I’m writing from a hotel room just outside of Duluth, with a white noise machine blaring. I pack it, usually, for the dogs, but tonight I need it for a different reason. The toilet in my hotel room runs every five minutes or so. The shower drips. The AC has an uneven tone to it, like the sound of a wave, except it’s a metal, mechanical sound. Bzzt, it crescendos, Tzzb, it decrescendos. I asked at the front desk about a different room, and before moving all my things, the front desk attendant offered to let me look in another room. “They’re all the same,” she said with a shrug. “With their own problems.” I did check two others out, and both did, indeed, have their own problems, so I stuck with the one at the end of the hall, far from the pool and the sounds of breakfast.

One of my dogs, the oldest, lies on the floor in front of the white noise machine, like you or I might in front of a window. I wonder if the sound is comforting to him, familiar. It normally runs in my house all day and all night. It’s the sound he hears when he sleeps, the sound he hears echoing in my bedroom when I’m not there. My youngest dog is curled in a ball at my feet, snoring. And my middle dog, who passed a few months ago in the middle of chemo, sits in a picture frame on my bedside table.

I’m thinking of a woman who I recently met at a fancy restaurant bar. “It must be glamorous,” she said of my life on the road. Fulfilling, yes. Glamorous, no. “Does it get lonely?” she asked me as she took a sip of her cocktail that had a single slim ice cube in it.

**

At home, in a house I once thought was my forever home, I feel lonely sometimes. There are three bedrooms, specifically chosen for the idea that one day, maybe, I would have a child. In 2023, I wanted a child badly enough that I thought I might try to have one alone. The problem–and it’s a big problem–is that in order for me to have children who don’t share the gene that gave me cancer at 34, I would need to zap out half the embryos. This in and of itself is a problem, sure, but there are two other problems with this: the cost of the test to determine which of those embryos needed to be tossed and the fact that my egg reserves were lower than other women my age.

In 2023, a doctor laid out a piece of paper in front of me and did the math. At the top, she started with all the eggs. Then she narrowed those eggs down to how many embryos I might have, drawing little lines like you might for a family tree. She X-ed some out because it is unlikely that they would all be viable. Then she X-ed out half the embryos again, assuming 50% carried the gene, and in the end, I was left with 1.5 viable embryos, or as she put it, “One or two shots.”

“Now, you might have more than that,” she said, “Or–”

She didn’t need to finish her sentence, “I might not have any.”

“Right,” she said. “But then we could do another round of egg retrieval.”

When I got home, I sat in an empty room that would eventually become my office and imagined it as a nursery. I was 31, and like all things in my life, I didn’t want to wait for a partner or a spouse to do the things I wanted to do. I wanted the baby.

**

When I weighed the decision of whether I would try or not, I found myself in infertility Facebook groups and talking to infertility organizations. I wanted to hear stories of people who had conceived with low odds and people who hadn’t. The people who had been successful called their babies miracles. When I asked them in direct messages if they would do it all over again, they said, “Yes.” The havoc wreaked on their bodies, the rounds and rounds of IVF that made them feel on the edge of insanity, the cost was all worth it. “‘Do it,” they said, hoping their miracle was contagious and would pass onto me.

The other women, the ones who did not conceive, their stories were ones of counting down the embryos until there were zero. Their stories were about rounds of those same difficult treatments, all the hormones going into their body to prepare for a child and then… nothing. Many of them told me they took out loans or accumulated credit card debt for the chance at a child that did not come. These women didn’t want to tell me, “Don’t do it.” They wanted me to have hope. But when I asked them, “Would you do it all over again if you had a choice?” all of them said, “No.”

How do I weigh these two very disparate things? Do I, like optimists, hope to be in the minority? Or, do I hear my doctor inform me that after multiple rounds of egg retrieval my chances of conception are probably below 30% and say, “I’m going for a VERY EXPENSIVE miracle?” I am sure there are other women who would have tried to have a moonshot baby, but I’m a person who has never stepped foot in a casino. I’ve never bought as much as a pull tab, never bet on a single horse. I don’t play the game when I know the odds.

In the fall of that year, my fallopian tubes came out. I entered a clinical trial to see if fallopian tube removal prevents ovarian cancer in a high-risk population.

For months before the surgery, I traveled the country and stopped into every boutique children’s store I saw. At one, in Portland, there were matching outfits for mothers and daughters. I remember the way it felt to see one where both outfits were covered in teeny, tiny strawberries. I have always dressed a bit like Ms. Frizzle and always hoped to have matching leather jackets with a baby–how twee, how silly, how fun.

With a tiny dress in my hand, the tears pooled in my eyes in the store, and the woman who worked the front asked me, “Has it been hard?” She meant conceiving, and I didn’t know how to tell her that it was a different kind of pain. It wasn’t the pain of trying. It was the pain of, “There’s really no point in trying at all.” How do you grieve something you didn’t even try for?

When my fallopian tubes were removed, my ability to conceive naturally was carved out of my body. And for why? To maybe save my life. I remember when I woke up from the surgery, there was a feeling of loss. I hadn’t been greedy, hoping for four or five children. I had just wanted one. I felt her in the room, hanging out like a ghost.

**

My ovaries were still inside of me, but with each year, the eggs diminished. I found myself in a house I bought for a child I likely would never have, in the school district I wanted my kid to be in, by the playground I used to walk to with kids I nannied because it was my favorite one. It has always felt a little bit like it was haunted by a ghost. I changed my dating profile to be as clear as I could about this, with phrases like, “I can’t have kids, but I’d love to meet yours!” Still, I found myself on dates with so many men who wanted children that it baffled me.

I told each of them the truth. I would try. I would. But under circumstances that felt impossible. They needed to be able to afford IVF, or have a benefit for it at work, and I wanted to stay home for the first few years of the child’s life. In this economy, there aren’t many people who fit that bill, and so we often went our separate ways if someone wanted children.

Then, two things happened at the same time.

The first is that I met someone named Devon* and they said to me, “There’s something I haven’t told you, and I feel bad for not telling you.” Sitting across from each other, they confessed, “I think I want to raise a child.”

*Devon uses he and they pronouns, and so you will see both used here.

I felt like a balloon that had been shot with a dart and instantly burst open. I was living in Groundhog Day. Then, it went from I think I want to, to, I want to. It was something I had heard before. Being face to face with a woman who can’t or likely can’t makes people really think about what they want. I don’t blame them. I have been a conduit for more men than I’d like to admit, finally realizing they want children. It is a painful thing to experience, your supposed inability to have children being the reason another person decides, “Yes, this is the beautiful life I want to live.”

When I told Devon the spiel I had given so many times, it now hurts to say, they did not say, “No.” They said a very sensible, “Let me run the numbers.”

The second thing that happened is that I went into chemo-induced menopause, with my ovaries shut down, maybe to restart again, and maybe not.

These two things happened at the same time. Like maybe I was so close to a dream that was always destined to die.

CHAPTER 2

I kept dating during my cancer treatment. It was a distraction from the hard things going on, but it also just made me feel normal. I changed how I dated during this time. I swiped left and right not on hotness but based on, “Do I think that this person could handle the cancer?”

Before I gave people my phone number, I told them all I had cancer. Most people with cancer wait longer, but I felt like I wanted to know immediately if this was something they could handle. I expected most of them to tell me that they did not want to go out on a date with me. But the only person who ever told me that was the person I was dating at the time I was diagnosed.

Every date I went on with a person who seemed unafraid of my cancer was one I took seriously. In many ways, this was a deeply unsexy time in my life. I was fatigued. I lost over half my hair. I puffed up all over. I was “toxic” much of the time, meaning no one could kiss me. But every single person who said things like, “Fine by me,” or just simply, “I’m sorry that’s going on. Not a dealbreaker,” was someone I felt drawn to. These were people who could do in sickness. People who can do in sickness are spouse material.

I went on dates with a variety of people during this time, like a man who brought flowers to the first date and then told me he missed me two days later, leaving me baffled. There was a librarian who spent the entire date talking about his fancy, vintage jacket from Japan and telling me about low-calorie swaps for Reese’s. There was a bisexual illustrator who worked in weapons. I had to ask them to repeat where they worked, because I was sure I misheard. Finally I had to admit, “I can’t date someone who illustrates manuals for… war criminals.”

There was a man seven years my junior who I took for pizza in the suburbs. While we waited for it, he wrapped his arms around me and put his chin on my head. He joked that if I lost my hair, he would call me Cailou, and while most people might think this crass, I found it endearing. He didn’t give a shit if I was going to lose my hair. The problem was that our lives were so different, there was no way to join them.

There was a real, actual shaman who I went on seven dates with until I finally said, “Oh my god, why don’t you touch me?” He sent a multiple-page long worded document about why he did not touch me. SEVEN PAGES. I did not read past the first paragraph, which told me all I needed to know to confirm this man was not my husband.

Then, there was a man who was seemingly written into the universe for me. He was a blue-collar communist who managed all aspects of a building at a retirement home. He wanted to move to the country, found the city overwhelming, read constantly, and he drove a truck. He wore flannel and rock t-shirts to every date. He sent me selfies from the roof he was fixing or a thumbs-up next to a boiler or photos of the meals he cooked every single night in a tiny, crappy kitchen. He was sober, but he smoked like a chimney. When I told people about him, they laughed. More than one person said, “That’s your husband.” One friend said, “Is this a fantasy? Did you make this guy up?” I didn’t. He was real. And being beside him felt good.

There was just one problem. On every date I was on with him, I thought about Devon.

**

Devon and I met outside on a patio when it was still technically winter. It was a patio that was open, mostly, year-round at Hai Hai. The patio butted up against the bar on one side, with windows that would open, so I felt safe dining there without a mask during the early days of treatment. The day we met, we weren’t the only people on the patio. It was forty degrees out, and people around town knew that Hai Hai was the place to go. The patio was covered, so there was no snow, while most other patios were waiting to “dry out.”

I was less than a week out of my second chemo, in a precious window where I tried to protect my mouth from things like heavily fried foods (they could cut open my cheeks) or spicy food (it could cause mouth sores). When Devon ordered, he wanted a spiiiicy dish of cauliflower and fried chicken. I didn’t tell them about my mouth, I just said yes. Sitting across from him felt like both a mix of being with someone familiar and someone altogether foreign to me. I couldn’t read them, but conversation flowed. We talked about his father who had cancer–and then my cancer. We were both bisexual, so we talked about that. Operation Metro Surge had just ended, and for both of us, we had given so much of our time to fighting it, we were navigating how to live our lives again. He still had a whistle around his neck, that’s how fresh it was.

At the end of the date, we hugged and went our separate ways. I was composing a text message to them about how I wasn’t sure if they were interested, but if they were, I would like to go on another date. Before I could send it, he had texted me. He said he had forgotten the plant he wanted to give me in his car. He said that he would give it to me next time. That was clear enough for me. I deleted my text.

**

Devon and I didn’t really date the way I was used to. We kind of meshed lives. On our third date, we went to trivia with my friends. On our sixth date, I went over to their friend’s Easter party and participated in the most competitive egg hunt I ever experienced. I took him bowling with my best friend, who usually had harsh things to say about my dates. Instead, here, there were only glowing reviews. I cooked for him and invited his friends over for brunch when the first ramps of the season poked up from the ground. I made them quiche, a crisp of last season’s peaches and blueberries, and bacon from my favorite farmer.

Before we had been dating for a month, my dog died. They came over with flowers, saying goodbye by kissing his forehead. And then he came with me to a wedding seven weeks into dating. I didn’t know how to refer to him, so I just called him “Devon.” The next day, my cat died. I felt like all around me, my life was falling apart. In a hard year, they were a bright spot. I always looked forward to seeing them, always left feeling better than when I arrived.

When it was just us, we watched Married at First Sight Australia, which we started like a prayer on our fifth date. The prayer? Maybe we can stay together long enough to finish this together. I took them with me on restaurant review visits. We watched television in his basement while he bench pressed and squatted multiple hundreds of pounds. In some ways, we moved at a glacial pace, not kissing for many dates–and in others, we moved fast enough that it might throw someone who is afraid of commitment into a panic attack. Our relationship bloomed around things other than the physical. It bloomed around both of us trying to figure out what a life might look like together.

Normally, I dated people with a lot more distance, in bite-sized timestamps, at distinct locations. 90 minutes in a restaurant. Two hours in a coffee shop. An hour at a market. It took a long time for me to let someone into my home. It had been almost two years since someone stayed the night at my house. To date this way was foreign to me, and I was doing it as my life fell apart. It was vulnerable and tender, for this to happen at such a hard time in my life.

I was falling for Devon–and I was worried that the failure of my body would doom it from the outset. Sitting across from them at A Bar of Their Own, tears in both of our eyes as we discussed the potential of breaking up over this whole mess about kids, I felt the pull to be a mother again. It was one of the things I kept feeling since I was diagnosed. All around me, my life was breaking, and still I yearned for a child. Cancer made me want that more. Made me hunger for it more. It was so early for these conversations, but that’s dating in your thirties. Sometimes, you have to get down to brass tax and figure these things out before anyone gets too attached.

After meeting Devon, that desire to be a mom came out of the place I buried it like it was a zombie. I called friends in tears, telling them about how haunted I felt by motherhood. Two offered to give me their embryos after they went through IVF. Another said, “Look, if you want it this badly, you should try.” Someone else said, “Okay, let it out, you have to cry about this.” And a very dear friend said, “You made that decision because you knew how hard the road was.” It was true, but aren’t all hard roads easier to walk with someone else than alone?

In the end, Devon and I broke up for reasons unrelated to children before we finished that season of Married at First Sight. There wasn’t really a question about what was next: we decided to be friends. Dating them during my cancer was one of my biggest bright spots–and getting to deepen my relationship with them as a friend has been a bright spot, too. It wasn’t meant to be like this, but in infertility there is sometimes a window where you realize someone was your last shot to have children. Usually, it’s age, but in this case, it was ability. I left the relationship feeling sure about the death of this dream, with a clock counting down: the clock for when my doctors wanted my ovaries out. “A year,” my doctor said, “Max.” Then, like an afterthought, “The sooner the better.”

