We didn’t eat out in the Twin Cities this past weekend because we weren’t in the Twin Cities this past weekend. If you pay attention to my posts on Instagram you’ll know that we were in New York and New Jersey for a few days. We ate out more than a couple of times on that trip and reports on those meals will start showing up on the blog once I get done with my remaining reports from our summer’s travels in Japan, South Korea and India. Today, however, I do have a Twin Cities report for you, as per usual. That’s because I had a report in my back pocket from August and September. We had lunch together as a family at La Hacienda back in August between errands in Minneapolis; and then a few weeks later I went back by myself on the way back from an outing to get some knives sharpened (at Eversharp Knives). Here is a quick look at both meals together. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Tacos
El Super Taco x 2 (Burnsville + Apple Valley, MN)
After a string of write-ups of meals at more expensive/fancy restaurants (Tenant, Hyacinth, Bucheron), let’s close out the month in restaurant reviews with a report from the opposite end of the spectrum.
I’ve been thinking for a while that I need to spend more time exploring casual Mexican restaurants in the southern suburbs of the Twin Cities. We’ve been seeing more and more of these on the occasions when we take the scenic route from Burnsville or Apple Valley down to Northfield where we live but we haven’t really tried any of them (beyond Homshuk). Which brings us, in a roundabout manner, to El Super Taco. They have two locations: the original in Burnsville and another in Apple Valley. Continue reading
Taqueria Los Paisanos (St. Paul, MN)
I said last week that our next meal out in the Twin Cities was likely going to be at Taqueria Los Paisanos in St. Paul and, for a change, I am not a liar. The boys and I ate lunch there on Saturday on our way to pick up the returning missus from the airport (we also squeezed in a quick stop at Ha Tien in between). We hadn’t eaten Mexican food in a while and were jonesing for tacos in particular. I am very pleased to say that Los Paisanos was not a letdown. This will not be a surprise to anyone who has eaten there before—it was our first time—or to anyone who knows how solid the Twin Cities’ Mexican food scene is. I really feel that the local media needs to do a better job of broadcasting this information: affordable Mexican food may be the single-most reliable genre of food in the Twin Cities. Which, I suppose, may be true of every large city in the US at this point. It’s just that a lot of people—including many people who live here—don’t know that Minnesota has a large and growing Mexican population and, as a result, an ever-expanding Mexican food scene. Continue reading
El Sazon Tacos & More (Eagan, MN)
This is an extremely belated review. By which I mean not that it’s being posted on a Thursday rather than my usual Tuesday for Twin Cities reports (blame my heavily jet lagged condition in Delhi) but that the place I am reporting on is fairly old news at this point. Now, I don’t mean that anyone ever looks to my restaurant reports to discover new places to eat in the Twin Cities. It’s just that the buzz around El Sazon now is not centered on their gas station-based casual food counter in Eagan—which opened in early 2022—but on the higher-end brick and mortar restaurant they opened in South Minneapolis late last year and which has received strong reviews. We’d been planning to eat at the new place ever since we got back from our travels at the end of March but I felt that we needed to first finally get out to the gas station location. Plans to do so fell through several times over the summer before the missus and I finally made it out there towards the end of October for a quick lunch. We liked the food enough to want to go back with the boys—which we finally managed to do the day before Thanksgiving. Here now is a report on both meals. Continue reading
El Chivo Crazy (Minneapolis)
In the late summer when Minnesota was suddenly in the news and a lot of people who knew or little or nothing about the state were apparently feeling an urgent need to express their knowledge of stereotypes about it, I read a particularly ignorant post by some idiot on Threads to the effect that there is no good Mexican food in the Twin Cities. A lot of Americans have seemingly not updated their view of Minnesota since the release of the Coen Bros.’ Fargo. While it’s true that the state’s population is still predominantly white (roughly 77%), Minnesota’s racial diversity has been growing steadily in the last couple of decades and the Hispanic population, in particular, has grown significantly. The Twin Cities metro, as you might expect, is more diverse than the state as a whole, and as of 2022 Hispanics formed almost 7% of the population—that may not seem like much if you live in, say, California or Texas, but it stems from a >100% increase in the Hispanic population since 2000. Mexicans are the largest subgroup and indeed are the third largest ethnic group in the state (after Whites and African Americans). If you’re not from here you shouldn’t be surprised then to hear that there are a lot of Mexican (and other Hispanic) restaurants in the metro aimed at this growing population, a lot of them very good. Continue reading
Mi Casa (Morro Bay, June 2024)
I said I’d have the last of my New York reports from May this weekend but here’s a report from Morro Bay in June instead. New York, California: same thing really.
