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
Tag Archives: Twin Cities Korean
Cook St. Paul (St. Paul, MN)
When last seen on these pages Cook St. Paul was the location of Golden Horseshoe, a Sichuan “residency” that ran for two months this summer, whose passing we are still mourning (my second review is here). At the time Cook St. Paul was essentially a diner, with breakfast their largest draw and no dinner service—which left room for them to host pop-ups. Not too long after the end of the Golden Horseshoe run the proprietor, Eddie Wu announced on Facebook that the restaurant was going to change form in October, now serving only lunch and dinner. This was greeted with some ambivalence by their patrons who were attached to their breakfast offerings. We, however, were intrigued. We live too far away to have ever made it there for breakfast and were interested to see what the new incarnation would be. Continue reading
Sole Cafe (St. Paul, MN)
Here is a report on one of the last meals we ate out in the Twin Cities before I left for my current trip to Hong Kong and India (I’m now on the last leg, in Delhi after a week in Hong Kong and five days in Bombay). This was a rare Korean outing for us, at Sole Cafe. Sole Cafe is located on Snelling, a few blocks from University Avenue—which was, as you may recall, proclaimed by plebiscite the Twin Cities’s true eat street (or at least unilaterally by me). We have not been inclined to eat Korean out much since we got here. The reasons for this are two-fold: 1) the missus cooks it at home; 2) the places that were described to us as the Twin Cities’ best we found to be just about whelming—such were Hoban in Eagan and the food counter attached to Dong Yang in Columbia Heights. The less said about the erstwhile Rabbit Hole‘s Korean food the better. However, in recent months a number of people have recommended Sole Cafe to us and so we decided to finally give it a shot. We were very pleasantly surprised by the meal. Continue reading
The Rabbit Hole (Minneapolis)
The Rabbit Hole’s first incarnation, about four years ago, was as the Left-Handed Cook, a counter among many other counters at Minneapolis’ Midtown Global Market. Run by two young, ex-Angeleno Korean-Americans, Thomas and Kat Kim (and named for her nickname for him), the Left-Handed Cook was quite popular when it opened. We never got around to eating there, though we’d always talked about doing it (we just haven’t been eating much at the Midtown Market in recent years). Then in late 2013 they closed it down and re-opened a little later within the Midtown Market as a proper sit-down restaurant, the Rabbit Hole. We talked about eating there as well for a good while and now we’ve actually gotten around to doing it. I wish I could say we liked it as much as we were hoping we would. Continue reading