Another, different doctor said, “It would probably be best for the uterus to go, too, so we can be done with this cancer nonsense.” The way he said it, “Cancer nonsense,” was so deeply unserious and deathly serious at the same time. The one thing I ever waited for a partner for was delaying my preventative double mastectomy in the hopes that I would be able to find my life partner before cutting off my breasts and reducing my desirability in the dating pool. And now I had cancer. Why? Because of a decision I made based on some imaginary person. I didn’t want to wait on unpromised hopes of having a child with someone I loved and get cancer I could have prevented… again.

There are women who would risk death for their unborn children. There are women who delay cancer treatment for their unborn children. There are women who go into debt for their unborn children. There are women who wreak known havoc on their bodies for a slim-to-none chance at unborn children. This is what we are taught to do as women: put unborn children before yourself.

In June, I decided to do the most unmotherly thing a woman can do. While hooked up to my last chemo drip on June 10th, I made the decision to rip everything out as soon as I could. I didn’t want to do it again. I didn’t want to be here again, with nurses in hazmat suits prepping drugs to kill the cancer cells inside of me. My doctor was right. I was cursed with a bad hand in the genetic lottery. Every day with my reproductive organs is another day in which I could get a different, harder to treat cancer.

I was single. There wasn’t a plan for a “few years for now” where I could hold on. I had to live the way I always do. I had to make a choice on how to live without a partner, instead of waiting for one. It was too high a risk. Everything had to come out.

It was, again, the death of the dream. Like deja vu. Except the first time, I had a list of requirements where maybe I would try, like I left the door open a crack. And this time, the wind–or a ghost–blew the door shut.

My surgery will happen in the winter. When I wake up from surgery, the hope of being a mother will end. They will take it all: the ovaries, the uterus, the cervix. I won’t save my eggs.

CHAPTER 3

I am in a shitty hotel room outside Duluth, with a white noise machine blaring. I am thinking of selling my house, of getting rid of the ghost that haunts it, of selling the house to someone with children. I am thinking of my grief about all of this, about how I thought I laid it to rest and it came back one more time like the roar of a lion. I am thinking of the woman who called my life glamorous, who asked me if I ever feel lonely on the road.

In this hotel room, with my two dogs, I do not feel lonely. Something only those who wanted children and could not have them, or did not have them, know is that one of the best salves for being childfree-not-by-choice is doing things you could not do with a baby in your arms. It’s what I do whenever I feel the grief.

In this hotel room, shivering with an AC I cannot turn off or turn down, I am thinking about the other life I could have lived if I had tried to have children younger or had I gone ahead and tried to birth a moonshot baby. Before I start to cry about it, I pick up my keys, and I drive to a dive bar that no baby should ever enter. Sitting in a bar stool at Kom-on-Inn, drinking Diet Coke, I feel content without a partner, without a child, because the freedom of the road is something you can only do without anything to tether you. And do I hope one day to have a partner to tether me? I do. But where are they? Not here. This is my life that I am living alone, and it’s a good life to live alone.

A man next to me says a little too loudly, “Are you really drinking Diet Coke?” I nod. He drunkenly asks, “Why?” And I tell him the truth, “There’s no one around to tell me what to do.” He laughs, like drunk men do, and I smile a tight-lipped smile and turn my back to him.

With no one to check in on me, with no one to call and say goodnight to, with no family waiting back home, the world cracks open in a beautiful way because of–no, really, because of–my inability to have the thing I once wanted the most. In another life, maybe I’m rocking a baby or reading a picture book and smoothing my daughter’s hair or maybe I’m standing in the kitchen finally eating a snack after a day that was nonstop parenting. And in this world, I am here in this bar with a drunk man yelling questions about Diet Coke at me while I am full of grief.

If it were up to me, I would choose the life with the baby. But the cards were dealt a different way. The drunk man starts yelling questions at someone else. I take out a book at the bar and start to read as the band starts up again. It’s not glamorous, no, but how can you be lonely when there are so many new places and new people on the road?

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Shots are often close-up, with hands holding onto bowls, chopsticks, or in some cases, tweezers. Photos of the team are often serious. It’s a classic shot: chefs with their arms crossed or standing side by side, frowning. The vibe of the videos is another thing entirely, with chef/owner Antony Gor smiling and speaking warmly to the camera.

The social media presence isn’t the only glimmer of how Gor’s concept mirrors the restaurant culture across the country. The founding of SoL is similar, too, to how many young chefs are getting their start nowadays: pop-ups. Exclusive SoL supper clubs were (and still are) held at places like distilleries, coffee shops, or open fields. The restaurant came from the pop-up, but it diverges in significant ways, leaving behind the tasting menu for casual fare.

One look at that casual menu featuring congee, French toast soaked in tea syrup, peanut chili noodles where the peanut butter and the chili crisp are made in house, and most items ending in .88 (a number that symbolizes good fortune in China) and you might imagine that SoL Hong Kong Café lives in a trendy neighborhood in Chicago or is about to be blown up by a viral video in LA. Except, SoL Café is somehow about as opposite of LA as you can get, in a city with under 90,000 residents, sitting at the edge of Lake Superior, in the neighborhood of Lakeside, Duluth.

As soon as Gor was old enough to reach the stove, his parents taught him how to make eggs and fried rice, but unlike many chefs, he doesn’t have core memories of being inspired by food in his youth. He worked in restaurants that family members owned in the summers and started cooking in college in St. Paul. “I had a long way to go,” he said to me in an interview. When he graduated from college in 2020, he left the food industry. He thought it was permanent. He became a software engineer, moving to New York with friends. Then he found himself couchsurfing in Duluth. Tired of New York, he decided to make it his home. He moved to Duluth in 2023, having fallen in love with the lake and the slower pace of life.

In late 2024, he was tired of his job in software and started to plan hosting pop-ups. That’s where SoL Supper Club was born. In February 2025, he hosted his first pop-up at now-closed Palestinian restaurant Falastin, having no idea that in less than a year, he would open a restaurant in the exact spot he got his start. In September of 2025, he quit his job with nothing lined up on the other side, not being able to stand another day of the corporate grind.

He planned to pinch pennies and get by doing a pop-ups a month when the opportunity to move into the building he had his first pop-up fell in front of him. It was his dream. It was also a huge leap. Nothing in his life moved as quickly as the opening of his restaurant. Shedding the tasting menu format of his pop-ups, he settled on serving breakfast and lunch. The spot used to be a diner and he wanted to honor its history. But he wanted to do it his way, honoring his heritage and the styles of cafes that his father loved so much, too.

Turning away from the fine dining elements of his well-styled pop-ups, 28-year-old Gor envisioned a casual restaurant serving breakfast and lunch inspired by Cha Chaan Tengs, or Hong Kong diners that blend Cantonese food with Western fare. Growing up in Houston, Gor went to a couple of these restaurants with his dad, who loved them.

The vibe of SoL Café is intimate, with soft indie music playing over a single bluetooth speaker and Chinese lanterns hanging up along the ceiling. People often ask me about restaurants that are quieter, where you can hear your dining companion without shouting. This is one of them. In the main dining room, the music is soft enough that you can talk to each other, but in the back room, the music is but a faint whisper. It feels more like a home than the average restaurant, likely due to the large amount of light, the plants, and the decorations, but also because that’s part of the intention: a soft, warm place you can come at any time of day.

Asian restaurants that serve breakfast on weekdays are rare in Minnesota. Often, finer dining Asian restaurants or bakeries serve brunch on select weekend days, with a handful serving breakfast on weekdays, most notably, nationally acclaimed Diane’s Place.

So when I saw a Cha Chaan Teng in Duluth, I knew I had to go. On my most recent trip, I went to SoL Café for breakfast every single day. It was the reason for my trip. I wanted to spend a week eating Gor’s food, stepping into his Hong Kong-style diner, and devouring Chinese sausage and congee.

“Breakfast is hard for us,” Gor told me. “We have a bunch of regulars who love the congee, but people don’t come through the doors as much as you would think. I keep doing it because it’s something that we believe in.”

To entice people in the door, Gor nicknames congee “Cantonese Grits,” an apt comparison, though of course the dish uses rice instead of corn and the consistency leans silky and smooth instead of thick and creamy. This dish comes out to the table soaked with tare, a Japanese sauce made with a base of their house-seasoned soy sauce. The porridge itself tastes like rich, deep housemade chicken broth punctuated with furikake. I mixed everything together: the tare, the porridge, the furikake, and with each bite, I found myself making audible, “Mmms,” thankfully in the back room as the only diner so as not to creep out the other guests.

The congee is served with a corkscrew-shaped Chinese donut that is perfect for dipping. I ordered my congee with pork belly, an extreme indulgence at 9:00am, but I figured, “It’s close enough to bacon.” Every bite was layered, nuanced, and deep, making it one of the most complex (and delicious) bowls of congee I’ve ever had.

For lovers of more traditional breakfast plates, there’s the breakfast platter, which has two eggs, rice, Spam, and Chinese sausage. This sausage bursts with the flavor of soy sauce and a subtle sweetness, making it perfect for lovers of maple sausage, or as Gor says, “Think of it like a teriyaki pork belly sausage.”

Or there’s a Hong Kong breakfast sandwich served on croissant bread and filled with eggs, house Kewpie, and Spam. I dipped mine in the housemade chili crisp, which has the classic floral flavor of Szechuan peppercorns and is chunky with large bits of chiles, garlic chips, shallots, and peanuts running through it. Over 15 spices go into this crisp, which can (and should) be added on to almost every dish on the menu.

One of the dishes that was most memorable on my visits was the Okonomiyaki… with a twist. Okonomiyaki is a Japanese cabbage pancake that normally has rough edges from the cabbage. Visually, the cabbage runs through the pancake batter like veins. It leans cabbage heavy, and not like an American pancake at all. But at SoL Café, the dish comes out looking like a traditional diner pancake, except it’s drizzled with Kewpie and tonkatsu sauce. It crosses between sweet and savory and would be perfectly at home doused in sugar or those savory sauces.

That same combination of Kewpie and tonkatsu is found on the lunch menu, on a katsu sandwich which is served on pillow-y bread that dents as you pick it up in your hands. The inside of the bread is toasted, while the outside stays untouched, and the disparate crunches of cabbage and fried chicken play well with the softness of the bread. These two dishes showcase the Japanese influences that Gor brings into his restaurant, which is a common theme in similar restaurants in Hong Kong.

On the fully sweet side of breakfast is the Hong Kong French toast. When the French toast came out, the first thing I smelled was a swirl of housemade peanut butter. This French toast is exceptionally soft due to the use of the croissant bread that serves as the base of sandwiches. It fell apart without a need for a knife. This dish is finished with a dusting of cookie crumbles, making it more akin to a breakfast dessert than a basic French toast. Like its savory breakfast counterparts, the magic in this dish is the layering: assam black tea-infused syrup cuts through the richness of the peanut butter and the cookie crumbles to make a dish that reads sweet without being cloying.

Cha Chaan Teng translates to “tea restaurant,” and so going into SoL Café for breakfast without ordering milk tea is like going to a steakhouse and not ordering steak: a major faux pas. My recommendation is the oolong milk tea, which was sweetened with the perfect amount of palm sugar.

QUICK SIDEBAR

When people talk to me about why they read my writing and why they like my work, one of the things that people bring up is that I’m independent, and the other thing people bring up is that I cover the entire state of Minnesota. Being independent means that I don’t have a company credit card or a salary. I’m funded entirely by my subscribers (that’s you!)!

Reviews themselves are expensive and part of the reason that I’m the only critic that covers the entire state of Minnesota is that it’s even more expensive to do so. If I split the cost of my hotel between the two pieces I worked on while I was up here, lodging alone cost $334.50. Food for this review cost over $250.

Factoring in gas means that this review cost over $700 to write.

Restaurants like SoL Hong Kong Café deserve to be reviewed, and it’s my mission to go out to all the corners of the state to review them. If you read my work and you want to support independent restaurant criticism across the state of Minnesota, becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to do that. It’s $50 a year or seven dollars a month to sign up, and signing up gets you access to some of my most-read pieces like: my favorite cake donut in the state of Minnesota, my guide to Duluth, and a list of my favorite Twin Cities steaks, and my favorite fries in the Twin Cities.

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While breakfast is bangers all the way up and down, lunch and dinner had a couple misses. Take, for instance, the crispy rice with salmon. The rice was fried a bit too long, making it more hard than crispy, though I liked how the salmon salad on top read like a take on tuna salad versus most salmon crispy rice dishes, which are served with spicy salmon à la the sushi rolls. Another item that had consistency issues was the 5-spice gingersnap cookie. While the flavor of this cookie delivered on its promise of warming spices and Szechuan, the consistency was slightly too hard, meaning that I had to break it into small pieces with my hands because I couldn’t break into it with my teeth. These are easy fixes and didn’t dampen the rest of my experience with the lunch and dinner menu.

The dumplings up and down the menu make up for these errors–and if I were visiting again, would be the heart of what I’d order.

The house dumplings are one of the signature dishes at SoL Hong Kong Café. The hand-pleated crescents are stuffed with an extra meaty mix of hand-ground pork belly and pork shoulder, along with thin bits of cabbage, scallion, garlic, and ginger. The use of a more fatty cut of meat acts like a binder, meaning the dumpling filling holds its shape, not falling apart and scattering on the plate when you bite into it. They’re suspended in a glistening mixture of dumpling sauce and scallion oil that was the perfect mix of salty and grassy. After I housed the entire plate of dumplings, I went back in to scoop up some of the sauce with my spoon, desperately wishing I had ordered another round of the delightfully cabbage-heavy katsu sandwich to dip into what was left.

There’s also a wonton soup where chicken stock glistens with fat and the mouthfeel on the broth reads hearty versus thin. Handfolded shrimp and pork wontons have ribbons of cabbage running through them. The shrimp isn’t ground to a paste, but rather, tiny bite-sized pieces are worked into the pork, meaning the dumpling has a texture and a nice bite to it. Bok choy adds earthiness, and a large smattering of green onion means you can get some in every bite. This is the kind of dish I might want when the wind whips off the lake in the dead of north country winter, cozying up in the blue booth at the back of the restaurant with a dear friend or date as cars stir up snow as they drive on the busy road past the restaurant.

