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 →

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 →

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 →

People plugged into the Twin Cities restaurant scene probably know the Oro origin story well but here’s a short version for the rest of you. Chef Gustavo Romero and his partner Kate Romero opened Nixta, a tortilleria, during the pandemic in 2020. He is a veteran of San Francisco’s fine dining world and she a veteran of the Twin Cities fine dining world (with stops at Surly’s Brewer’s Table and Travail). Nixta did brisk business with takeout meals during the height of the pandemic and beyond and this year they purchased the adjoining space and developed it into a standalone restaurant: Oro. It started out as a counter-service restaurant but is now a formal dine-in restaurant with a liquor license and cocktails and everything. It’s also probably the best Mexican restaurant in the Twin Cities metro. Or so we thought after our first dinner there this past weekend. Continue reading →