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 →

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 →