Even cream cheese wontons were noteworthy, perfectly fried, seasoned with sugar, onion powder, and garlic powder, then served with hot honey.

SoL Hong Kong Café is a restaurant unlike any other in Minnesota, worth a trip for foodies in the Twin Cities, and worth being a regular stop for residents of Duluth. The opening of SoL Café demonstrates not just that Gor is a talent worth watching, but that Duluth’s food landscape is evolving so much that creative young talent like Gor can open restaurants that are deeply personal, innovative, and novel not just for the region but for the state. “This style of restaurant is narratively and philosophically so much of my story,” Gor said. “It’s East meets West. I have these deep roots to American culture, but my parents are straight up from another country. I was between two worlds most of my life. This style of restaurant represented that perfectly.”

★★1/2

My three favorite bites: Congee, house dumplings, French toast

Where to sit: The back patio is REALLY cute and has great light

Good for: Weekday breakfast, early dinners with friends, and caffeine cravings

My one big tip: Order the chili crisp!

What the stars mean:

★★★★: Best in Class

These are Minnesota’s best restaurants. Think category-defining and excellent all around in cookery, hospitality, and beverage.

★★★: Excellent and Consistent

These restaurants are excellent and consistent, meaning that the meals are similar across all my visits. Think meals worth writing home about where all parts of the menu are equally strong.

★★: Good or Inconsistent

These are either restaurants that are good but not excellent or excellent on some visits and not excellent on others. Think a restaurant with some stars and some flops, a restaurant that excels at pasta but not at dessert, or a restaurant that is excellent in cookery and not as strong in service.

★: Skip it

Self-explanatory!

This piece features my top spot for breakfast, my favorite veggie burger in the entire state, potato donuts, dinner at a longstanding icon with one of the cutest interiors around, and a coffee shop serving up not-too-sweet specialty coffee, along with a few farms to stop at on your way there and back!

Why is this piece behind a paywall?

Most of my pieces are free, outside of a paywall. Pieces like this take a long time, require a lot of research, and cost more than my average pieces do to write. I don’t have a company card or a salary, I just have people like you! By becoming a paid subscriber, you help me fund more long-term projects like this one.

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This piece goes beyond food. I cover where to stop on the drive up to Grand Marais from the Twin Cities, two of my favorite park pitstops, where to stay when you’re on the shore, my favorite shops, and a list of fun activities. Of course, I also tell you where I’m eating (that’s the best part).

My trip guides are behind a paywall. Why? Because they cost a lot to make. Travel costs alone for my 2026 trips were about $650, not including food. By becoming a paid subscriber, you help me cover the entire state of Minnesota.

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I had a trip planned to Grand Marais a couple weeks after the fires started raging. Friends who knew I had a trip planned to the North Shore asked me if I was going to cancel; I wasn’t going to. Grand Marais is a special place to me, and even if I had to stay inside the entire time, I was going to go up there and support the local businesses.

Another person deadset on keeping her trip was Cally Prairie. She had a trip planned to Poplar Haus up the Gunflint Trail from July 15-19th. She went to a cabin while air quality was still, literally, off the charts. “We decided that we wanted to support the community during such a challenging time for them financially,” she said. “We sort of treated it like a cozy winter cabin trip.” For the few days she was up in Grand Marais, the air quality was so bad her group wore masks outside. Understandably, not everyone made the decision to make the trip during that time.

When Prairie’s group went into town, it was empty. “It was the slowest I have ever seen it there,” she said.

I talked with John & Mindy Fredrikson, owners of Gunflint Lodge, the biggest outfitter on the Gunflint Trail. They’ve seen a huge dropoff in reservations. “50-70%,” John said. The lodge has been here for 101 years, sitting near the west end of the Gunflint Trail, close to the Boundary Waters. The pair bought the lodge in 2016 after having corporate careers. “We were looking for a change,” John said. They took the leap and never looked back.

At one point during the fires, Mindy said to John, “‘I feel like I am living in Pompei.’” But that was just for a few hours. She continued, “All of that terrible stuff that you’re seeing in the media that looks horrible that was a couple of hours at the end of the worst day. The next day, it was smoky and hazy, but it started cooling down, we started getting rain, and then they started sending firefighters in.” John is one of them, working as a volunteer firefighter for the Gunflint Trail Volunteer Fire Department because, as he says, “Up here, we take care of our neighbors.”

The Fredriksons had an easy way of talking, going back and forth on the phone, almost finishing each other’s sentences. John said, “The day after that hazy day, Duluth and the Twin Cities had bad air quality and there were reports that being up here is like smoking packs and packs of cigarettes. It generated a tremendous amount of cancellations for us well into the fall.”

Katie Slanga, who owns The Fisherman’s Daughter in town with her husband, Parker, told me about that time in an interview, “All of a sudden, we were really busy with people leaving the trail. And then it got quiet and kind of eerie.”

Long before my trip came around on July 26th, the ash had stopped falling and the smoke cleared. I spoke with Slanga at The Fisherman’s Daughter as the sun beamed through the windows on a Tuesday, looking nothing like the photo she took and posted on The Fisherman Daughter’s social media a few weeks prior. When I spoke with the Fredriksons, the air quality was better in Grand Marais than it was in the Twin Cities.

The problem is, if you look at mainstream media, you would have no idea.

On my way up, one of my friends texted me, “Stay safe with the smoke up there!” But there was none. The only haze in the air on my drive up was a beautiful, dense fog.

Alex Beebe-Giudice, owner of Superior Creamery, said, “The smoke was bad for 4, 5, 6 days.” He has a personal soft spot for the Boundary Waters, having worked there in the early 2000s. On a drive from Alaska to the East Coast with his family during COVID, he stopped in Grand Marais and pondered moving back to the area. “We started thinking about what the region needed and we thought Grand Marais needed a really good ice cream shop.” In 2022, his family moved down to Grand Marais to open Superior Creamery, even though they had never made ice cream before.

You’d never guess they have been making ice cream for just a few short years. The salted honeycomb is one of my favorite flavors in the state, with big chunks of honeycomb swirled into the base. Normally, when I go, there’s a line out the door, but when I popped in on Monday, things were slower than usual. “This month, we’re down a bit,” Beebe-Giudice said. He’s not alone.

“For a few days, it felt apocalyptic,” Slanga said. “It was 6:00pm midweek and it was weirdly silent. I kept thinking, ‘There should be people everywhere.’”

Kristen Lease was up the same weekend as I was. Lease runs the social media account kristeninmn. She’s amassed over 80,000 followers, focusing on local happenings in the Twin Cities and greater Minnesota. She and I both travel here regularly, so I decided to reach out to her to ask her if she noticed the dip in tourism, too.

Lease said, “A lot of people and legacy media are using old imagery when the smoke was heavy and the sky was yellow and people are cancelling their trips based on that.”

The Star Tribune, for example, posted this old photograph on the same day that I was up at the North Shore (July 26th), when the skies were blue and when Boundary Waters air quality was listed as moderate.

They weren’t alone in using old photos. MPR published a piece on July 23rd and used a photo of the fires from July 14th as the header. The Washington Post published an article on July 26th that had a photo from July 15th. While journalists might think that they’re using the best, most compelling photos available to them, locals were clear: it’s impacting tourism.

The Fredriksons met in college as mass communication majors, so they’re no strangers to the media. “It feels unethical to me,” Mindy said. “My journalism professor would have told me that I can’t run these photos, because it’s no longer factual. It feels like people are trying to profit or get clicks or likes at the expense of the truth and of people up here.” She started her own, quiet media campaign, posting dated photos of the blue skies every day on their Instagram account. Still, tourism is down.

When Lease arrived in Grand Marais, her first hint that tourism was slower was the lack of lines. “It was definitely less busy than it typically is. Typically if we want to get a donut from World’s Best Donuts and a coffee from Java Moose we need to be downtown by at least 7:00 a.m. to not have to wait in line. On Sunday, we slept in later and didn’t get downtown until 9:00 a.m. and didn’t have lines at either spot.”

When I went to World’s Best Donuts at 7:30 a.m., like Lease, I also didn’t have to wait in line. The woman working the counter said, “Eventually, there will be a line out the door again.” It was like she summoned people into existence, because just then a family of eight walked in, with kids bouncing up and down ready to order donuts. It was quieter than usual, yes, but everyone in town was hopeful it would be back to normal soon. Malorie Brazell, who took over ownership last year, said, “We were really down the first week. This week, we’re still down, but better. We’re hoping things get back to normal next weekend.”

When I talked to Sarah Jorgenson-Hallberg, owner of Java Moose, she said, “Business has picked up again; not to true summer levels, but it is good to see people returning.”

Businesses up at the North Shore are mostly family owned Java Moose and World’s Best Donuts are no exception. Brazell was talking to her mother-in-law and long-time owner, Dee Brazell, last year when she made the decision to take over the business. “No one was lined up to take over the shop when she wanted to retire, so I said, ‘I’ll do it.’” She started working one season before they opened. She told me, “This is the fourth generation that World’s Best Donuts has been in my family.” She pointed to the sign on the side of the building that said the business had been open for 57 years. “I wanted to keep it in the family,” she said. When she looks at the kids in the fifth generation running around, she wonders, Which one will own the shop next?

But this year, many businesses are keeping an eye on a shorter vision: getting through the year. Unlike large businesses, or spots with multiple locations, restaurants and shops in Grand Marais are small, relying on the summer tourism boom to get through the winter.

“This is the time of year that we move into the black and start preparing for the winter. We live off of it for the rest of the year.” John said. “Like squirrels or bears,” Mindy chimed in.

“A drop like this during a week in July is a much bigger deal than a week in May,” John said, settling into their back-and-forth style of communication. “It’s our business. It’s our families. It’s our livelihood. If you know Grand Marais, you know there are no corporations here,” Mindy said. Then, John again, “We’re mom and pop shops.”

“This is our season to survive the rest of the year,” Slanga concurred. When I talked to her on Tuesday, air quality was listed as good. “Air quality is in the green, as good as it gets, but it’s not what people are seeing down in the cities. The sky is not yellow and orange anymore. It has changed.”

Beebe-Giudice said, “The larger media have sensationalized things.” When scrolling online, he found a photo of Broadway in Grand Marais, “It was captioned something like, ‘Deserted street midsummer.’ It was nighttime and featured businesses that operated during daytime hours.” Anyone who knows Grand Marais would expect that photo to be quiet, because Grand Marais is busy during specific times of days, and at night, people go back to their cabins or hotels.

“It’s frustrating,” Kjersti Vick, Marketing & PR Director for Visit Cook County told me. “I know that the pictures look so apocalyptic. I get it. You want awareness and clicks but it’s not the reality that’s happening. Even if the headline says, ‘Reopened for business,’ if the air quality looks terrible in the visual picture, people aren’t going to want to come.” I looked at the photos circulating online while I was sitting on the porch at my cabin. They were so contrary to the bright blue sky and the temperatures in the mid-sixties.

“The messaging being reshared is that our air quality is terrible,” Vick said, “But we’re back to normal, regular air quality.”

While the media keeps posting old photographs of orange skies, I looked at the air quality index to see how things were, noting that my trip would have similar or better air quality than back home during my entire stay. The upcoming week is similar, with air quality in the moderate range for both Minneapolis and Grand Marais.

Cook County has a way to see what the sky actually looks like on any given day, with no orange in sight. “Look at our webcams that are showing what is happening in real time and you can see what the sky looks like,” Vick said. “Today, it’s a blue sky day.”

The Gunflint Lodge has webcams, too. “They don’t lie,” John said. I watched them while I talked to the Fredriksons. Kids were splashing each other in the lake while parents watched the sunset on the beach. “People who come up here tell us they were debating and considering if they were going to cancel or not. They always say, ‘We are so glad that we decided to come.’ These are fantastic July conditions, the type of summer days that we all put up with winter to enjoy,” John said. I agree. While my friends were sweating in the Twin Cities, I was doing early morning runs with temperatures falling below 60 degrees.

“It’s so nice here right now,” Slanga said. “People should know that.”

At most new buzzy restaurants, the lighting is so dark that at 34 even I consider taking out my phone light to read the menu. Most of the materials are literally cold like steel, marble, or wire. If they’re soft, like velvet, it’s often not industrial grade, meaning just like modern dating, restaurateurs are sometimes not building restaurants meant to last.

The music that pulses through many new restaurants feels more like a club than a dinner experience, sometimes at such a loud volume that tables are nearly shouting. I’ve been on more than one first date at one of these spots, staring at the person across from me wondering how either of us looks sexy as we continually scream, “What?” into the void. At some of these restaurants, there’s the continuous flash from influencers taking photos or taking out their ring lights and it can feel like they’re built for what has been dubbed “content-driven dining” and not, you know, actual dining.

I am romantic, a lover of pomp and circumstance in people and in restaurants. I mourn the end of romance in our society: the giving of flowers, the candlelit tables, the getting pulled out of the car to kiss in the rain, the love notes left on pillows after nights spent together, the dropping of croissants at the door on hard days, the effort. So when I walked into Tatin with its soft lighting, soft music, and soft service, I felt immediately at home. At Tatin, a pop-up currently housed at Gardens of Salonica, romance feels like the goal.

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Chef Brooke Faudree, the muscle behind Tatin, never intended to become a chef. She was the second of six kids and food, celebrating, and gathering were a part of her upbringing, but she was focused on studying fine arts, not fine dining. In 2013, her sister, Danielle Bjorling, came to Faudree and asked if she might help her and her husband Chris open The Copper Hen. “I’ll give it a year,” she said. Her sister focused on sweets and Faudree set her sights on the bread and the savory side of the menu. She was working 18-20 hour days and at the end of the year, she decided to keep going. “I fell in love with it,” she said to me in an interview.

