Tag Archives: Twin Cities Dining

Restaurant Alma XIV, January 2025 (Minneapolis)

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[A reminder: my regular restaurant reports are now being posted on Wednesdays, not Tuesdays.]

My first restaurant report of 2025 was of a couple of lunches at Hoa Bien in St. Paul. Those meals were, however, eaten in 2024. With the missus off in Los Angeles by herself through the first week of the year, we didn’t go out to eat in Minnesota for the first time till this past weekend. I am glad to report that we managed to start the year off very well in gastronomic terms, with dinner at our favourite fine dining restaurant in the Twin Cities: Alma. As it happens, Alma is also doing something new in 2025 and we ate a very early iteration of it. Read on to find out more. Continue reading →

112 Eatery V (Minneapolis)

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Here is my second report this year on a meal at 112 Eatery. No, I have not promoted them from the “Once a Year” tier in my Twin Cities fine dining rotation; After our meal there in the summer we’d expected to next eat there again a year later. But as it happened, a combo of a friend’s birthday dinner and a mini-grad school reunion brought us back there in mid-September. Two of the friends we were eating with were in the Twin Cities for the first time and while I don’t think it had been picked for that reason, 112 Eatery is really a very good way to introduce people to the Twin Cities dining scene. It was a nice meal again, on the whole, though it is probably fair to say that we were reminiscing and laughing a little too much to be able to pay close attention to the food. Once again, 112 Eatery is the perfect restaurant for that kind of a meal: the food is good if you pay attention to it; but it’s not striving to be a temple of haute cuisine and you don’t feel out of place if your table gets a little too loud. Here’s a quick look at the meal. Continue reading →

Petite Leon III (Minneapolis)

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I placed Petite Leon in the “Once a Year” tier in my Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation, along with112 Eatery, Hai Hai and Spoon and Stable. We’ve eaten at all three of those restaurants this year and so to keep up appearances it was necessary that we eat at Petite Leon as well before the year runs out. Accordingly, after a bit of reservation shuffling, we ate there this past weekend with the same friends who’d joined us for dinner there in May 2023. I think we all enjoyed this meal at least as much as we had the previous and I am glad to say it did not make me think I’d been overly generous in my estimation of them in my rankings. Though not everything we ate got us equally excited, we enjoyed every single thing we ate, as we did our cocktails; and the meal turned out to be very reasonably priced as well. Hmm maybe we should eat at Petite Leon more than once a year… Continue reading →

Vinai (Minneapolis)

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Chef Yia Vang’s long-planned, long-awaited formal restaurant, Vinai finally opened in Minneapolis this summer. Along with Diane Moua’s Diane’s Place (which opened in the spring), it immediately became the standard-bearer for high-end Hmong food in the state. Vinai’s opening got a fair bit of positive press, both locally and nationally. Along with Oro, they were included in The New York Times’ 2024 list of 50 best restaurants in the US (or whatever that list is supposed to be about). Well, we’ve been disappointed before by Twin Cities restaurants that have received both local and national acclaim and so it was not without trepidation that I made a reservation in September for dinner at the end of October (by which point I figured the restaurant would have worked out any kinks). We descended on them for that dinner this past weekend. I am very happy to tell you that it was one of the most enjoyable meals we’ve had in the Twin Cities this year. Here are the details. Continue reading →

Spoon and Stable V (Minneapolis)

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I put Spoon and Stable in the “once a year” tier in my Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation a couple of months ago. It was then drawn to my attention offline that it had been two years since my last report on a meal there. To address this situation I made a reservation for dinner there to celebrate the missus’s birthday earlier this month. We descended on them with a couple of friends we have eaten there with before and had a meal that was both very good and simultaneously an illustration of why I have them in the “once a year” tier in the aforementioned rotation and not at a higher frequency. Allow me to explain. Continue reading →

Oro III (Minneapolis)

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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 →

Tenant XII, Fall 2024 (Minneapolis)

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We ate at Tenant at the beginning of June, right before we headed off to California. Though there were things we enjoyed at that meal, it was not our favourite of our recent meals there. But as I said at the end of that report, it wasn’t going to keep us from going back. Given how much we enjoy their take on fine dining, odds were good that we’d have no quibbles about the next meal, especially if it included their usual end-of-summer tomato water course. I am happy to report that our meal there two weekends ago did include a tomato water course, that it was very good, and that the rest of the meal was excellent as well. Here are some details. Continue reading →

Restaurant Alma XIII, Late Summer 2024 (Minneapolis)

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My term starts on Monday which means summer is truly about to end. But in a way summer already came to a close at the end of August for it is then that Alma served their last bowl of chilled corn soup for the year. Despite this soup having been a recurring staple at Alma since they opened in 1999, we somehow ate it for the first time in September 2022. We utterly loved it. We ate another version in September 2023—this one was also very good (even if it wasn’t chilled). We were planning to go back this September to eat it again but seeing repeated mentions of it on Instagram, I was not able to wait and we grabbed a table for Saturday, August 31. And it turned out to be a close call: our server informed us that it was the last weekend of the late summer menu featuring the corn soup! This means this is an even lower utility restaurant report than my usual: you couldn’t go eat this menu at the restaurant if you wanted to. Anyway, the soup was outstanding and the rest of the meal was not far behind. Here are the details. Continue reading →

The Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation

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If you thought you saw a version of this post yesterday but then couldn’t find it again, no, you were not imagining things. A first draft of this post was accidentally posted yesterday. Here now is the complete version, though you may not find it to be so. By this I mean that this is not meant to be a comprehensive survey of the Twin Cities “fine dining” scene. I have not eaten at every Twin Cities restaurant that aspires to or is covered by that label. Nor is it intended as a ranking per se or at least not in the usual sense. For one thing it’s not based (only) on the pure merits of restaurant kitchens and dining rooms, on how good the food or hospitality is. Instead, it’s based on the question of how often we (usually meaning the missus and me, with or without friends, but also occasionally our kids as well) would likely return to a given restaurant; i.e what our personal rotation is, given the limited number of meals per year we can give to this expensive genre. Continue reading →

Hai Hai 2 (Minneapolis)

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We ate at Hai Hai for the first time in 2019. Despite some service-related hiccups—beginning with an unconscionably long time to be seated—we quite enjoyed the meal and at the end of my write-up of that meal I said there would certainly be a second visit. Well, it’s taken more than five years for that second visit to happen. As you may remember, things went topsy-turvy for a few years in early 2020. And then when we got fully back into the eating out swing of things, Hai Hai somehow fell off our radar. It took a James Beard award nomination and then win this year for Chef Christina Nguyen to put it back on there. I’d grabbed a reservation earlier in the summer and this past weekend we descended on them for dinner with friends we eat out with often. Here’s how it went. Continue reading →

112 Eatery IV (Minneapolis)

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We returned to 112 Eatery in 2022 after a long break (see here for my write-up) and since then eating there seems to be threatening to become an annual thing for us. We went back in October 2023 for the missus’ birthday dinner with the boys in tow—they’d also accompanied us in 2022 and loved the food (see here for the write-up of that meal). And when the younger boy was asked where he would like to go for his 13th birthday this year, he picked 112 Eatery. And so there we were again last weekend, sitting at the same table we sat at last year, feeling a slight sense of deja vu. Here’s how this year’s meal went. Continue reading →

Oro II (Minneapolis)

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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 →

Restaurant Alma XII, Summer 2024 (Minneapolis)

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A couple of days after we returned from California at the end of June, I received a WhatsApp call from my mother in the morning, and that is how the missus and I learned that it was our wedding anniversary. This is an annual event: the next time we remember on the day of—or even a week prior—that it is our wedding anniversary will probably be the first time. But as it was a signifcant’ish number (21), we decide to try to go out and mark it with a nice meal, even though we’d been eating out pretty much every day for the previous two-and-a-half weeks. Our first choice, of course, was Alma. We couldn’t do that evening but I was able to grab the last table for two in the dining room for the day after (a Saturday). We arrived happy to eat their still new summer menu. And it did not let the occasion down. Continue reading →

Tenant XI, Summer 2024 (Minneapolis)

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Here is the long-promised report on the dinner we ate at Tenant in the beginning of June before going away to California. I don’t know why I’ve been apologizing so much for the delay in posting this when I still have three reports to come from Seoul in March. Well, that’s not entirely true: as Tenant’s menu changes every six weeks or so, my already-low utility approach to reviewing restaurants may have reached the point of total irrelevance with this report. By which I mean that there’s a good chance that this menu has totally turned over in the intervening period. Well, while this may not give you a good sense of what exactly you might find if you ate at Tenant very soon, it should, hopefully, give you some sense of the kind of thing to expect. Continue reading →

Kim’s (Minneapolis, MN)

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The business calculus involved in opening any expensive restaurant is complex. It is all the more so in the US for restaurateurs/chefs seeking to feature the foods of a cuisine that isn’t very prominent in the market they want to open a restaurant in; especially when the market, broadly speaking, still does not have a very sophisticated understanding of non-mainstream cuisines (in most parts of the US, this would be anything other than American, Italian and Mexican cuisines). The market I am most interested in, obviously, is Minnesota, specifically the Twin Cities metro. This is a region in which, in the year 2024, many East Asian groceries of one kind or the other still bill themselves as “Oriental” and where even in food-centered groups on Facebook requests for recommendations for Chinese restaurants routinely receive responses that list Thai or Vietnamese restaurants (or vice versa). This is not to say that there are not a lot of restaurants in the Twin Cities that specialize in the cuisines of different parts of Asia; merely that these remain largely marginal and outside the purview of the prominent food media outlets that disseminate knowledge of the local scene. Continue reading →

Restaurant Alma XI, Spring 2024 (Minneapolis)

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Here is a quick report on the second of two meals we ate at Alma in a span of just over two weeks. The first meal was one of our regular meals out. The missus and I ate one of the last outings of Alma’s winter 2024 menu (and enjoyed it very much indeed). 16 days later we were back with a much larger group and this time we ate one of the earliest outings of the current spring menu. This was a retirement dinner for one of my colleagues and in keeping with his long service and the high regard in which we hold him we decided to throw him a farewell dinner at a fine restaurant in the Twin Cities. Alma was at the top of our wishlist and as it happened there was no other restaurant that could have accommodated our group as comfortably as they did. And the food was not half bad either. Continue reading →

Restaurant Alma X, Winter 2024 (Minneapolis)

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We welcomed ourselves back to Minnesota a few weeks ago with a big lunch at Grand Szechuan. The estranging effects of three months away are not so easy to shake off, however. Well, now that we’ve eaten dinner at Alma we’re truly back in Minnesota. Note: while the title of this post says “Winter 2024”, we ate there this past weekend, and not even the most pessimistic Minnesotan would say that April is winter. It’s just that this was part of their winter menu cycle; the switch over to spring is about to happen in a week or so, we were told. Well, whatever the season, a meal at Alma is a good thing; and this meal was a very good thing. Continue reading →