We first ate at Oro in late 2023, not too long after they opened. We liked that meal very much. Our second dinner there was in the summer of 2024. And we liked that meal even more. Accordingly, I listed them in the “Twice a Year” category in the first edition of my Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation last year. But then our second meal there last year was not so great. This was largely due to some service missteps but none of the dishes got us quite so excited either as those at our first two meals there had. As a result, they were not high on our list for this year’s dining out in the Cities. But as I get ready to issue Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation 2.0, I figured we should go back and see how things stand a year later. And so we descended on them last week for dinner on Saturday night. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Twin Cities Mexican
Tacos El Kevin (Minneapolis)
We really need a historical survey of the Twin Cities metro’s casual Mexican restaurants. As I never tire of telling people who don’t live in Minnesota, there is a large and growing Mexican (and more broadly Hispanic) population here and a large and growing Mexican food scene to match. This is, of course, true almost everywhere in the US now, but casual Mexican is probably the most dependable category of food in the Twin Cities metro now. No matter where you go you are probably not more than a 5-10 minute drive from some excellent tacos, quesadillas and more. Someone more steeped in the scene than me should map all these places (to the extent it would be possible to map them all) and annotate them briefly with years of founding, names of proprietors and chefs and so on. I am not equipped to do that for you; but I can tell you what we thought of our lunch this past Sunday at an excellent place to grab tacos and more in South Minneapolis: Tacos El Kevin. Continue reading
Taqueria La Hacienda (Minneapolis)
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
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
Andale, Three Years Later (Richfield, MN)
I think I’d said last week that this week’s Twin Cities restaurant report would be of either a dinner we ate at 112 Eatery last month or the dinner we were scheduled to eat (and did eat) at Spoon and Stable this past weekend. Here, accordingly, is a quick report on lunch eaten at Andale Taqueria in Richfield in August. You’re welcome. This was a quick lunch eaten after a family trip to IKEA. We chose it over Swedish meatballs with lingonberry sauce and had zero regrets about having done so. This is not a slam on IKEA’s Swedish meatballs and lingonberry sauce, which we enjoy greatly when we partake; it’s just that on this occasion we were in the mood for something with some spice to it. The prospect of also stopping in at Andale’s adjoining mercado sealed the deal. Continue reading
Oro III (Minneapolis)
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
Homi, August 2024 (St. Paul, MN)
It’s been a while since we’ve eaten at Homi, almost exactly a full year in fact (my last write-up of a meal there was posted on August 29, 2023). Homi has long been our favourite affordable Mexican restaurant in the Twin Cities metro—and until Oro came along it might even have been our favourite Mexican restaurant of any kind in the Twin Cities metro. This is not on account of just their food (which has always been very tasty) or their menu (which has always been far more expansive than those at most other affordable Mexican restaurants). It’s also because of their hospitality. The pandemic and then inflation has been very hard on small restaurants (and other small businesses) that don’t have very many resources to fall back on. But Homi has managed to stick it out through it all so far with their trademark warmth. This is their 15th year of operation—that’s a pretty good number in this business but in truth they feel like an institution that’s been around longer. They deserve all the support they can get to keep things going. To that end, here’s a quick writeup of a recent lunch there with friends we’ve eaten with at Homi many times before. Continue reading
Oro II (Minneapolis)
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
Homshuk + Bodega 42 (Apple Valley, MN)
Late last fall I heard talk about a new Mexican market that had opened in Apple Valley. Before I could investigate, we went away for three months to Bombay and Seoul and I forgot all about it. And so when my friend Ben P. alerted me last week to the presence of Bodega 42, raving about everything they had bought there, it was only going to be a matter of time before I got there. Checking out their website, I discovered that they also have a restaurant right next to the market, named Homshuk. Accordingly, earlier this week the missus and I drove up to Apple Valley for lunch and a bit of shopping. This is what we found. Continue reading
Oro (Minneapolis)
People plugged into the Twin Cities restaurant scene probably know the Oro origin story well but here’s a short version for the rest of you. Chef Gustavo Romero and his partner Kate Romero opened Nixta, a tortilleria, during the pandemic in 2020. He is a veteran of San Francisco’s fine dining world and she a veteran of the Twin Cities fine dining world (with stops at Surly’s Brewer’s Table and Travail). Nixta did brisk business with takeout meals during the height of the pandemic and beyond and this year they purchased the adjoining space and developed it into a standalone restaurant: Oro. It started out as a counter-service restaurant but is now a formal dine-in restaurant with a liquor license and cocktails and everything. It’s also probably the best Mexican restaurant in the Twin Cities metro. Or so we thought after our first dinner there this past weekend. Continue reading
Homi, August 2023 (St. Paul, MN)
Hey, it’s a Twin Cities restaurant report! We were in Europe for nine weeks this summer, first in Italy on vacation and then in Ireland on work. We ate well in both countries, particularly in Italy and I’m not complaining about our time away. But when you’re gone for nine weeks, there are things you take for granted at home that you are invariably going to miss and hanker for. And for us, when going to most parts of Europe from the US, at the top of that list food-wise are most Asian cuisines and also Mexican cuisine. Now, as it happens, we found surprisingly good Sichuan food in Dublin—and also better dim sum than is available in the Twin Cities. Unsurprising, though, is that Mexican food in Ireland does not have the best reputation. This was drilled into our heads by every American we met who’d eaten at some Mexican restaurant or the other in Dublin, and after a few repetitions we decided not to put that to the test. So when we got back to Minnesota last week the thing we really wanted to go out to eat was Mexican food. And what better place to go than Homi on University Avenue in St. Paul? Continue reading
Petite Leon II (Minneapolis)
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
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
El Triunfo to Start Another Year (Northfield, MN)
My first restaurant report of 2022 was a brief round-up of a few meals eaten at El Triunfo in 2021. And my first restaurant report of 2023 is of a few meals eaten at El Triunfo in 2022. El Triunfo, as you may remember, is a small Mexican restaurant in our town of Northfield, Minnesota. When I first wrote them up on the blog, many years ago, I referred to them as our favourite restaurant in our town. This is still the case. The restaurant scene in Northfield has not remained static in the past decade but that’s not to say it’s improved radically—though there have been some welcome additions (Tin Tea and Coco’s Place among them). El Triunfo remains, however, and it remains reliably dependable for what it does: putting out an edited menu of basic Mexican fare; they push no boundaries and follow no trends, but the food is predictably tasty and always a good deal. And they remain an essential part of our town’s cultural geography. Continue reading