Since Dahlia has moved into their permanent space, you don’t need to be the first in line in order to score whatever pastry you want.

That wasn’t always true, though. Once, being first in line landed me the single, lone, last flaming hot Cheeto croissant on a 4/20 (not being high on this holiday had its perks, mainly, timeliness). In the pop-up days, sometimes there were only one, two, or three pastries left when you showed up. Now, coming at 11:00am on a weekend is definitely risky, but there will be something left for you. Coming at 8:00am? They’re not even close to being sold out.

I was there right when they opened for a very specific reason. If you show up at 8:00am, you can get a warm chocolate chip cookie.

It seems like a weird thing to eat at eight in the morning, but I wake up really early— and at Dahlia, the rules don’t apply.

The cookie I was trying to score is the brown butter chocolate chip cookie, which is good even when it’s not warm, but when it is warm? It’s packed to the gills with melty chocolate chips and has that extra nutty flavor from still-cooling brown butter. I eat this cookie by taking chunks from the edges and dragging those bits of edge pieces through the top of the cookie to get all of that molten chocolate. It’s nostalgic for me. It reminds me of eating Mrs. Fields’ chocolate chip cookies, except this cookie is significantly better.

Subscribe now

When most people think of Dahlia, I think they think of co-owner and baker Alex Althoff’s inventive and giant croissants.

Dahlia is known for giant laminated pastries, as big as two hands. But I always find myself drawn to the other Althoff treats behind the glass.

Like the uber tart thumbprint lemon raspberry snickerdoodle. I know. It’s a mouthful. Thumbprint doesn’t begin to describe the size of these cookies, which are so big that I can’t hold them tightly even with my entire hand outstretched. While it might seem like those flavors together are chaotic, part of the Althoff magic is that they are balanced, making you wonder why lemon and cinnamon are rarely paired together. In Althoff’s hands, it seems like they were always destined to be married.

The Twin Cities used to be a croissant desert until Patisserie 46 opened and then unleashed a boom of bakery after bakery with incredible croissants. Almost every single neighborhood across Minneapolis and Saint Paul has a bakery that has croissants ranging from good enough to truly exceptional. Dahlia is one of those bakeries. But not every corner of the city has a bakery that has the croissant piece down along with cookies and cake.

When I think of what makes a truly exceptional bakery, I think of a baker’s range. Althoff has that range, best displayed by her chocolate cake.

This cake is sexy. It’s glossy from the dark chocolate mousse and mirror glaze on top, but it’s also light. The weightlessness is noticeable in your hand and on your tongue, but somehow sturdy enough to stand four layers tall. Bitter, rich, and deep, this cake is so good. I kept buying it for my friends and asking them, “Have you ever had a better chocolate cake?” No one had. It’s affordable enough to run out and get a slice for your Sunday dinner date ($12), but it’s good enough for your wedding.

Lest you think I opened with cookies and cakes because I find the croissants rote, I don’t. I did something I rarely do when Dahlia opened. I went on opening weekend. The first thing I did was pull a knife out of my pocket (I travel with one) and slice a normal croissant in half. It had the perfect honeycomb structure that only the best bakers can produce. There was no tunneling, no butter leakage, no density issues, no guminess. I went up to Althoff to show her the croissant, “This is perfect,” I said.

That matters because Althoff was working with brand-new ovens. I would have expected and forgiven messy croissants on opening weekend, but these were not messy or imperfect. They show the hands of an expert baker who is able to adapt quickly to the conditions around her. Years of pop-ups gave Althoff this skill, meaning opening weekend pastries were as good as the ones they’re producing today. Since then, I’ve cut into 13 croissants, looking at cross sections for my notes. All of those croissants were flawless, except one, which had a tiny bit of tunnelling. This is rare, with only two other local bakeries producing this kind of consistency: Diane’s Place and Black Walnut Bakery.

The flavors in these croissants range from the standard ham and cheese to the more inventive fare like their Easter menu, which had a blueberry and toasted vanilla nest and an “Easter Bunny” croissant. The blueberry and vanilla showcased how Althoff plays with classic flavors: vanilla pastry cream and blueberry jam are both identifiable flavors for any guest that walks into Dahlia.