Through that job, she met a family who asked her to be their private chef and she founded her catering company Quince Catering in 2016. She was self taught, but she desperately wanted to go to culinary school. In 2019, she found the perfect program: Institut Paul Bocuse in Écully, France. Then COVID happened. She deferred enrollment twice and then finally set off to learn how to cook French Food in the French language. After she graduated, she took on another grueling job. She did an externship in a restaurant in Lyon, with two prix fixe options options: a five or seven course menu. “It was the most rigorous, hardest I’ve worked in my life. I started at 8am-2pm, got two hours off, and then worked from 4pm-midnight,” she said.

It was grueling, yes, but it also honed her skills and set her up to do the challenging work of running a full service restaurant with a prix fixe menu once a month in Minneapolis with the help of industry vets. Just like her sister brought her into the mix, Faudree enlisted the help of her sister, Kendra Martin, in the front of house. “Gathering is in our DNA,” Faudree said.

Before I go any further, it’s important for me to note that this monthly pop-up is a French prix fixe menu–and it’s not cheap. My first meal was $200 for food for two, $70 for two NA pairings, and $70 for an upgrade of mackerel en croute. After tax and tip, I walked out having spent around $375. My second meal was more expensive, as the price bumped up to $280 on food alone for two people. It is, to date, my most expensive meal of 2026. This means that Tatin isn’t competing with Bar la Grassa or even Meritage.

Tatin is competing with Demi, Myriel, and Kado no Mise. Tatin is competing for your anniversary, your birthday, or your engagement night. Not everyone can afford it. It’s what an editor called aspirational dining in an interview I had last year for a critic position. While I hate that term, I used to save actual coins in a jar to afford a place like this once a year. Restaurants and pop-ups this expensive should be, but often are not, darn near perfect. For some people, this is a once-in-a-lifetime dinner. Restaurants should act like it.

These are the kinds of experiences people save for and because of that, they’re the most likely to let people down. When I complain about my meals Per Se or Alinea, people often call me a spoilsport, but those restaurants cost well over $300 per person, and sometimes it feels like they’re performing service and not magic, going for stars and not memory. Sometimes, it feels like they’ve forgotten how expensive they are. I know what it feels like to be let down by these restaurants intimately, because I used to save literal coins in a jar until I had enough to go to a menu like this one–and I haven’t forgotten what it feels like when the food lets you down. The question I ask at meals like this is, “Would a broke 27-year-old me feel like this was worth my coins?”

At most restaurants, my answer to this is, “No.” At Tatin, it is a resounding, “Yes.”

The first course at these meals is a work of layering. There was a chevre terrine with a teeny, tiny first-of-spring radish with the greens left on. Then, an oeuf en gelee, encapsulated in beef aspic with a cracker-like sliver of brioche and one, single ramp leaf. Upon cracking into the mold of gel, the yolk tumbled onto the plate. During my most recent meal, the opening bite featured a plate with a generous glug of olive oil topped with a checker pattern of compressed melon squares and raw tuna. Miniature scoops of melon sat atop the bright pink tuna flesh and in the circular holes that were scooped out sat pools of mulberry balsamic. These early courses set the stage for the rest of the meal.

Faudree is a master of architecture in these plates, but also with the progression of the meal itself. There is something structural about these meals. The courses build on each other, yes, but the dishes all require multiple elements that have to be perfectly assembled in order for the dish to land.

Like a mackerel en croute with scales carved into the puff pastry. It came out to our table in two pieces: head and tail. The fish was thick and because puff pastry and mackerel are both high in oil, they’re both high in fat. They needed a bold sauce to cut through them, and Faudree had one: a sauce ravigote so heavy on the mustard, it made the dish feel balanced, not overly buttery. Our server told us the table behind us named the fish and dared my table to do it, too. The dish was so good, we forgot to name the fish while eating it, naming them Mackerelamore only after the fish was eaten. Both of the other mains I had at Tatin included a dish encapsulated in puff pastry, a rare event in Twin Cities dining.

Based on Faudree’s history in savory cooking and bread, it was surprising to me that she had such a deft hand with pastry. And yet, desserts are some of the strongest courses on the menu. In the early days of summer, a rhubarb flan Parisien was a layered delight. Pistachio frangipane was stacked with vanilla bean and custard and a thin layer of rhubarb, then dressed with a ribbon of rhubarb candy that had a perfect snap when split in half. There was a Crêpes Suzette where the tartness of the triple berry sorbet cut through all the butter, making guests want to go back for bite after bite.

Meals end with tiny gifts of pastry called mignardise. Butter cookies dipped in chocolate. Hazelnut chocolate shortbread. Matcha macarons. Passionfruit marshmallows. Earl gray madeleines. Apricot or guava pâte de fruit. Marzipan shaped into a cherry. A kitschly named chocolate salami, which is simply telling you what the dish looks like, not what it tastes like. These miniature bites at the end of the meal are a callback to the days when restaurants aimed to do more than feed you, they aimed to delight you.

Tatin is the kind of place where you could get engaged, fall in love, or rekindle a romance that feels like it’s make or break. In a world of influencer-driven restaurant design, I want more of this: soft, warm restaurants with execution that’s so darn near perfect, it’s worth saving pennies for. At Tatin, I always left full both physically and emotionally, thinking “This is fine dining.”

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★★★ 1/2: Tatin is excellent and consistent, producing some of the best French food in the Twin Cities.

My three favorite bites: The menu here is a tasting menu, so there’s no “best bites” to order.

Where to sit for the best service: This is all table service!

Good for: Anniversaries, engagements, and special occasion meals.

My one big tip: Pop-ups like this one often have at least one kink during the night. That’s because the team works together once a month, not every single night. One meal, the dishes came out far slower than I’m sure the kitchen would have liked, with 90 minutes passing before my companion and I reached a true first course. At my most recent meal, service had lagged on the first turn a little too long and there was a line of patrons waiting to take their seats pushed up against the bar. As a critic, these kinds of errors are expected in meals like this one, where teams assemble only for one night to put on a little bit of romance. Is it worth the wait? For me, it always was.

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What the stars mean:

★★★★: Best in Class

These are Minnesota’s best restaurants. Think category-defining and excellent all around in cookery, hospitality, and beverage.

★★★: Excellent and Consistent

These restaurants are excellent and consistent, meaning that the meals are similar across all my visits. Think meals worth writing home about where all parts of the menu are equally strong.

★★: Good or Inconsistent

These are either restaurants that are good but not excellent or excellent on some visits and not excellent on others. Think a restaurant with some stars and some flops, a restaurant that excels at pasta but not at dessert, or a restaurant that is excellent in cookery and not as strong in service.

★: Skip it

Our second date was my Black Friday dinner party, where over 30 people gather every year in my house for a massive, themed dinner of squash and apple. It was awkward. When I bumped my knee into his, he pulled his away. He was cagey. I could tell that he felt uncomfortable around my friends. They asked him questions and he answered them self-consciously. He got into a rut, a safe spot, telling the same story over and over again: after this party, he would leave to go to his father’s to eat bland, unsalted Thanksgiving food over the weekend. He spent all weekend telling me about that food: green bean casserole that was really just green beans and turkey that was both overcooked and undersalted. We had another date set up for dinner on Tuesday, but he sent me a photograph to cancel it. The photo he sent was of his positive COVID test.

Now, there were two options here. The first was panic, because he might have infected my bevy of immunocompromised friends with COVID. But I did not panic. I took the second option. I zoomed in on the hand in the photo and said out loud in my kitchen, “Motherfucker, that’s not your hand.” A quick metadata search showed me that George had sent me a photo from 2021 of a COVID test that surely was not his. I sent that data back to him. We never spoke again.

I did send this information to every single friend who was at that party, not, “Watch out for COVID,” but, “Look what this asshole did instead of just saying he didn’t want to go on a date!!!” We spent a year bringing it up as an inside joke when someone got sick and had to cancel plans and most of them have forgotten his name and just call him Fake COVID Guy. “Promise I’m not being a Fake COVID Guy,” they’d say. This is a part of my dating lore, with friends who were at Black Friday still doubling over in sidesplitting laughs as they tell the story of the fake COVID test at parties.

But… but, George is important to me and to you, for something totally unrelated to the fake COVID test.

In 2023, I realized that every single best fry list in the Twin Cities was old. The first Google search result was Eater, from 2018. It included dead restaurants, but it also included a lot of photos of fries from restaurants that at some point changed their recipe or process, meaning that some of the “best” fries were mid at best or bad on their best day. I set out on a mission: a fracket (fry bracket). I was not a critic at that time and didn’t yet have any wisdom or philosophy about how to eat for missions like this. I thought I could hammer out 30 different fries in a month. I did not meet that goal. It took me four. By the end of those four months, I was ¼ potato, ¼ fryer oil, and ½ over eating fries. Now, I work differently, prepping for pieces like this over many years, not one single month.

In 2023, I was asking everyone their favorite fry, and George’s fry ended up on my list of fries to try and in a head-to-head match with 29 other fries, it ended up at the tippy top of my list. It wasn’t anywhere on any of the main “best fry” lists, and it wasn’t a spot that was on the radar, really, except for locals in that suburb who sometimes pointed directly at me once I became a critic and said, “Don’t blow up my spot.” (Sorry.)

Between 2023-2026, I have consumed over 100 unique french fries in the Twin Cities. That is not a typo. Normally, I keep count down to the exact number, but at a certain point, I felt like I had fry authority–and that point was 100 french fries. Before releasing this piece, I went back to test those fries again… and again… and again. The reason for that is that many of the fries that people say currently reign supreme lack consistency, and a fry is all about the, well, fry. I took that long list of fries and narrowed it down to six fries that, after testing over and over and over, were excellent every single time. Some really good fries didn’t end up on this list. I am not saying these are all the good fries in the Twin Cities. I’m saying that these are my six favorites, the standouts, after trying so many fries that they all started to run together. These are the ones that stood out, that I wanted to go back for.

This list includes fries from a food truck, a summer-only joint, and a bakery of all places. It also includes a fry made in a gluten-free fryer, with the most elaborate fry-making process I’ve ever heard of, and a fry that’s perfect for a wine, fry, and gossip sesh. But the one on top? It’s George’s recommendation, tucked away in a cash-only suburban dive bar that has a carpeted ceiling, because some first dates end in you meeting the person you’re going to marry, and others end in you meeting a lying son of a gun who points you to some of the best fries you’ve ever had.

Why is this piece behind a paywall?

Most of my pieces are free, outside of a paywall. Pieces like this take a long time (three years!!!), require a lot of research (100+ fries!!!), and cost more than my average pieces do to write (close to $1,000 over three years). I don’t have a company card or a salary, I just have people like you! By becoming a paid subscriber, you help me fund more long-term projects like this one and show that you support indie restaurant criticism.

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What kitty? I wondered.

I opened my eyes and he was on all fours, meowing. I was in awe, hoping that this was just a fluke and not an accurate impression of the college I had chosen.

I realized quickly that this introduction was an accurate one and that not much learning was happening there. Classes were spent with students so rip-roaring high, they repeated themselves over and over. Students were often combative with teachers, challenging authority in ways that felt more like theater than actual grappling with their teachings. More than one student told me proudly that they had a trust fund. I had taken out $25,000 in loans to be there. I couldn’t imagine going six figures into debt for this. In between classes, sitting on the green, I sometimes just cried into my (very good) veggie burger from the little cafe on campus.

At 18, I was dating a 25 year old man who was sleeping on a air mattress. I was newly off narcotics and drugs were so prevalent that I spent most of my time off campus holed up in a coffee shop (Trident and The Laughing Goat). My roommate had no sense of other people and played Star Trek in our shared room at three in the morning, as if I could just… sleep through it. There were orgies in the dorms where people left their doors open for all to see. And, speaking of open doors, once a student took his door off the hinges while drunk and slammed his door into an RA’s door, like he was in some medieval movie where you’re trying to get into a castle. That student wasn’t given any disciplinary action, and while I was a free spirit, I realized I was not that much of a free spirit (reader, I was miserable), so I left that school after one semester.

My very short time in Colorado during my early college career was transformative. I learned to love the mountains and hiked my first 14er. I fell in love with swimming in Boulder Creek and went there every chance I got. I also fell in love with Nederland and seriously considered moving there in 2023 when I left New York, but the cost of rent was so high, I just couldn’t stomach it. I go back often, and sometimes I think I might end up in Colorado again. In so many ways, it honed me, grew me, pushed me.

But the biggest takeaway I got from Colorado? Peaches.

I grew up in a canned-fruit household, so I’m not sure if, before being in Colorado, I ever ate a fresh peach (sad, I know). But I arrived during the tail end of peach season and ravenously devoured them. I learned about the different counties of peaches, like Delta, Montrose, and Montezuma. It was maybe the first time in my life that I would eat things head-to-head, grabbing peaches from the farmers market and trying them side-by-side with friends. I learned what anyone with years of eating in Colorado would tell you.

On the Western Slope, there’s only one county where you should get your peaches from: Mesa. And within Mesa County, there’s one town that reigns supreme: Palisade.

The peaches in Palisade are so good because of the microclimate on the Western Slope, with tons of sun during the day creating a lot of sugar and steep drops in nighttime temperatures balancing the acids. That big swing in temperatures makes some of the sweetest and juiciest peaches around.

When I got home to Minnesota, I remember trying to find peaches that tasted like those Palisades I fell in love with. Out-of-season peaches are a tragedy, and I waited all year to go to the co-op to get peaches, but… they just were never the same. Yes, during peach season in Minnesota there are tons of places offering Colorado peaches, but very few of them are selling Palisades. Co-ops and other grocery stores often come in and out of Palisades, making it hard to assess if you’re getting a real Palisade peach or a lesser Colorado variety. One place that always has Palisades, though, is Stillwater Colorado Peaches.

For over 30 years, this family has been shipping in peaches from a friend’s family farm and selling them to people like you and me from their driveway in Stillwater. I’m always a little frenzied the morning of pick-up, with that buzzy feeling you might get before an exciting trip or after you ace a test. Picking mine up, I sink my teeth into the peach before I’m even off their property, because nothing tastes like mid-summer to me like these specific peaches.

