 2017 (though in Minnesota it may still have been winter). We tried to go eat there a few times that first year but it wasn’t until the fall of 2018 that we finally managed it. We really liked that meal and wanted to go back a lot sooner than in another year and a half. Alas, between our schedules, travel and the difficulty of scoring seats at the tiny restaurant it was almost another year before we made it back for our second meal. That was last weekend. We liked this meal even more and I think we are both ready to say that it may in fact now be our favourite and quite likely the best fine dining restaurant in the Twin Cities metro. Depending on your view of fine dining in the Twin Cities you may think this faint or high praise but either way Tenant is very good indeed. And we are already plotting a return in September. Continue reading
Canis (Toronto, June 2019)
From classic bistro fare in Montreal to an altogether more modernist meal in Toronto. Canis opened in downtown Toronto in 2016 and has apparently moved fairly quickly up the city’s fine dining charts. They show up at #27 in all of Canada in one of those restaurant ranking lists and if there are 26 better restaurants in the country then Canadians are doing very well indeed. The truth, of course, is that these restaurant ranking lists are all silly and highly subjective—just the next evening I ate at another place in Toronto that is higher in those rankings and thought Canis was far superior. Indeed, I thought my meal at Canis was the best fine dining meal I’ve eaten in a long time, far superior to anything I’ve eaten in the Twin Cities since the heyday of Piccolo. Outside the Twin Cities, I think I would have to go back to our dinner at Hotel Herman in Montreal in October 2016 to come up with one as good; and to Hedone in London in August of that year for one that might have been better. (All three of the aforementioned restaurants, alas, are now closed.) Continue reading