In order for that croissant to be seen as good by a guest requires it to be nearly faultless. The pastry cream and layer of blueberry jam were both perfectly set, with that little bit of toastiness adding depth that took this croissant from good to great.

The Easter Bunny croissant was at the opposite end of the spectrum from classic. It was covered in Althoff’s signature piping, with the center of the croissant hollowed out. The bottom layer held a thick spread of sea salt dark chocolate ganache and smashed malted chocolate eggs, then it was piped full of malted milk chocolate cremeux on top. It’s as decadent as a cake, making a pain au chocolat look like child’s play. And while most stuffed croissants like this are filled only in the center and not end to end, this one has flavor throughout.

Sometimes, though, those creative flavors don’t take off, like a Lucky Charms pain suisse that didn’t follow through on the promise of cereal milk pastry cream, though the pastry cream tasted fine. It just tasted like pastry cream. When she nails it, though, she really nails it.

My favorite item on the menu to date was a banana cream pie croissant that tastes just like a banana cream pie with a rich all-butter crust. Just like with many Dahlia treats, it was hyperseasonal. Blink and you’ll miss it–and this one was gone sooner than I wanted it to be. (Bring it back!!)

Dahlia’s new space isn’t just about the pastries, though, it’s also about co-owner and chef Nat Moser’s savory creations. The menu of sandwiches and soups is perfect lunch or breakfast fare.

Dahlia’s new building presents major restrictions for a bakery trying to offer savory food. “Everything is electric,” Moser explained to me in an interview for Racket. “We don’t have a hood system, so we’re really limited in what we can cook; we had to build a savory menu that fit into the space we had.” A regular customer asked after their iconic pop-up’s fried potatoes, a fan favorite, which didn’t make the cut. “It’s because we don’t have a deep fryer, so we turned those potatoes into a really good potato salad,” Moser says, adding that the grab ‘n’ go deli item is his favorite thing they offer.

They’re also a favorite of friends of mine, with a friend saying to me, “I almost never like potato salad.” But she devoured this one. She liked it better because it’s less mayo or mustard-forward and well-dressed with chimichurri, which gives each bite a bit of a kick and tons of herbal and acidic notes. It packs a punch. This will make a Potato Salad Hater into a believer.

Other items in the grab-and-go case are their signature whipped brown butter tubs, English muffins, and chili crisp. But my singular favorite grab-and-go case item is Dahlia’s quiche. I had two flavors while I was eating for this review, but my favorite was their broccoli, smoked cheddar, and green garlic quiche, which had a layer of cheese at the bottom of the egg custard. When I put it into the oven, the cheese melted onto my pan, giving it a bit of a cheese skirt, which made me say out loud, “Oh, hell yeah.”

I have made my way through the entire catalog of breakfast sandwiches served on those iconic housemade sourdough English muffins that soar sky-high or on the plain-but-not-boring croissant. In Dahlia’s space, with no hood, they can’t do any Maillard reaction. For lay people, just think of this rule for our purposes as no crisping of meat. After ordering the bacon and tofu additions to the sandwiches a few times, I could tell that the team isn’t allowed to crisp anything up. The bacon was always exceptionally soft and I found myself missing the char. Once, it felt borderline undercooked and I took it off my sandwich. It’s not their fault. They’re limited by the space. But still, it reads in the final product.

That’s why I typically order the sandwiches straight up, or I get the special, which normally is built around these restrictions, like their special: The Farmstead.

This sandwich had an egg, chicken sausage, Muenster cheese, pickled jalapenos, and garlic herb cream cheese. It was a fun, punchy number served on their scallion English muffin and didn’t have any of the failings of the bacon-based sandwiches. The sausage can withstand the limitations of the kitchen and is my go-to for meat on breakfast sandwiches.

The breakout star on Moser’s savory menu, however, is maybe a bit unexpected: it’s the soup.

On opening weekend, I ordered the root vegetable soup to go, intending to just briefly taste it. I ended up drinking the entire thing like a latte straight from the cup. Since they opened, they struggled to sell the soup so they tried something novel: pairing it with a pastry.