Available for preorder (cash or check only) at $70 for a 20-pound box ($3.50/lb), these peaches are the best you can get in Minnesota. You could order an entire box for yourself and freeze what you don’t use immediately, or you could grab some friends and split it four ways. There are two options for pick up this year: July 25th or August 15th. If you’re looking for where to get the best peaches in the state, it’s not up for debate. It’s here.

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The closer I got to the end of my chemo, the more people said this to me.

The closer I got to the end of my chemo, the more people phrased it as a question, “Aren’t you excited to get back to normal?!”

I never knew what to say because the honest answer I had to this isn’t what people were searching for, so I just said, “Yes.”

“You don’t seem excited,” someone said to me.

I just took a really big breath and said, “I’m not sure how to tell you the truth.”

In some ways, it’s true, I am “back” to normal. I am over a month out from my last chemo. I am doing cardio every day and it feels really good. I am cooking for myself again. I have passed my last chemo, which means I’ve passed my last chemo crash. My hair has stopped falling out.

I’ve re-established my bedtime routine that I wasn’t able to do during chemo. Even doing my Korean skincare routine took too much out of me on bad weeks, and stopping and starting made me feel like I was playing peek-a-boo with normalcy, so I let things go like washing my face and cooking. My bedtime routine is so mundane, it’s hardly worth writing about, except that maybe the mundane nature of it might tell you how sick I was that I couldn’t complete it.

My bedtime routine is bricking my phone at 9pm, letting the dogs out, then feeding them. I “turn down” my kitchen, wiping away any crumbs and putting the dishes in the dishwasher. The dishes in the dishwasher part feels particularly poignant in that friends started doing this for me quietly when they stacked up in my sink because I had so little energy that sometimes doing the dishes made me winded. Then I head upstairs, wash my face, meditate, journal, read, and go to bed. This, on the worst days of my chemo, wasn’t something I could do spread out over 24 hours, let alone in 60 minutes.

Take a minute. Pause. Think about it. If for six months you were unable to do the dishes, would you still be the same person you were before those six months? If you couldn’t even wash your face, would you emerge as some solid self who can just bounce back to the before times? If you faced a brush with death at 34, would there still be a you to “get back” to?

When you have cancer, you become a mirror for people.

You become a mirror for other people’s grief, with the countless senseless, inappropriate, heartless grievers who respond to your cancer with the story of someone they loved dying of it, as if this is any comfort. People who have not been on the receiving end of this told me over and over to be kind about it, but I couldn’t. I silently cursed every person who said this to me, wickedly angry that when I told them, “I have cancer,” their response was to talk to me about death.

You become a mirror for people’s feelings of control. So many questions about my cancer revolved around people hoping that if they just did something, were something, had something, they wouldn’t be this unlucky. Instead of luck, they see it as your unique due. As an alcoholic, more than one person told me it was the drinking. Vegans I used to be friends with told me it was the meat. And so many people sighed sighs of relief when I told them, actually, it’s my bloodline, my genes, as if any of them knew if there wasn’t a fuse inside them too, lurking. People want to be sure they cannot become you, that if they just do things “right,” they won’t get cancer like you, who did things “wrong.”

You become a mirror for people’s feelings about sickness. While eating brunch at Mara, someone who reads my work came over to me and said, “I’m SO GLAD you’re out eating,” to which I responded, “Should I hide in my house?” This is something I had to ask over and over as people applauded me for being sick and out in the world. Sometimes their surprise at seeing me felt more complicated than being happy. Sometimes, it felt like because I was out, I wasn’t so sick, which made them feel more comfortable about a young woman diagnosed with cancer, even as I sometimes collapsed at home on the couch immediately upon arriving home from the monumental effort continuing to live in the world took. Underscored at the bottom of all of this is people feeling that the sick should disappear and that it is extra-ordinary if you do not, or that you are “not that sick” if you refuse to let your sickness take the world from you.

You become a mirror for people’s feelings about mortality. More than one person asked me, “Are you going to die?” Or they ask about your staging to check for themselves. My response to these requests early on was, “I’m ready to die. Are you?” I was tired, exhausted really, by the effort it took to manage people’s emotions that I stopped responding with kindness and started responding with the same brazenness people approached me with. Sometimes, I would say, “Maybe. Why?” using the same tone of voice you might use if someone asked if you had a light, forcing, really forcing, the person who asked me this question to tell me why they asked it. When people stammered, embarrassed, I didn’t stop, thinking that was enough. I asked again, more directly: “Why are you asking me if I’m going to die?”

This is not how the sick are supposed to behave. Especially not women. We are supposed to understand people’s discomfort, be quiet about it, and teach them how to hold us gently. I was too exhausted to wash my face, and I was too exhausted to pretend like these interactions were fine. I developed standard responses to all of these questions. But there was something about the getting back to normal comments that I couldn’t find the words to respond to. I was trying to figure out why people said this. While the other comments felt really psychologically transparent, this one felt more complicated. What were people looking for from me when they asked it?

There are so many things that I think people are hoping to see from me, but a full recovery is one of them. A hero’s story! A triumph! She’s so young! She has to stay in the world! And maybe if you look at me now, you see the getting back to normal part and dust off your hands and think to yourself, “She’s back to the land of the well.”

But if you look closely at my right arm, you can see a splotch where the chemo leaked out during my last chemo, leaving a mark that will never disappear from my body. I have a matching one on my left hand, hardly noticeable to strangers, very noticeable to me.

If you see me with my hair down and not under a hat, as only a few people have, you will see the hair is still missing and won’t regrow to the length of the rest of my hair for years. Years.

If you look at my liver, you’ll see more toxicity than before.

If you look at my ovaries, you’ll see that they have stopped working–and might never restart. You’ll see fertility stolen from me. You’ll see the dream of a child taken like a diamond ring might be stolen from a house.

If you look at both of my armpits, you’ll see one is larger than the other due to complications from my surgery. And if you look really closely at me while I chop vegetables, you’ll see me wince in a pain caused by that complication. Any repetition hurts. Still, you’ll see me trying–because pain won’t take the things I love from me.

If you watch me try to take a nap on the couch, you’ll see my hands move suddenly as the pins and needles come in from neuropathy. If you’re there on a particularly bad day, you’ll hear me say, “Fuck,” while I shake my hands trying to make it stop.

If you look at my heart, you’ll see me telling a man I was dating that I had cancer, and you’ll see him tell me that the cancer means an ending. And if you look at my body, you’ll see that my breasts are gone, marked with an armpit-to-armpit scar, which means dating in the future will require me to find someone who has desexualized women’s worth–and that? How many people have done that?

If you look at a tiny snapshot of the exact moment when I learned I had cancer, you will see tears fall out of my eyes in one of my favorite coffee shops, and then see me running home, and then see me slam the door shut, double over, and scream. I’m writing this from the exact spot I learned I had cancer, drinking the same drink I was drinking that morning. When I close my eyes, I can feel my stomach drop the way it did in that moment. As I ran home, I screamed at god, “My whole life is in front of me.”

How can I go back to the woman I was before this moment? She doesn’t exist anymore.

Early on in my diagnosis, my therapist said, “You seem calmer about the cancer than I imagined.” My response to her was, “I am not the person I was two weeks ago.” She nodded, and we sat in silence for a long time, letting the sound of the white noise machine fill the space. Early on, I knew there was never anywhere to “go back” to.

The moment I was diagnosed is a fissure. It is a tectonic plate moving, cracking, and breaking in two. It is a glass shattering on the floor into dozens of tiny shards, so small they can’t be put back together. It is the second in which the deer hits a bumper and two bodies fly forward: yours and the deer’s. If you’ve ever hit a deer, you know that you never look at them the same way again. Every night drive, you scan more thoroughly into the woods. Every deer standing ready to run in the ditch sends a flurry of fast heartbeats into your body. And most of them never run out into the road. Most of them just stand there. But every deer you see, it reminds you of the crash.

For things like car accidents and robberies at gunpoint, no one asks you, “Are you excited to get back to normal?” What a ridiculous question to ask someone after their entire house has been cleared out of valuables. We understand that your house being pillaged changes you, makes you more wary of every sound in the night. What an equally ridiculous question to ask someone after their body has been ravaged for parts and pumped full of poison in an attempt to save their life. Yet, people who have never had to face their death ask it all the time.

I don’t understand why people talk about cancer like this: the number of strangers and acquaintances I meet in the world who insist on telling me to go backwards. What if I don’t want to go backwards? What if there’s nothing to go back to? What if everything I knew about who I was has been lit on fire and I’m digging in the ash to find anything worth saving?

While I have my bedtime routine down pat, my morning one feels less certain. I start most of my mornings in tears. As soon as I wake up, they come out of my eyes, and I don’t always even know why. I was warned about this from other survivors. It’s purgatory. It’s a liminal space. It’s the in between. Once you are through active treatment, once your brain starts to feel safe, that’s when the grief creeps in. There are so many ways to respond to this and my response is to do the same thing I did when I learned I had cancer: I run. Every single morning, I get out of bed and take to the road trying to keep the thoughts of recurrence at bay.

Through my active treatment, I wasn’t quite sure why people kept telling me, “It will be good to get back to normal.” It wasn’t until I reached the end that I realized that what people were hoping for was that I could be a mirror for them here, too. If I can return to normal, when they get sick, they can, too.

I feel like I know, now, why people are asking. They want me to comfort them with my own story, to tell them that sickness is like a foreign country you visit and return home with stories about and jet lag that passes quickly. They want me to tell them that it’s not a place that scars you forever. They want me to be proof that there are some extra resilient people who enter the land of the ill and come back swinging into the land of the living. They want me to, somehow, be a “good sick person” who doesn’t linger on illness, but rather, beats it and just gets on with her life.

They want me to tell them that the woman sitting in the coffee shop one second before the text message referring her to oncology is the same woman who was unsure if she was going to die at 34. I can’t. I’m sorry.

More than once, I have found myself crying simply and only because I am 34. I sometimes say it out into the air, “I am 34.” Once, I screamed it in a parking lot at the gym when I wasn’t able to run for more than 90 seconds, “I am 34.” I am in the prime of my life. The people around me are getting married, or having children, or hitting career milestones, and my milestone is that this morning, I cooked eggs for the first time in six months. These are my 2026 milestones: tiny glimmers of the most mundane parts of life.

How do I tell you that while it has shattered me, it has also solidified me? How do I tell you that when you realize there is no you to “get back” to, the whole world opens up, that the screaming in the car about being 34 is both about my misfortune and also the great task of redefining myself for the next chapter of my hopefully long life? How do I tell you that if you, too, enter the land of the sick, the person you were before won’t be waiting for you at the end of it, that you’ll be someone brand new?

“We’re ordering the pork chop,” my friend announced before I even sat down in the corner booth at Risata Cucina. “Our server said it’s the best thing on the menu.” Our server is known for pushing the pork chop. He told someone to get it on their anniversary dinner, even though they had just come in for pasta. He convinced a family of four to share it. Someone who didn’t plan to get an entree ordered it for the entire table, like a table pancake. While a lot of servers will tell you not to ask your server what to order, because servers don’t know what you like, good servers know how to guide you to the dishes that excel beyond taste preferences–and less deft servers can lead you astray.

I was skeptical. A lot of the restaurants that excel at pasta in the Twin Cities struggle with their mains. Risata Cucina, which opened in Robbinsdale in early March and is run by industry veterans Brendan Denne and Bryan Gooding, doesn’t have this problem.

Case in point: a swordfish picatta that is anything like what your Italian grandmother might make. This swordfish is dredged in a potato crust, fried, and served with a butter caper sauce so good I spooned up the last bits with the serving spoon and drank them. But what makes the dish is the whole herb salad. Parsley, mint, basil, and oregano are thrown atop the swordfish and give brightness to an otherwise creamy, acidic, and garlicky classic. It feels, forgive me for the pun, fresh.

Then there’s the chicken parmesan, which is bone-in, brined in buttermilk, coated with bread crumbs, blanketed in mozzarella, slathered in a “spicy” red sauce (it’s Minnesota medium), and sprinkled with oregano and basil. I’ve been consuming a lot of chicken parms lately and almost all of them wind up either burnt or soggy. This one remained crisp, even as I left it to sit in the sun while I devoured the pastas.

And, of course, there’s the porkchop. The meat itself is well-seasoned and the portion is massive. On that count alone, it’s worth ordering. But then it’s topped in a glistening thick layer of vincotto and bright red peperonata and dusted with a small handful of fresh oregano. It is visually stunning and of all the dishes I ate that night (of which there were many), this was the sauce I carefully chose to drag my bread through. At $26, it’s also a steal. Each bite was vivacious, with the spicy and smoky peperonata and the fruitiness of the vincotta not fighting for attention on the palate, but feeling like a cohesive whole. So many dishes at Risata Cucina feel this way. When you read the menu, you might wonder, “Is that… too many flavors?” Somehow, in Denne’s deft hands, it never is.

The pork chop was my first glimmer of many that this restaurant is run by industry vets. Both of Risata Cucina’s co-owners have significant history working in the industry. Denne worked as Executive Chef for Daniel del Prado across multiple concepts and served as Culinary Director at Travail Collective. Bryan Gooding, who says hospitality is in his blood, started working in a pizza shop at the age of 14 and has been in hospitality ever since. This pork chop is proof of their extensive experience. Denne has built a menu that is well-rounded enough to break the curse of subpar mains at spots with our best pasta, and Gooding has built a front-of-house team that knows how to sell those proteins to people hellbent on just ordering those pastas.

With Pasta, There’s Something for Everyone

I’m not saying skip the pasta. I just want you to know that they aren’t the only strong dishes on the menu. There’s the rigatoni alla vodka with its just so spicy sauce for those who love classics. It won’t surprise you, but it will fill you with nostalgia, because it feels straight out of nonna’s kitchen.

On the other end of the spectrum, for those love creative fare, there’s the carrot agnolotti which is served atop just browned butter and then topped with shards of pistachio, big sprigs of dill, and a dusting fennel pollen. There’s a brightness in this dish that turned me, someone who usually feels that carrot should be reserved for fall, into a believer that yes, carrot is for summer. So much of that feeling is the use of herbs at Risata Cucina. Almost every dish comes garnished with fresh, whole herbs in generous portions.

