Tongue in Cheek opened in 2014 in a part of St. Paul that apparently has a checkered past. It has received decent reviews from the professionals (see this enthusiastic writeup from Rick Nelson in the Star Tribune) and was also recommended to me in the comments on my review of Grand Cafe, where I asked for recommendations for more places doing interesting things under the radar. I put it on my list then and in mid-August we met two friends for dinner there on a weeknight. And I’m sorry to say that I had mixed feelings about it (and they were shared by the rest of the table, I think). It’s not that it was a bad meal (though some things were not good); it’s more that too many things suffered from excess of one kind or the other: too many elements in some plates, too much superfluous technique for its own sake, too many on-trend things on one menu, too much of an effort to be inventive for its own sake. There’s talent in the kitchen but it’s trying too hard, I thought. On the evidence of the better dishes at our meal this would be a better restaurant if it just calmed down and kept things a little simpler.  Continue reading →

Heirloom opened in St. Paul late last year and while it wouldn’t be accurate to say that it has set the cities on fire it has already acquired a strong reputation. The chef, Wyatt Evans is another W.A. Frost graduate (like Russell Klein of Meritage). His new restaurant offers what it calls “modern farmhouse cuisine”. I’m not entirely sure about the farmhouse part but the restaurant’s general approach—lots of pickled veg, foams, crumbles and powders on top of things, an emphasis on seasonal ingredients, bread you pay for, a beer list etc.—certainly is in line with contemporary trends, as is its aesthetic and general air of informality. It’s a large, bright restaurant, with lots of wood and glass, an active bar area with its own menu, and lots of room between tables: a very nice space and not too loud—at least not in the back where we were seated. It’s true that it’s located right off a street with the name Cretin Avenue, but you can’t have everything. Continue reading →

When we first got to Minnesota in 2007 the two restaurants that came up most often when we asked for recommendations for places to eat were La Belle Vie and 112 Eatery. 112 Eatery was still relatively new (they opened in January 2005), La Belle Vie was already an institution. Eight years later, 112 Eatery is seemingly still going strong but La Belle Vie will be closing at the end of the month. I do not bring this up to suggest that 112 Eatery is the better restaurant per se; but there may be some evidence here of the survival of the fittest in the original Darwinian sense.  Continue reading →

Towards the end of my recent dinner at Travail, while waiting for the next course in what had long before begun to feel like an interminable meal, I began to idly try to come up with versions of book titles to describe the meal so far. Here are the best I could manage: A Series of Unfortunate Courses and A Supposedly Fun Meal I’ll Never Eat Again. No, I really did not enjoy my meal. Yes, I actively disliked it. Before I get into the details of the meal and the very basic reasons for my lack of enjoyment of it, a little bit of background on and description of the restaurant for those who don’t follow these things. Continue reading →

I’ve been meaning to get to Corner Table for a while for my very slow rotation through the current big names on the Twin Cities fine dining scene. For one reason or the other it hasn’t worked out in the past but this weekend we finally got there. It was a pretty good meal, on the whole, but it somehow simultaneously disappointed anyway. Well, I shouldn’t be vague, I know exactly why it disappointed: it was a meal that mostly pleased on the plate and palate but felt very unimaginative and by the numbers. This could be any number of restaurants in any number of cities in the United States and if you’ve been to enough that work this genre of contemporary American cuisine you could probably predict the contours of 85% of the menu without even looking at it. I’ll expand on this below but first let me show you pictures of what we ate (there were four of us; two of whom had been there at least twice before). Continue reading →

Sea Change is the restaurant at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. It opened a few years ago to rave reviews and continues to be rather popular and well-received. I had one middling to poor dinner there with friends a couple of years ago and was not terribly motivated to go back. However, this year there was some noise around an omakase dinner program they had in January, and I believe there’s a different chef now than when I ate there last; and so as we tried to figure out where to go after our excellent meal at Piccolo last month it seemed like a decent bet. And as we were dining with a bunch of friends it seemed like a good opportunity to get a lot of what’s on the current menu and see if my prior experience might have been due only to bad luck in ordering. Continue reading →

Here is your Twin Cities fine dining report for February. Borough, which opened last year, has received a lot of good press, locally and nationally, and after a good grounding dinner at Alma last month we were ready to once again try somewhere new. We had reservations at Borough for late dinner last Saturday with a group of friends and then a major storm hit southern Minnesota and snarled up the highways. It seemed at first that we would have to cancel–we have a 50-60 minute drive up to the cities, and there were reports all through Thursday and Friday of cars and semis crashed/spun out on the highway, and Saturday morning didn’t look promising either. Reports looked up in the afternoon, however, and we decided to chance it anyway (our friends live in the city). It probably wasn’t the smartest decision–the roads weren’t terrible the whole way but there were a few white-knuckle icy stretches. We arrived at the restaurant ready for some wine and hoping like hell that the meal would be worth it. Well, on the whole, it was. Continue reading →