The soup of the day now comes with a rich, buttery garlic knot you can only get if you order the soup. It’s perfect for dipping in the chicken wild rice soup that I ordered on my fourth visit. The soup was salty, creamy, smooth, with an ample amount of tiny pieces of chicken paired against the chewy bite of the rice. Just like the chocolate chip cookie, it’s worth ordering for breakfast on a rainy morning.

At Dahlia, the rules of size and flavor don’t apply, and neither do the rules of time.

Whether it’s 8:00am or 11:00am, you can order whatever fits your fancy and no one will judge you. In fact, they might nod at you from behind the counter in acknowledgement of your shared audacity. After all, the soup and the cookie are both ready at 8:00am. Maybe they’re ready for you.

★★★: Dahlia is excellent and consistent.

My three favorite bites: Soup, chocolate cake, and quiche!

Where to sit for the best service: Dahlia has an expansive patio perfect for weekend brunch dates.

Good for: Surprising the office with great baked goods, early afternoon soup runs, getting a whole quiche to go, and bringing a chocolate cake to your friend with a broken heart.

My one big tip: You can pre-order on weekdays!

__

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!

“Hmm,” he said, looking down his nose at me, “I think they’re trying to be a little too cutting edge.” I laughed. “I think they are cutting edge,” I said, telling him excitedly that I was going there for dinner and telling him why I loved it. He advised against it, telling me that I should eat my comfort food for dinner instead of a restaurant meal. His comfort food was chicken noodle soup. It was clear that is what he hoped I would eat for dinner, too.

As soon as he left the room, I turned to my friend who had come with me. Her eyebrows were raised all the way up. “My comfort food is foie gras,” I said. We cackled so hard, we both snorted. In under an hour, the surgical team put me under, ripped a port out of my chest, and I was up and walking. The first thing I said when I woke up from anesthesia was, “Where is my Labubu?” The second thing I said was, “Foie gras donuts.”

I was starving. I hadn’t eaten in 22 hours. I was champing at the bit to go into Marrow where I knew savory would be dynamite, but where nothing beats the Danish donuts. Light pastry is pumped with a whipped Nutella and foie gras mousse. The filling is hazelnut-forward, foie light, and oh-so-memorable. It’s the perfect introduction to foie if you’ve never had it, just giving you a tiny taste of the richness from the liver. Foie is even blitzed in with the powdered sugar that is dusted on top, and it’s a menu item so good my server said, “We can’t take it off the menu.” I’m sure the reason is because there would be a donut uprising from locals (I’d drive down and join it).

There are other moments of luxury on the menu, like a Wagyu dish I had in December that tasted exactly like Minnesota winter. The flesh was deep red with perfectly crispy sunchokes flanking broccolini. Unlike the foie, there was nothing subtle about this dish. Like many of my friends who came with me to Marrow, it elicited emotion. My friend took her napkin and blotted back tears. “This was so special,” she said as she ate her last bite. It is.

Another little luxury is the deviled eggs with no expense spared. Dijon-heavy and topped with steak tartare, these deviled eggs made me, a notorious deviled egg hater, a true believer. The homemade barbecue chips served as tiny scoops for the tartare and trout roe, and the whipped egg on top and dredges of tartare that were left underneath were a perfect one-biter.

Rich, decadent, and luxe, eating at Marrow feels like eating at the best restaurants in the Twin Cities with constant surprise and delight. Like being served Iberico Pork Pressa, which I personally haven’t seen on a Twin Cities menu. This is a highly coveted cut of meat that is served medium-rare. The pork was served with a tiny crepe of huitlacoche (Mexican truffle), which is a delicacy that turns corn from bright yellow to black fungal masses. The flavor transforms, too, going from sweet and soft to intense and earthy.

This dish encapsulates the high-low cooking style of Chef Jeff Schwenker, where he is able to deftly move between luxury ingredients and ones that, on certain menus, are often overlooked. Sharp, deep, and endlessly creative, Marrow is producing dishes that would earn them accolades in any major city, but because they decided to open a restaurant in their hometown of Rochester, they’re often overlooked, just like many of the ingredients they use.

