Here is the third edition of my Twin Cities Metro Indian/South Asian Restaurant Rankings. I posted the original in December 2020 and the follow-up in December 2021. At the end of that 2021 update I promised various things that I would do before the 2022 update. These included checking out the a la carte offerings from a couple of places I had only tried the lunch buffets at; trying the prominent Nepali restaurants in the metro; checking out Raag, Pizza Karma and the Muddy Tiger food truck; and checking out a location each of the Taste of India and India Palace chains. I am pleased to tell you that I only got around to doing one of these things: getting takeout from the India Palace in Burnsville. We had plans to eat at Everest on Grand and Himalayan that fell through at the last moment on a couple of occasions; and I only discovered at the end of the year that Muddy Tiger had been showing up regularly outside a bar in our town! I would promise that in 2023 I will keep the promises I made for 2022 but best not to over-extend myself. Continue reading →

Just about a year ago I published my first-ever “Highly Subjective Ranking of Indian Restaurants in the Twin Cities Metro Area“. That list was occasioned by recognition of the fact that the Indian food scene in the Twin Cities at the end of 2020 was almost wholly transformed from what it had been like when we arrived in Minnesota in 2007. And also by the fact the mainstream food media and their readers continue to be largely unaware of these developments. Now I don’t pretend to have a very large reach on this blog but I was happy to see that post shared and re-shared by many people on various Twin Cities food groups on Facebook. And though it was posted with just a week left in 2020 it quickly rose into the top 5 most read posts of the year. And it’s been read consistently in 2021 as well (it’s currently in the top 3 most read posts of the year). Here now is an updated second edition. Continue reading →

I have argued before that we are currently in a new era of Indian food in the Twin Cities metro. Indeed, I’ve gone on about it on more than one occasion (most recently, here) and so I will spare you yet another replay of the whole dissertation. Suffice to say, there’s been a quantum leap in the last few years in the quality of Indian food available in the metro area and that the mainstream food media in the Cities has been all but completely quiet about it. This development—the former, not the latter—took us by surprise. When we arrived in Minnesota in 2007 the Indian food scene was quite bleak. In those pre-blog times we tried a couple of the North Indian places everyone recommended to us and were never moved to go back. Then in 2014 I first attempted a survey of the scene to see where things stood then and had to abandon it after the second stop. The last half-decade or so, however, has seen an influx of white collar Indians to the area and specifically people from the South Indian states. This has been reflected in the offerings at Indian groceries around town and in the arrival of a number of restaurants that are parts of franchises that operate elsewhere in the country where large populations of Indians can be found: Bawarchi, Hyderabad House, Kumar’s, Godavari. All in all, a new Indian food scene has emerged, one that exists in parallel with the old one of North Indian curry houses, which continues to be what the local food media and non-Indian reviewers on Yelp etc. largely focus on. Continue reading →