There’s also the pasta dishes that are somewhere in the middle between nostalgic and creative, like a fusilli beef cheek ragu with large cuts of tender beef cheek flanked by slivers of garlic. The dish falls apart in your mouth, like you hope ribs do, and while beef cheek isn’t a standard ingredient in most ragus, this tastes just like you might expect a ragu to taste. That means that even your most picky friend can try a new-to-them ingredient, because it’s set inside a familiar concept. My favorite part of eating this particular pasta though was the way the housemade fusilli was imperfect, which let me make clear, I do not mean flawed. Handmade pasta often has slight variations piece to piece if you look closely enough, and here the corkscrews felt decidedly made by hand.

Yes, those more creative pastas on the menu are delicious and delightful, but how many of us can recall the last time we had really good standards at a restaurant? In the Twin Cities, there’s an incredible array of inventive pasta, ranging from OG Bar La Grassa to newcomers Liliana and Hendrix & Siena. What sets Risata Cucina apart, and what I personally hope you order, is the classics. Here, the team tries to give you the best version of ragu, pomodoro, or alla vodka you’ve ever had. This is, arguably, the harder route. Friends remarked long after my visits that those classic pastas were memorable. More than one went back without me (rude).

Rounding it Out: Apps, Dessert, and Amaro

Apps and desserts are also worth ordering, though not at the expense of pastas and mains. The salmon bruschetta feels like an Italian take on a spicy salmon roll. The grilled mortadella and mozzarella spiedini is akin to a mortadella lollipop that tastes of green due to the salsa verde and large heaps of mint on the skewers. Most stuffed arancini have too much filling, not enough rice, but at Risata Cucina, it felt like someone fried up really good mushroom risotto. Then there’s the panzanella which was my first bite of summer–acid forward and sweet, it felt like the perfect entrance into summer produce.

While pastas and mains were flawless, desserts were a mixed bag. I had a tiramisu that was too sweet even for my friend who loves Sweet Martha’s Cookies. I ordered the chocolate crostata in hopes of the promise of the graham cracker crust listed on the menu, but it came in a pale shell that resembled an underbaked refrigerated Pillsbury crust. The crust was doughy and pale, letting down the well-salted chocolate filling and shaved honeycomb that had so much potential to be the perfect end to an excellent meal.

Thankfully, other desserts fared better, like a cannoli that was heavy on the orange and shattered when you bit into it. The best dessert on the menu is the panna cotta. The strawberry panna cotta tasted just like artisan strawberry ice cream from a small producer, just in refrigerated form instead of frozen form. It was a nice break from the “sameness” of most panna cottas, where they are often vanilla, caramel, or goat cheese. This one, like most of the rest of the menu, had personality.

With dessert, you should order from the extensive Amaro list. Yes, even you, sober friends. They have non-alcoholic Amaro Lucano, the best or second best NA version on the market depending on who you ask, and it would be a shame not to order it at a restaurant with such a focus on this Italian liqueur.

An Affordable Bite of Luxury

Risata Cucina is also, by 2026 standards, incredibly affordable. Large portions of pasta start at $15 for spaghetti pomodoro and cap out at $24 for fusilli with beef cheek ragu, even as other restaurants have housemade pasta prices soaring into the thirties. Entrees start at $24 chicken scarpariello and max out at $35 for 9 ounces of ribeye, where at a steakhouse, $35 won’t even get you in the door. Sides are priced in the single digits. Desserts don’t go past $10. In a moment where everyone is penny-pinching and cost-conscious, Risata Cucina meets the moment without cutting any corners. And that? There’s not many restaurants that can do that.

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★★★: Risata Cucina is excellent and consistent.

My three favorite bites: If you go and don’t order the porkchop, what are you doing? Follow it with a classic pasta (your choice, they’re all good) and swordfish piccata.

Where to sit for the best service: Anywhere. Service is even, the patio is huge and shaded, and the bar has enough seats for you to squeeze in after work without a reservation.

Good for: Kids (there’s a “kiddos menu” with a spaghetti and meatballs to color in), date nights, and gossiping with the girls. Really, honestly, you can go here for your anniversary or a casual night out. It’s rare to find a restaurant that can do it all, but Risata Cucina can.

My one big tip: Say it with me: order the porkchop.

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What the stars mean:

★★★★: Best in Class

These are Minnesota’s best restaurants. Think category-defining and excellent all around in cookery, hospitality, and beverage.

★★★: Excellent and Consistent

These restaurants are excellent and consistent, meaning that the meals are similar across all my visits. Think meals worth writing home about where all parts of the menu are equally strong.

★★: Good or Inconsistent

These are either restaurants that are good but not excellent or excellent on some visits and not excellent on others. Think a restaurant with some stars and some flops, a restaurant that excels at pasta but not at dessert, or a restaurant that is excellent in cookery and not as strong in service.

★: Skip it

Self-explanatory!

Recently, a subscriber DM’d me to ask a question that is on everyone’s mind in a post-COVID world: where do you go when you want to go to a coffee shop after 5:00pm? As a writer who works remotely, I spend a lot of time in coffee shops and bars writing after work. I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out the best places to work after hours, and I’m excited to share my five favorite spots with you. Every single place in this list is open until at least 10:00pm, with a few open until midnight. This piece includes my go-to spot, a punk dive coffee shop, a vegan cafe that’s open all day, a spot for late-night sambusas and Somali tea, and more!

Why is this piece behind a paywall?

Most of my pieces are free, outside of a paywall. Pieces like this take a long time, require a lot of research, and cost more than my average pieces do to write. I don’t have a company card or a salary, I just have people like you! By becoming a paid subscriber, you help me fund more long-term projects like this one.

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The best seats in the house are the booths, with their own individual lights and privacy screens, making these the choice for cozy dates or gossip sessions with friends while K-Pop or Korean rap plays in the background. But anywhere you sit, the restaurant is visually cohesive, where every section (bar, booths, dining bench) feels distinct and integrated at the same time. The theme, the brand, are unmistakable. So is the presence of owner Sammi Loo, who went table to table on one of my visits, asking guests about their meals.

BeBap is a Korean restaurant located in the heart of downtown Rochester. It has a hybrid menu of creative fare, like kimchi arancini or bulgogi nachos, next to classics like bibimbap and kimchi jjigae. Stopping at my table, Loo said, “Korean food is kind of new here. People didn’t know much about it when we opened. It took us three years to build this.” You can feel that in the restaurant. Staff are succinct in describing dishes, but always describe them in ways that make it clear most of their guests are experiencing new-to-them flavors. They do their best to invite you in if you’re a staunch lover of Korean food (raises hand) or want to know what kimchi is (like a table to my left one night).

I ate at BeBap four times, ordering a wide variety of dishes. These are the dishes I’d pick for your first visit and my go-to order next time I go back.

Fried Mushrooms ($14)

Is this a safe space? Probably not, but pretend it is anyway. I was a vegan for a decade, and I would be happy to never eat a mushroom again. I know, RIPPING HOT take, but it’s a dish that I rarely order. I can judge mushrooms, cook mean mushroom dishes, but I never crave them, and unless they’re morels, I often have to be coaxed to order them for review. Most of the time mushrooms are just… fine. So if I am telling you to order the mushrooms, bestie, they’re good mushrooms. Is it the most beautiful dish? No. But it is one of the best tasting on the menu.

The mushrooms at BeBap are deep-fried mushrooms in a sweet, salty, and just-oh-so-slightly sour sauce. They’re flanked by thin cuts of peppers and onions that have been perfectly sweat, then topped with green onions and sesame seeds. My friend and I devoured this dish. My hack is to order this dish with rice for a vegetarian meal, where you can get all the sauce that falls to the bottom of the bowl.

Chicken Wings ($15) or Popcorn Cauliflower ($12)

Yes. I’m telling you to get two appetizers in my go-to order, and I stand by it. Both the chicken wings and popcorn cauliflower come tossed in a slightly spicy gochujang sauce, and just like the mushrooms, they’re topped with sesame seeds and served with scallions. Just writing this now, I’m salivating thinking about both of these dishes, and I literally just ate dinner. The chicken wings have a crust on them that is crackly, and the cauliflower has that perfect mash-up of crunchy outside and soft inside without being overcooked. Somehow, even after being thrown in a fryer and doused in a lot of sauce, the cauliflower still held its bite. I’ve eaten a lot of fried cauliflower in my day, and this is up there with the best.

Both of these dishes are well seasoned, with a super saucy, fermented punch that sets the tone for the rest of your meal. If you’re worried it might be too spicy, don’t–these are on the mild side.

Crispy Rice Bowl AKA Bibimbap ($18+)

When bibimbap comes to your table, it’s important that you put your ear by the bowl. What you’re listening for is a sizzle coming out of the hot bowl that’s been dropped in front of you. There aren’t a ton of restaurants that serve bibimbap in Minnesota, and BeBap is the only restaurant serving it in Rochester. Bibimbap is a rice dish with a protein, egg, and gochujang, and it comes topped with assorted banchan. Never had bibimbap before? The mixing is part of the whole experience. The name literally means “mixed rice.”

You want to take the entire little ramekin of gochujang and drop it on top, crack the egg, and kind of chop it up, then mix everything together. At BeBap, the bowl comes so overflowing with so much banchan that it’s hard to mix the bowl (NOT complaining) to scrape the bottom for the crispy rice, so I put a few chopstick scoops worth of banchan in my mouth before mixing. I’m a classic beef bulgogi girl and so that’s my recommended order, but I had the fried tofu on another dish, and vegheads, let me tell you, it’s a great fried tofu.

Black Sesame Ice Cream ($10)

“The problem with black sesame things,” my friend said with a giant mouthful of ice cream, “Is that they normally do not taste like black sesame. This,” she said pointing to the ice cream, “Tastes like black sesame.” Similarly, my problem with most ice cream in restaurants is that no one seems to know how to Brix test ice cream. A Brix test, in brief, helps you understand how hard an ice cream might freeze. If the number on the refractometer is too high (most common at restaurants), it melts immediately at your table. I’m sure this has happened to you: you order ice cream, and it comes to your table already half-melted, you’re rapidly trying to eat it before it melts, and half of it is ice cream soup. Again, not so at BeBap! This ice cream passes the quality control test and has the consistency of ice cream made at a professional ice cream shop. That’s because it’s a collab with local ice cream shop Flapdoodles, but you can only get it here. Do not skip it.

Rotating Cake ($12)

Similar to the ice cream, Loo gets cakes custom-made for her restaurant by Japanese-French pastry chef Patisserie M. Ordering the rotating cake at BeBap will yield a cake slice big enough for four people, about the size of your head. Four fluffy layers of pandan cake were layered with three layers of coconut whip and one layer of pandan whip on top. It was huge, but light, and reminded me a bit of an icebox cake. Pandan is one of my favorite ingredients in dessert, requiring you to crush or bruise the leaves to release its flavor. Often compared to vanilla, it’s a bit more floral and grassy, with a brightness that makes it a perfect pairing for the fresh, clean taste of coconut. Another dessert I had was a pistachio cheesecake that was chock full of pistachio flavor, not too sweet, and a perfect way to woo the dessert hater in your life, because it’s just that good.

One falafel isn’t enough to judge what the best falafel is, but it sure is a great way to get a sense of where to try again. Some were fine, some were bordering on inedible, and some were great. But there was one I kept coming back to over and over again–and they’re one of the few local places that make their own pita in-house! In total, I tried 34 falafel balls, but I contacted more spots than where I ate (look, sometimes you can just tell by the way it looks that it’s not the best).

I called all 58 spots that I found were serving falafel on a hunch that if someone made their own pita in-house, they might also make excellent falafel. Of the 58 falafel spots I called, only seven make their own pita, likely due to the dominance of local bakery Holy Land’s fresh pita, so getting house-made pita is a rare treat.

Below, I tell you my favorite falafel and give a nod to my runner-up, both of which make their own pita.

Why is this piece behind a paywall?

Most of my pieces are free, outside of a paywall. Pieces like this take a long time, require a lot of research, and cost more than my average pieces do to write. I don’t have a company card or a salary, I just have people like you! By becoming a paid subscriber, you help me fund more long-term projects like this one.

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First, we have to discuss strategy. In order to create the perfect five-scoop mini flight, you have to have a variety of flavors that all go well together. In this case (pun intended), all of the flavors rotate, so you’re probably not going to get all five of these flavors at the same time. But you can sub out a classic flavor like vanilla for chocolate, or you could sub out strawberry rhubarb for rhubarb. You get the point.

For me, the perfect flight looks like two fruity flavors, two more classic flavors, and one wacky wild card.

Second, we have to talk about the order in which you eat the flavors. In the same way that wine flights go light to dark, we are going to go mild to whacky. If you start with your wild card flavor, that vanilla won’t hit quite as hard as it can (and should). This is my perfect five-scoop mini flight, in the order I recommend you eat them in.

MALTED VANILLA

I think you can mostly judge if an ice cream parlor is going to be good by how their vanilla tastes. And the malted vanilla with malted milk balls is one of my favorite vanilla ice creams around. The big pieces of chocolate add a perfect crunch to an otherwise silky base that’s heavy on the malt. It’s a great first scoop to ease you into everything Pumphouse has to offer.

WILD BLUEBERRY AND QUARK

Every year, Pumphouse Creamery debuts new flavors like this Eastern European-inspired scoop. This flavor combines wild blueberries with quark, an unaged soft cheese, and the flavor profile is stunning. The quark is mild (think ricotta), and the wild blueberries have a bit more pucker than their commercial varieties. These two opposites play well together, giving you a mix of bright tartness and yogurt vibes in every bite.

STRAWBERRY RHUBARB

You should almost always get the most popular seller at any ice cream shop you go to, and at Pumphouse Creamery, that’s their rhubarb. But this year, they debuted a new flavor that combines two of their best sellers: strawberry rhubarb. Their rich local strawberry base is studded with ribbons of crystal-y, tart rhubarb. I thought I was a rhubarb purist at Pumphouse until I tried this ice cream, and now I have to say, I’m a convert.