Like sweetbreads. Which… I do not seek out. When I ordered the Marrow pot pie for the first time, my server said his school-age son described it as a mash-up of mac-n-cheese and chicken pot pie. I’d personally describe it as pure luxury or a love letter to offal. Flaky pastry covers a base of sweetbreads, celery root, and tender pearl onions that are folded into a creamy béchamel. A hole is cut out of the middle of the pie crust, and a marrow stopper is placed on top. This pie comes with two spoons: a teeny tiny marrow spoon and a spoon big enough to dig into the whole pie. It’s rich and luxurious for dinner, yes, but I like to save half of it for a second meal at breakfast. Reheated in the oven, this pie is just as good on day two, and even better with a poached egg lovingly placed on top.

Another overlooked ingredient on the menu is humble beef tongue, which Schwenker transforms into pastrami to top rye spaetzle. While many places cut beef tongue as small as possible to be more palatable, here they serve it up in large pieces over mustard cream and green grapes. It’s not gamey at all and you can slice your knife through it with ease, leaving my friend who joined me to look up at me at the chef’s counter with a mouthful, “This is so good,” she said, barely intelligible because her mouth was that full. And yes, she means good, but I also think she meant surprising.

Even the salad is special–and it’s full of lore. My server said, “It took us a while to convince him to put it on the menu.” Chef Schwenker (allegedly) said defiantly, “This is Marrow. I don’t make salad.” And yet, somehow, it’s one of the best things on the menu. Smoked and pickled grapes add a vegetarian punch that even the best vegetarian bacon falls short of, the dressing is zippy, and the amount of pepper puts cacio e pepe to shame. It’s so good that I scooped up the rest of the dressing with the naan, and I can promise you I would never normally dip my bread in salad dressing. I would come here for three of these as a meal, spending $48 on salad alone.

The salad isn’t the only stunning vegetable on the menu. Marrow is a vegetarian’s paradise, with dishes like a take on a vegetarian scallop course, using daikon radish. The radishes are poached in yuzu, topped with starfruit chutney, and set atop a bed of cashew puree and sprinkled cashew furikake. While at first, you might read this and think, “That sounds sweet.” It’s not. The yuzu and starfruit brighten up the bitterness of the radish, creating a dish that reads more bright than sweet.

It fits perfectly on Marrow’s menu, yes, but it would also be a dish I could see easily placed on many of the Michelin-starred vegetarian tasting menus across the country.

I find myself writing this, looking at the list of everything I ate, feeling unable to narrow down what to highlight, wanting to write ravenously about the food and let it speak for itself. So often now, reviews spend more than half of the time not talking about the food. And then there’s the other kind of review where you learn nothing about the restaurant other than the food. The industry speak for this is “plate focused,” and often, an editor might say, “Look up.” And it’s not that I wasn’t looking up and around at the team or other people dining. It’s just that some places, the food drives everything, it is so good it creates emotion, and in a restaurant like that, the food deserves the spotlight.

Marrow has won my heart over so fully that when someone asks me the question, “Why don’t I know about it?” I can’t quite find an answer except to say, “You do now. Go.” Marrow isn’t just a destination restaurant, it’s a four-star restaurant nestled in the healthcare capital of our state. It’s the perfect place before a scary test or after your last chemo, or for a trip down just on the deviled eggs alone. When I asked each friend what they would rank it, they all said strongly, “Four stars,” and my friends are harsh. Multiple of them cried over the food. I cried over the food, going into the bathroom and blotting my tears, because Marrow moved me.

The only thing I didn’t like across all of my visits? I had a pierogi topped with apple that I thought was a little too sweet and a naan that was just underdone on one visit (and excellent the other two times I tried it). Other than that, the chefs at Marrow are producing perfection quietly in the back, navigating a space smaller than many home kitchens and serving up some of Minnesota’s best casual fine dining in a small 45-seat restaurant that’s skinny like a New York railroad apartment. Sitting at the chef’s counter, which I recommend you do, gives you a window into the kitchen, where the team works quietly with a hum that sings: this team is made of people who know each other.

