Two weeks ago, I posted the second edition of my Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation. At the end of that post—and also at the end of my most recent review of Oro, posted a week earlier—I referred to another upcoming Twin Cities restaurant list, one whose purview would not be limited only to “fine dining” restaurants. Here now is that list. I call it the Twin Cities 52. The title might put you in mind of the long-running Eater 38 but, unlike that list, mine does not seek to provide a “heat map”. Indeed, many of the Twin Cities’ hottest restaurants are not on this list (just as they’re not on either edition of the Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation). I wouldn’t know what was hot if I were sitting on it. Instead, this is simply my current list of the 52 Twin Cities restaurants that I would go out to eat at in the Twin Cities over the next year if I were here all year and wanted to eat at a different restaurant each week (we very rarely eat out more than once a week when not traveling) with an eye on variety and our budget. As such, it will give you a better sense of my/our family’s preferences than the Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation might. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Twin Cities
The Weekend Buffet at Indian Masala (Maplewood, MN)
I’ve had Indian Masala—along with Godavari—at the top of the 2020 and 2021 editions of my Twin Cities Indian restaurant rankings but until last weekend we had never eaten in the restaurant. We first ate their food in late 2020—during what we’d then naively thought was the height of the pandemic—and then again as takeout in 2021. On the first occasion I’d gone in to pay and the long-neglected interior had not looked very prepossessing. Once they opened back up I had reports of the dining room having been more or less redone and looking much shinier. I also heard lots of promising reports of the special buffets they’d begun to run. (Most of these reports came to me via Mike McGuinness—the man behind the excellent East Metro Foodies group on Facebook and almost certainly Indian Masala Fan #1.) They now have special vegetarian/vegan buffets during the week and occasional Indian Chinese buffets as well. And on Saturdays and Sundays they put out what they call their Grand Weekend Buffet. Given our high opinion of the food from their regular menu, this seemed like a promising situation and so—having made our return to in-person dining last weekend at Grand Szechuan—we showed up last Saturday to partake of it with a couple of friends. How was it? Read on. Continue reading
The Year in Pandemic Takeout
The year is almost done. It’s hard to say when the pandemic will be done though. I’m guessing we’re going to be in the mode we’ve been in for the last nine months till at least the start of the summer before vaccination gets more widespread and infection rates drop meaningfully. There will therefore be more accounts of pandemic takeout meals before it’s all over and we can go back to eating in restaurants with friends. Hopefully, the restaurants will all still be there too. There have been a number of closures in the Twin Cities over the course of the year but as far as I can make out the toll has been heaviest at the high end where there are higher overheads and tight margins. The smaller, immigrant-owned restaurants that we eat at most of the time seem to have mostly weathered the storm—so far (though it’s hard to tell with the minimal coverage of these places in the local media outlets which, by and large continue to identify the local food scene with high-end and white restaurants). And some new places have even opened at the height of the pandemic. Continue reading
Bawarchi (Plymouth, Minnesota)
As mentioned a few days ago, I am starting a slow-motion survey of some of the luminaries of the Indian restaurant scene in the greater Twin Cities metro area. Why? Read on. (Or if you want to just skip to the review of Bawarchi scroll down a fair bit.)
I’ve lived in the US for 21 years now and learned from experience long ago to avoid most Indian restaurants, regardless of location. Short version of the reason: almost all of them run the gamut from mediocre to very bad. And somehow, most American foodies don’t get this even if in the last 10-15 years their awareness of and ability to make meaningful distinctions with various other Asian cuisines has expanded dramatically. The most obvious and striking parallel is with China, another large country with a dizzying variety of regions and cuisines. While the dominant mode of Chinese food in the US is still the Panda Express model, the major metros have a fair bit of granularity, with Sichuan usually leading the way. Certainly, the knowledge base of the average American food writer and foodie is much higher re various Chinese cuisines than it used to be in 1993 (I take this arbitrary date as a reference point as that’s when I arrived in the US). The same, alas, is not true of Indian food—leave alone the average foodie I can’t think of a single well-known American food writer who can be trusted on Indian food. Continue reading