SEA SALT, CARAMEL, PRALINE PECAN

This flavor has been on the menu for over 20 years–and for good reason. This salty bad boy is one of my favorite things to eat on a hot summer day when my brain is screaming, “ELECTROLYTES.” This scoop has the perfect amount of praline pecan with big hunks of caramel, both of which have the perfect notes of roasty-toasty flavor. It’s the most decadent flavor on the menu, reminding me of bonfires on the lake.

WILD CARD

From here, the last flavor is up to you. You could get a mint chocolate chip where the chocolate chips are housemade and the mint is front and center. You could choose the newly debuted chili crisp with honey-roasted peanuts, which already has such a strong cult following that people keep DMing me about it. Or if it comes back, you could get my favorite wacky flavor at Pumphouse, black garlic and chocolate chip. (Trust me!! Black garlic is mild, like balsamic and dates!) The world is your oyster, er, cone. Have at it.

My perfect split scoop

When I’m not trying to try every flavor on the menu, my go-to split scoop is lavender and chocolate. These two flavors together are perfect for late Minnesota sunsets and a walk around the neighborhood. The lavender isn’t overpowering and the chocolate is truly the best around, with a vibe somewhere between milk and dark chocolate. There are no gimmicks to either flavor and no frills. It’s just dried lavender or chocolate with good cream and eggs, as the ice cream gods intended.

I sat on my therapist’s couch with a tiny carton of orange/yellow tomatoes and said nothing. She knew what I was feeling when she saw the carton in my hands in the lobby. The tomatoes were the same exact strain a friend planted in my yard two years ago: Sunrise Bumblebee. I had stumbled upon them at a farmer’s market. The tears came and did not stop. Crying at a farmer’s market over tomatoes is such a silly thing to do, but heartbreak can find you anywhere.

“What if you cooked something for one of your friends?” she asked.

“What am I supposed to do?” I asked back, “Call someone up and say, ‘I’m crying over the strain of tomatoes that my former best friend grew in my yard, can I make you something with them?’”

She sat steady in a silence that told me, yes, that is what I am supposed to do.

2021

Elizabeth arrived at my house with very little. An old dog. A couple of suitcases. A lot of tears. And tomatoes. I told her she could stay as long as she wanted. I meant it.

The tomatoes were seeded by her late husband. He had just passed. He started them and she was hellbent on finishing them, like his last act of life. She put the tomatoes in the windows of my sunroom at first. It was still cold enough for frost and deep enough in the heart of the pandemic that we found ourselves getting our first boosters in a Best Buy.

The tomatoes eventually went up in my front yard, sometimes nibbled on by the deer that run in suburban-rural New York. They climbed a trellis, getting higher every day, reaching towards summer. She took care of them and learned new hobbies. She went on long walks. She learned to bake milk bread. She mastered stained glass. I still have the piece she made me, not hung in my house, but nestled against my mother’s ashes, my wedding invitation, a love letter from my twenties. It’s placed in a box like my own little graveyard of lost loves. Sometimes, when I miss her, I pull it out.

*

I made Elizabeth meal after meal in my house. I don’t think I ever told her that before she came, my boyfriend and I had started eating alone. One night, when he was working late, she said, “I thought it would be hard living with a couple, but you two barely touch.” She didn’t think that might mean something was wrong, but I actually hadn’t noticed that about my him. “You’re so intentional,” she said later. “I just thought you wanted it that way.”

When she told me, I started to notice it. He sat on the other end of the couch. I moved closer. We switched sides. He never held my hand. He didn’t hug on his way out the door. I started trying to squeeze in between the space that had been carved between us and I couldn’t.

The tomatoes grew taller until they burst with fruit. Then fall came and the branches dried. Her grief was a constant presence in my home. The space between my boyfriend and me grew wider. From April to October, she lived with us, and I did my best to love her the way I knew how: giving her the space for her grief and cooking for her.

I cooked with the tomatoes. Rich, red sauces just touched with olive oil and salt, mostly. Panzanella. Gazpacho. But also humble tomato toast, which we ate almost every morning. Mine had butter. Hers had mayo. My ex-fiancé ate the toast plain, without mayo, or butter, or tomato. Just bread. In the end, I knew she was getting better when one morning she woke up and made milk bread for BLTs. It was soft and pillowy. It was made as an act of grace during one of my hardest days–like I will take care of you and you will take care of me.

I mistook what we had for siblinghood.

*

When she left, I stopped cooking. My relationship got tighter around me. He stopped coming to bed as we were planning a wedding. They say there are always signs–and there were. I just thought they were fixable. I slept on my side of the bed, hoping he would come to sleep. It’s now so ingrained in my body that even when I try to sleep in the middle of the bed, I move to that side by morning, years later.

When she was in my home, I sometimes felt stifled. I didn’t realize it was because I was used to living alone, even though I lived with a man. He and I were so far apart. I spent most of my hours in the sunroom waiting for the sight of his car. When she left, I missed her presence so much that I kept going to the place she moved to. I just wanted to hug her. I just wanted to tell her I loved her. I just wanted to watch her life unfold in her new house with her new lover and her new dog.

When she left, the tomatoes died. I tried to plant them again the following summer. Nothing grew.

2023

Two years later, my boyfriend was now my ex-fiance. When I called her to tell her, snot bubbling out of my nose and wails bumping off the walls in my house, she got to the house faster than seemed humanly possible. She brought armfuls of protein shakes, knowing that in times of deep sadness, it was all I could eat. That same day, we got U-Haul boxes. That same day, she booked movers. That same day, we packed half the kitchen.

We spent Valentine’s Day together during my final days in New York. It was tender and surreal that she gave up spending it with her girlfriend to spend it with me. We found the record that played on my second date and broke it over my knee. We popped NA champagne. I burst into tears for no reason and she wrapped her arms around me. We burned my wedding vows. I walked alongside her in the worst moment of her life–she was walking with me in the worst moment of mine.

We spent around 10 days together packing and moving and unboxing my life. Elizabeth drove me home across the country, communicated with my ex, and booked the halfway hotel stop in Chicago. She did countless things I am sure I did not know she did. She passed on the word that I had left the home so my ex could come back to find bookshelves ripped of most of their contents and a kitchen he built for me nearly empty. I can’t imagine what it must have felt like for him to arrive there, a house gutted and not cleaned, a book left on his pillow. I felt more love from her in those weeks than I had felt from him in a long time.

I took Elizabeth to my favorite restaurants upon my arrival in my hometown, Bar la Grassa and Modern Times. I wanted to show her a part of my life. When I asked her if she wanted to look at the menu at BLG, she said, “Show me your world.” I did. Red wine spaghetti and cauliflower and orange gnocchi were sandwiched between courses of goat cheese bruschetta and gjetost cheesecake. It was dreamy in that restaurant that night, warm. It felt like the end and the beginning of my life.

We came at the tail end of a blizzard. The city was cold and white, not yet brown from oil slicks and dirt. All of my friends came over the night I arrived. They wrapped their arms around me, most of them meeting my cats for the first time. Tender, gentle, careful, they said, “Welcome home.” Then to her, they said, “Thank you.”

Elizabeth promised she would come visit one day, when I had a big house like the one I left behind. But by the time I had that house, just three months later, I knew she never would.

*

In the early days of being single, I dated frantically. I was looking for a distraction. Most of my friends knew this and were delicate with me, smiling while sitting across from me at restaurants and understanding that my way through grief and pain was doing things. My friends back home had known me for over a decade. Each of them had seen heartbreak in my life. Each of them also knew how I lived while alone. They knew the fervor with which I lived, the gusto. They also knew those parts disappeared in my last relationship, not because he stifled them, but because I thought maybe I could hold onto him if I was a different person.

Those parts came roaring back at their highest pitch when I left. Imagine finding your violin after years of not playing it, how it might be tenuous and chaotic, but also might make you feel alive. This was me in those days, not with a violin but with life.

This is a thing I know about grief, having seen enough people in my life face it, including Elizabeth. You have this period of absolute chaos where you gather all the parts you lost into a little pile. You put them on like garments, all at the same time. It’s a shitty little outfit that clashes. Her frenetic energy went into things like stained glass and gardening. It felt poised. Mine went to, honestly, being quite messy and making mistakes and delaying my heartbreak that I didn’t see coming.

You put all the grief garments on, and then some come off. But that first part? The really messy part? That’s where the healing happens. You have to do it. You just have to.

*

The calls Elizabeth made became further apart. Text messages went unread. The tone of her voice turned from loving her friend to someone I didn’t recognize. I stopped talking for a while, hoping that would help, and she filled in the void with her own challenges in love and friendship. I didn’t talk about dating unless she asked.

Once, she said it was like I cried wolf with love, that I fell too often, or too hard. What she meant was that after first dates, I had hope. I wished I could be with her in person, hold her hand, and say, “Not all of us meet our great loves at bus stops or at conferences, as much as we wish we did. Some of us have to suffer through dozens of first dates, and for that, we need infinite hope.”

Other times, I felt anger. Did she not remember the chaotic and wild days of her current relationship, where the woman she dreams of a life now with was married? I wanted to sit with her in a park in the city she lived in and say, “Look, I love you, and that time was a little wild. You called and texted me all the time, sometimes yelling or in all caps, about your feelings. Sometimes you texted me mid-argument on the phone. Or frenetic on a train. I just listened. I didn’t love you less because of it. I loved that you shared it with me. Can you not love this part of me, too?”

*

When I returned to New York for the first time after the end of my engagement, I asked if she would go to the waterfall where I was supposed to be married. At first, she said yes. Then, she was tired and didn’t want to. It was the whole reason for our trip to the Hudson Valley: the promise of pilgrimage. I had planned to talk to her on that trip, too, about our friendship, how much I loved her. But in the car on our way to the train, Elizabeth ran into a gas station. A mutual friend of ours turned to me and said, “We’ve been talking about it and you’re just going through,” their eyes got big, “A LOT right now.” Then they shared a detail only Elizabeth knew about my life.

I imagined them getting coffee in a city I didn’t live in, gossiping about my pain. I decided not to say anything when she got back into the car. Four months had passed and we didn’t recognize each other anymore.

I went to my wedding site alone, standing on the banks of the place where I was supposed to be married. I dropped flowers in the water. I didn’t cry. What was supposed to be a pilgrimage with my best friend was something I did alone. As I dropped flowers in the water, I dropped some for her.

I grew resentful. She grew resentful. I tried to hold on. She did, too. It was destined to break. In the same way she couldn’t say the hard things, I couldn’t either. I think that neither of us could do it because we knew if we did, it would end.

In one of her last messages to me, she said she missed the friend who cared. I found myself standing in my kitchen, looking at the message, thinking about going to that water alone. I thought about how she did not realize at that moment that the choices she made in the hardest part of my life would impact our friendship forever. The calls left unanswered, the texts left unread, the waterfalls left unvisited, sent me calling others, texting others, asking others. They picked up, texted back, came with. I cried out in my house, to a cadre of cats, “I can’t love you the way you want me to if you won’t love me that way, too.”

2024

When I left my therapist’s office with those tomatoes in my hand, I called a friend and I said, “I’m crying about tomatoes, and I know this sounds crazy, but can you come over and can I make you something with the tomatoes?”

She did not ask why. She came. We sat at my bar counter eating tomato pasta and I told her all about my grief. “It’s so stupid,” I said, “I’m triggered by tomatoes.”

“Triggered by tomatoes would be a good band name,” she said.

We laughed.

Then she said, “You can call me for anything. I can’t promise I will always be able to come over for dinner, but I will always call you back.”

Over two years, friends showed up for me in the ways only the greatest of partners might. One went to get a mammogram with me on their birthday and said, “There’s nothing else I would rather be doing on my birthday.” When I laughed and said, “Liar,” they looked me dead in the eye and said, “I mean that.”

Another made me eat on days when it was hard–just bits of tomatoes here, a slice of bread there. She brought me homemade cordials and jams, fresh produce, things she thought I might be enticed to eat.

The same friend who brought me to the mammogram brought me to surgery that might help prevent cancer one day. Other friends stayed over at my house after that surgery, assembling a makeshift team of caregivers who figured out a meal train, dog walks, and cat care. One friend, new at the time, insisted on being in that care team.

On the day Elizabeth was set to be the person delivering the meal on my meal train, it didn’t arrive. A friend of mine had quietly noted the slot she was in and asked me if food had arrived during that time. When I said no, she didn’t just send some, she showed up with burgers and said, “Turn on 90 Day Fiancé.”

When my phone went off with a string of apologetic messages from Elizabeth and a fresh dispatch of food, my friend stuffed her mouth full of cold fries and said, “You get to be mad that she forgot.”

I wasn’t, though. Just like in my last relationship, I kept hoping the love would come back if I was the right person for her. Maybe if I didn’t talk about dating or my heartbreak, maybe if I only asked about her life and didn’t share mine, or maybe didn’t ask for too much, our friendship would blossom again. I didn’t yet know that when you start to shield part of your light and also your mess from people you love, it’s already over. I didn’t yet know that not everyone can come with you as you grieve.

2025

This year, I’m not holding tomatoes from a farmer’s market. I’m holding tomatoes I grew myself, not in my yard but on my bright, bright roof. When all of my friends had tiny shoots, mine were growing like weeds. It wasn’t just the tomatoes but the dill and the nasturtium and the edible flowers and my first blueberry plant. I planted these things expecting them to die–and all of them are lush enough that after dinner, friends stop by my roof to take things home. I have too much for myself.

I thought I wasn’t a talented gardener. That I killed everything I touched. Now, in the mornings, I go out and water these plants with no idea how they are thriving. Friends ask me, “What did you do?” I don’t know. Except for the constant sun and the constant trying.

The first tomato picked off the vine went right into my mouth. There was no one I wanted to tell more than Elizabeth. Instead, I told my friends that I grew something I thought I couldn’t. I found myself on this deck, wondering if maybe the house and the dirt were trying to tell me something in New York. Not: you are a bad gardener. But: nothing is meant to grow here for you. Not tomatoes, not herbs, not love, and not your friendships. I wonder if the house in New York was quietly telling me to go, like this one is telling me to stay.