Over my entire six months of eating here, the same faces have been in the restaurant. Many of the core staff have been there since day one. 100% of the team stayed when the restaurant was decimated by a car driving through it.

As I’ve been going, I’ve started to recognize the faces of regulars, people who come again and again. And just as her husband is always present in the back, Hospitality Director and Owner Sarah Schwenker is the face of the front. She answers the phones, shepherds you to your table, is always ready to respond to a special request or question, and writes the bios on the website, like her husband’s, which begins with, “He doesn’t want me to write anything about him but we’re going to do it anyway.” You can tell that Sarah, and her entire team, always want to go the extra mile. She refers to her regulars as friends and family, and I feel that’s true.

This kind of hospitality is what makes a four-star restaurant. It’s not just wiped plates or the standards executed perfectly day in and day out. A four-star restaurant is the place where you want to make memories on the worst and best days of your life. A four-star restaurant is one where you, too, can become a friend or family. Not every restaurant deserves your engagement night, your anniversary, or your post-chemo dessert. Not every restaurant tries to be the place to hold the biggest moments of your life.

Marrow does. Every day, they show up with the warmth and hospitality that makes you want to come back. As for me, for the next four and a half months, I’ll be one of those tables every three weeks, because as I face down chemo, there’s really no other place in Rochester where I’d rather be.

Subscribe now

★★★★: Marrow is best in class and category defining for Minnesota casual fine dining (not Greater Minnesota–Minnesota).

My three favorite bites: The menu is seasonal, but I will always order the Danish donuts. The Marrow pot pie is a must-order when it’s on the menu. Otherwise, do like the locals and trust your servers.

Where to sit for the best service: The chef’s counter. This kitchen team is rock solid and watching them work is a treat.

Good for: Meals after anesthesia (I am kidding), dinners to celebrate ringing the bell after your last chemo, day trip dinners, and anniversaries.

My one big tip: Make a reservation. It’s Rochester, not the middle of North Dakota. Multiple people from Minneapolis have taken day trips thinking they could slip in and were not able to!

__

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!

At first glance, looking around the restaurant, it feels built around excellence all the way down to the details, like these.

At breakfast, the quiche exemplifies this attention to detail perfectly. The quiche is delicate, with a soufflé-style egg, big hunks of butternut squash, lots of nutty gruyere, and ribbons of caramelized onions that beg you to try the French onion soup. The crust is a showstopper, with that brûléed top that is as visually stunning as it is balanced in flavor. Each part of the quiche is able to stand on its own. When brought together, it is one of the best quiches in the state.

I ate that quiche on a picture-perfect breakfast on a snowy morning while a North Loop mom introduced their friends to her baby to my right. The pistachio macaron was light as air, with ruffled feet for days and a perfect dome. The croissants, as well, were stunning, with crisp shards breaking off with every bite, leaving those moms to brush them out of their hair.

The cross-section of a croissant should look like a honeycomb, with almost no gaps or holes. The ones at Bellecour have that iconic structure, which doesn’t just tell you about how it was baked, but it tells you about everything from the hands that made it to the proofing to the lamination to the dough itself.

One small error and the honeycomb collapses. To achieve it, each detail has to be just right.

That attention to detail doesn’t permeate the entire restaurant, though.

At 10:00am, floors were slicked with salty boot prints that seemed to denote more days of tracking in snow than just a few hours in the morning. The door squeaks loudly enough to be heard in the back corner of the restaurant every time it opens, and it sounds kind of like a whistle, meaning that every so often, someone would look up from their work and then outside. “It’s the door,” I would say, sensing immediate relief. During the day, when it’s counter service, I never once saw a table get wiped down, and I was seriously looking.

Once, fries came out to me cold, though they were perfectly salted. Another time, they came out hot, needing salt. The salad that came with that darn near perfect quiche had small specks of dirt on a few of the leaves and small, but noticeable, bruising, the kind you might forgive at a less prestigious restaurant but wouldn’t expect of a Kaysen enterprise or a restaurant brought back from the dead. Another day, with an omelette, the salad was woefully underdressed. A different day, on the side of a breakfast sandwich, that same set of greens was delightful.