When last seen in California on the blog, we had just started our drive up from Seal Beach to San Francisco and had stopped in Santa Barbara for a Cal-Mexican lunch at Taqueria El Bajio. I’d said at the end of that post that I’d have more to say later about dinner that day. Dinner that day had been set to be at Mi Casa in Morro Bay but we didn’t make it. On the way there we got a flat tire outside Cayucos and our evening was taken up with waiting for Alamo/Enterprise’s roadside assistance to show up and then being towed to San Luis Obispo Airport to pick up a new car. By the time we got done with all of that the only place open nearby was a Burger King and we ate a Whopper-based dinner before returning to our hotel in Cambria. But we did make it to Mi Casa the next evening for dinner. Here’s a quick look at the meal. Continue reading
Taqueria El Bajio (Santa Barbara, June 2024)
Let’s keep the California reports moving. We were last seen eating out in Greater Los Angeles at Chengdu Taste in Alhambra. A couple of days later we headed north towards San Francisco. We took the scenic route to get there, literally: we went up the 101 to Santa Barbara and then took Highway 1 up the coast to Cambria. We stayed a couple of nights in Cambria, venturing further up the coast on Highway 1, before heading inland, back on the 101 to San Francisco. I’ll have a few meal reports to come from our days in San Francisco but here, first, is the lunch we ate in Santa Barbara, just a few hours after setting out from Seal Beach. Continue reading
El Itacate (Maplewood, MN)
The quality of the Twin Cities’ Mexican food scene seems to still be more of a secret than it should be. Inside and outside the state, I suspect this largely stems from stereotypical ideas of who is recognized as Minnesotan. Now, it’s true that Minnesota is still overwhelmingly white and that of largely northern European extraction. But non-white populations are rising steadily—and Hispanics in general, and Mexicans in particular, are a large part of that. As per the 2020 census, there are now >340,000 Hispanics in the state, making them the third-largest racial group in the state (African Americans are in second place); the growth in this population has accounted for >25% of the entire population growth of the state in the last 20 years. (And keep in mind that it is believed that the 2020 census may have significantly undercounted the Hispanic population.) With this growing population it is hardly surprising that the number of Hispanic and, in particular, Mexican restaurants is also steadily growing. There may not be huge regional variety yet in the food that’s available but much of what is now available is really quite good. That’s certainly the case at El Itacate, which opened in Maplewood just about three months ago. Continue reading
Los Ocampo Restaurant and Bar, Suburban Ave. (St. Paul, MN)
As I’ve said before, when we first arrived in Minnesota 15 years ago, Los Ocampo’s outposts—first at their counter in the Midtown Global Market and then at Taqueria Los Ocampo across the street on Lake St.—were among our Mexican mainstays. We also ate occasionally at the Taqueria Los Ocampo location on Arcade St. in St. Paul. All of these locations are casual, counter-service places. Somehow, however, we never ended up visiting their more formal restaurant and bar which opened on Suburban Ave. in St. Paul in 2011 (they’ve since opened another sit-down restaurant on University Ave. in St. Paul). That finally changed this past weekend when we descended on the Suburban Ave. location with a couple of friends we dine out with often. Here is what we found. Continue reading
Orale (Minneapolis)
A month and a half ago I took the boys up to Fridley for taekwondo belt testing (yes, I know it’s a bad idea to get them training in how to beat us up). I’d wanted to stop at Tangletown Gardens on the way back to buy some vegetable seedlings for my community garden patch. We ran away screaming when we saw the prices but didn’t go very far. Just around the corner is Orale, a casual Mexican restaurant that was our port of call for a quick lunch before heading home. I’d heard up and down things about its likely quality but based on the options in the neighbourhood it seemed like the best bet for us. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Grand Central Market (Los Angeles, July/August 2014)
Grand Central Market in downtown Los Angeles received a major (ongoing) facelift a little over a year ago, consonant with the ongoing gentrification of downtown in general. The entire area has been transformed utterly from what it was when I first arrived in Los Angeles in 1993, right after the riots. Then, the “fortress” of the financial district, as Mike Davis memorably describes it in City of Quartz, was largely deserted after the close of business, and the experience of the rest of downtown was in stark contrast to the gleaming skyscrapers and business hotels that had been constructed in the middle of it, a “self-referential hyperstructure”, to once again use Davis’s language. Continue reading