I sent a photo of that first tomato to my boyfriend at the time. I said, “I grew something.” I still have an entire patch of nettles I can’t seem to kill, and weeds that won’t go away, and ivy that needs to come down away from the gutters. I don’t have a green thumb, just a little luck maybe, and a lot of sun and a good year of rain. I feel like my house is saying, “Vegetables won’t die here. Love won’t die here. Friendship won’t die here.”

I wonder if Elizabeth felt a shudder when I picked that first tomato from the vine. I wonder if when she eats tomatoes, she thinks of me, like someone who was once beloved to her, too. Sometimes things end, like love or friendship, but the love you shared can still live on inside of you. Not every ending needs spite or anger. Sometimes, it’s just… time. One of the things that Elizabeth grew to resent about me is how deep, how hard, I love. I’m not sure she ever paused to think about how deep that love was, too, for her. I didn’t start gardening with tomatoes because I thought they might be easy. I started with tomatoes because they remind me of her.

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Why is this piece behind a paywall?

Most of my pieces are free, outside of a paywall. Pieces like this take a long time, require a lot of research, and cost more than my average pieces do to write. I don’t have a company card or a salary, I just have people like you! By becoming a paid subscriber, you help me fund more long-term projects like this one.

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I went on the hunt for my favorite waffles in the Twin Cities. I ate 22 waffles over 18 months. I found five I wanted to order again and again: a classic diner waffle, a Belgian waffle, a waffle at a berry patch, a savory waffle that you wouldn’t guess is gluten-free, and a vegan waffle with rotating flavors.

Why is this piece behind a paywall?

Most of my pieces are free, outside of a paywall. Pieces like this take a long time, require a lot of research, and cost more than my average pieces do to write. I don’t have a company card or a salary, I just have people like you! By becoming a paid subscriber, you help me fund more long-term projects like this one.

Read more

How many times do you visit a restaurant before a review?

If it’s over two hours from Minneapolis, it’s a minimum of three times, because traveling for work is expensive, and because I try to visit as many places as possible in a year. This is pretty standard. Most critics visit a restaurant three times. I find that I learn a lot more–and my pieces develop more character–if I go more than that, though. If it’s under two hours from my house, I normally go five or more times. I went to Marrow and Thai Pop in Rochester five times each. I visited Bellecour seven times to re-try dishes where I had errors in earlier visits. I visited Dahlia nine times to try a bunch of seasonal pastries. I go as much as I can, because I think my readers greatly benefit from repeat visits.

Are there any restaurants you won’t review?

I don’t review restaurants that don’t meet my code of ethics. I also regularly go to very small restaurants to see if I might review them positively, but more than once, I have realized halfway through writing that my review would have to be significantly mixed or negative. For an indie restaurant without a lot of acclaim or press, I’m not going to give them a negative review. The only time I work on a mixed or negative review is if the restaurant has press, acclaim, awards, tons of influencer hype, is exceptionally expensive, or is a part of a restaurant group that has multiple restaurants. Those are my two main exceptions.

How do you pick the restaurants you go to, especially the more obscure ones?

I have eaten at over ¼ of the restaurants in the state. This year, I’ll likely cross the ⅓ mark. So a lot of the answer to this is that I eat out a lot, and I try to give every spot a fair shake. Sue’s Drive-In is a good example of a more off-the-beaten-path restaurant, as you have to go out of your way to get there unless you go to a cabin right there. I found it because I was trying to find (and eat at) every drive-in in the state. It’s definitely worth a pit stop for the housemade onion rings, but I only know about it because I did hours of research on drive-ins. A lot of how I find spots comes down to a lot of research, like how I Googled “bakery in [insert county here]” to find all the bakeries in the state, or just moving a map on my phone with the word “bakery” as the search.

How do you review restaurants that constantly rotate their menu?

My reviews of Marrow and Dahlia are good examples of this. Typically, I wait for at least one menu turnover. I reviewed Marrow from October-March. Dahlia, I made sure to go in for three of their special menus, like St. Patrick’s Day and Easter. I think it’s important to remember that reviews are snapshots in time, and the menu I’m reviewing might be better (or worse) than a future menu. I also try to figure out what the staples are on a menu and eat those. Myriel, for example, has a rotating menu, but the duck and the pie are always available.

How do you decide what to order during each visit for a review?

Similar to the question above, I try to figure out what the staples are. But I also try to figure out where a menu might be weaker. For example, at a restaurant without a pastry chef, I’m eating all the desserts, because I want to be able to give an honest picture of the restaurant to my readers. In general, though, I eat broadly across all dish categories and proteins.

Have a question you want to ask me? Put it in the comments below and I’ll add it to a future Q&A!

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In the summer, it’s another animal entirely. The front patio is bustling, where in the off-season, it’s closed. The line can extend through that patio with wait times to order crossing 30 minutes on the busiest days of the year. But in both seasons, there’s the unique magic of being in a restaurant where most of the fish came in that day on boats, fished by locals.

Old timers over at beyond beurre blanc know that I’ve thrown down the gauntlet and claimed that the best fish and chips on the shore is at Fisherman’s Daughter. This is, in some camps, controversial, but to those folks, I ask this question: Have you eaten all the fish and chips on the north shore in one day back-to-back? Because I have. Not only is it my favorite fish and chips on the shore, but in 2025, it also landed on my top 50 restaurant list at number four.

Here’s my go-to order at this iconic Minnesota establishment.

Fish and Chips ($16)

The first thing you are going to do when you get to the counter is ask, “What’s fresh?” Everyone I know wants to get the walleye, but it’s often frozen. That doesn’t mean it’s bad (the walleye is great!). It just means we’ve got better. So you are not going to get the walleye. You’re going to get whatever the cashier tells you was caught fresh. If you’re expecting British fish and chips, that’s not the vibe here (unless you go on Monday in the winter). It’s a light cornmeal breading that is distinctive of the North Shore style, with homemade tartar sauce and a lemon on the side. The fries are beer-battered and always extra crispy. If you’re vegan, they have a vegan filet option for you, too!

Smoked Salmon Chowder ($9)

I never go to Fisherman’s Daughter without getting soup. Every time I get soup here, I’m just blown away. Cream of poblano, cauliflower and cheese, and smoked salmon chowder are just a few of the soups I’ve had over the past year that push this place into my number one “must-eat” spot in all of Grand Marais. There’s always a vegetarian soup option, but the smoked salmon chowder is the icon here. It’s made with bacon, so it’s not pescatarian. Chunks of smoked salmon are generous, with the bacon portion smaller, but still there in flavor. Packed with herbs, celery, and potato, this is the first thing I eat every time I come to the shore.

Smoked Salmon Dip

On your way out, don’t forget to get a smoked salmon dip. This dip is made with whipped cream, smoked salmon, and the rest… well, that’s a secret. I always bring up Ritz to eat with it, because these buttery crackers are the perfect pairing, and sometimes, I bring up Mogi bagels if I remember. It’s perfect for eating on the rocky shore while you watch the sun set.

beyond beurre blanc is 100% funded by readers. I’m an independent restaurant critic and my supporters help make my work possible. If you plan to use this piece to order at Fisherman’s Daughter, the best way to say thank you is becoming a paid subscriber.

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This was months before my trips to Rochester became closer and closer together, probably while the cancer was inside of me, but before I knew it was inside of me. I thought I was going to check out a restaurant that seemed special for the first time.

In the warm light of a restaurant that was skinny and long, I felt a feeling I feel every so often. It’s a glimmer I feel when I’m somewhere special. You can see it before you taste it by the way a team works in the kitchen. There’s a hum to the hospitality that sometimes stops me in my tracks.

For me, this glimmer happened while eating deviled eggs that were topped with beef tartare and housemade potato chips.

I looked up at my boyfriend with a shine in my eyes. He looked at me with a shine in his eyes, too, for a different reason. For me, I was smiling at him because of the food. I was ravenous for more, insatiable. “You love it here,” he said. That’s why he was smiling.

“I love it here,” I said, taking out a napkin and wiping my hands off. I was doing two things at once. I was searching tirelessly for references to Marrow on websites of media publications, trying to find where this food was highlighted. I came up almost completely empty.

At the time, I had just really started throwing my hat into the review ring. I was in the early days of getting serious about it and honing my craft, taking things from memoir to actual criticism. It was bumpy. But I was sure after one visit that I wanted to review Marrow. I wasn’t just sure I wanted to review it. Quite frankly, I was pissed off that it hadn’t been reviewed.

I think people trust me because this is how I decide to review: with my heart.

Like at Marrow, I was eating scallops and I had tears in my eyes because I loved them so much and I wanted you to go to eat them, and I was stark raving mad that no one had told you to eat them! I know it sometimes frustrates other food writers that I talk this way, but I threw my hat in the ring because I saw a gap. My readers saw it, too.

Criticism, which is by its nature not neutral, is now often, well, neutered. You’re supposed to be solely objective. But I don’t know how a glutton attempts to do that with any honesty, and every critic is a bit of a glutton. The heart is the way, for me. Whether that’s how it’s supposed to be or not is of no concern of mine. It’s up to my readers to decide if they want the objective or the heartfelt–and they’ve chosen the heart.

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I think that people read my work because you feel I’m more like you than the average critic. I hear it all the time.

I’m rough around the edges, a bit raw, and I’m first and foremost a guest. That’s not ever changing. This is who I am, and this is what beyond beurre blanc is. I have built a writing career out of moving from deeply personal experiences at restaurants on the side of going out to dinner and not on the side of making the dinner.

It is, in fact, how criticism used to be, though it gets rarer every year as more and more reviews center chef stories, not guest stories. But the magic of a restaurant is the moment between the chef and the guest–and to do that, we have to know what the guest feels, sees, and tastes. A beautiful chef story that can’t be translated to the guest at the meal is a restaurant not living up to its potential.

To see if you can hear the story, you have to step back and away from what the chef is saying and ask: What does the food tell me on its own, with no conversation? Because while more and more critics interview chefs for their reviews than ever before, this isn’t a privilege most guests have.

I ask: is the food, without that interview, moving?

At Marrow, the food was.

In that first moment, at Marrow, I was just a guest. Like you. I knew I was going to write about it, but I didn’t want to put that hat on yet. I let that dinner be dinner. I took notes but I used none of them for my review. I just wanted to eat the food and write about it for myself first. That’s how much I loved it. I was a guest sitting across from a man who was laughing at the fact that I was tearing up over scallops. “You don’t even like scallops that much,” he said.

“Shut up, I do now,” I said back. Because good food can change you. It can open you to new experiences, textures, flavors, and cultures. This is the power of the guest story. It’s not, “How does the chef want the scallops to taste? What does the chef want the scallops to mean?” The guest’s story is, “Now I order scallops all the time, because of you.”

This is how I fell in love with Marrow.

I wrote a review about Marrow.

I want you to read it, closed or not. I wanted you to go. I spent so long writing that review, never feeling like I did it justice. It sat for a month overdue because I just never felt like I got it right.

Marrow was a restaurant worth the trip from the Twin Cities, or really, anywhere.

It was so special to me that even as I am actively mapping Rochester and need to eat at restaurants multiple times for review, every single time I went to chemo, I went to Marrow for personal reasons, not professional ones. I couldn’t leave it off my list.

Some restaurants are so important to me that if and when they close, I feel wayward and lost. This happened to me when I lived in Kingston, NY, and Boitson’s closed. I spent so many nights at that bar in my drinking days, eating the best vegan burger ever to exist, and then they busted the wall down and replaced a tiny oyster bar with a monstrosity. It’s how I felt when Muddy Waters closed in Minneapolis. I lived fewer than 100 steps from there once, and it held so many of my late nights, so many of my memories. It’s how I felt when Heyday closed, too, after its four-star review couldn’t even keep it afloat. I had dozens of first dates there. I lived a life there. Once, I snuck out the back!

I lived a life at Marrow, too. Marrow was the place I came after chemo, with my hair covered in ice from wearing a cold cap all day, and the owner, Sarah Schwenker, would be at the front and tell me, “Welcome back.” During the last chemo visits, I didn’t even have to remind the staff that I couldn’t share food with friends and that even the desserts needed to be split because I was toxic, literally, from the chemo. They just remembered. They let me be tired and let my table breathe a bit and always asked how treatment was.

Each and every friend I took, at one point, one of us cried at least a little. Sometimes, it was over the food, like my friend Kelly, who cried over a steak so good, she said she’ll never forget it. And sometimes it was over the fact that I had cancer. On one of my worst days, I teared up and said to a friend, “But what if it does kill me?” I know exactly at which table I asked her that question.

Some people treat restaurants like places you go to dinner, but I treat restaurants like an extension of the hearth.

You can’t treat them all that way, but you can treat some that way. In a world where everyone wants the glitzy Instagram shot, I just wanted to eat those deviled eggs one more time on my last chemo. I won’t get that, but there’s a restaurant you love somewhere that you can go to tonight. You can pull up a seat at the bar. If there’s a wait, who cares?

Tonight, I just want you to go somewhere, and I want you to tell the bartender or server how much you love that restaurant and how much it means to you.

If you celebrate every anniversary there, I want you to tell them. If you haven’t done that in the past but plan to now, tell them that, too. Have a great memory there? Tell them what it meant to you. Because restaurants like this need us more and more every year, not less, and Instagram photos and videos mean nothing if the best restaurants in town keep closing because we’re chasing views.

Restaurants also need to hear our stories, the guest stories. Not the critic stories. Your stories.

The staff needs to hear what their restaurant means to you. You are, in so many ways, the whole point.

If you go out to eat like you’re searching for magic, you’ll find it. And when you find it, don’t let it go. Because even though Marrow is closed, when I told all my friends, the thing we shared with each other were the memories we made there in the worst year of my life. That space will always be there for me to return to and put my palm on the outside of the building and remember everything the restaurant made me feel. Because for me, I don’t do this work for any other reason than the fact that restaurants like Marrow are the places where I feel most myself, and most alive.