One night, the tiny croissants served with dinner came with soft and spreadable butter. Butter at early seatings, though, was often untempered, meaning that spreading it on delicate croissants required tearing those flaky layers. That incredible breakfast sandwich? One morning, when I ordered it for a friend, the sausage was dry, like it had been overcooked on a flat top and all the fat leeched out.

Sometimes when I ordered the same dish twice, I felt like I had accidentally ordered something else or that I had walked into a different restaurant entirely.

At dinner, cod was served atop some of the most flavorful and tender lentils I’ve ever had, with a vadouvan curry and parsley oil that both tasted fresh enough to be noticed. But the fish was unevenly cooked, with almost burnt sections against nearly naked flesh, and an overcooked texture throughout that doesn’t live up to Kaysen’s reputation of fish that is always tender–a skill that is hard to master for any kitchen, let alone your entire repertoire. When I sat at the chef’s counter, I tried to figure out what was going wrong with the fish cookery. It came to me with a missing sound in the kitchen. There’s sizzle when flesh touches hot oil. The sizzle was absent. The pan wasn’t hot enough when most of the cod went down into it.

One night, the gnocchi was so spectacular that my friends fell silent when it arrived at our table. But the chicken and steak we had along with it both needed salt. When I asked my friends how those dishes were, they responded with a chorus of, “Fine,” and for the cost, fine isn’t good enough. For Kaysen, with restaurants known for excellence like Spoon and Stable and Demi, fine is surprising. We left half of the steak on the plate, a rare thing at dinner with me, and asked for it boxed to go. At the end of dinner, the box never arrived.

Pastry had similar challenges. The case has perfect baby madeleines, pain au chocolat that flakes exactly the way it should, and buttery standard croissants that rival the best in town. At dinner, a profiterole was entirely crunchy throughout, not crispy with a light and airy filling.

Similarly, there was a Valentine’s Day special, the bow croissant, that had such a leaky filling it bled onto the napkin immediately, and when I took a bite, it started spilling out of the pastry. The filling was so loose, I had to eat it with a fork and knife. Lest you think the filling spilled out of the places I bit into it, it didn’t. It came right out of the piping holes as soon as it was picked up. Unlike the cream puff, though, this was delicious, but there were errors in execution. And execution, is what Kaysen is known for.

At a Gavin Kaysen restaurant, known for restraint and hailed for details, these misses are more glaring than those of a first-time restaurant owner.

I kept wondering: where’s the consistent fish cookery of Demi? Where’s the perfect plating you see at Mara? Where is the tight pastry program, like the one at Spoon and Stable? Where’s the steak that makes me want to come back? Yes, the wine list is excellent, but where are the cocktails that feel inspiring and taste cohesive?

Some restaurants run on dishes where major execution errors can go unnoticed. This is a menu that requires expert hands and execution. The hallmark, signature, and greatness of Kaysen’s restaurants is that they don’t miss. An error in a dish with a punchy sauce and too many elements can be covered up, but in his restaurants, you see every error. Most of them are flawless. Bellecour is not.

A requirement of excellence, of near perfection, is baked into the menu–and restaurants are made up of people, which means almost perfect is a big ask.

Some nights, they are almost perfect. You go in and everything is just right, like when I came in during the snowiest night of the year in February after a stretch of 50-degree days. The roads were slicked with enough ice that a 15-minute drive from Uptown took me 50 minutes–and a drive from St. Paul took my friend almost two hours. When you come in after a drive like that, all you want is soup.

The French onion soup we ordered was hearty and had depth missing from some of the other dishes I tasted, with so much jammy and deep flavor from caramelized onions and big croutons softened by the broth. Then, we ordered the burger. If you’ve lived here long enough, you’ve had this burger at the old version of Bellecour or Spoon and Stable: The Dirty French. An iconic recipe like this one requires consistent execution, because enough people know what it should taste like to tell if you had an off night. This one tasted good as ever, the kind of burger you remember, crave, and go out specifically to eat. It tastes like comfort. It tastes like home.

We had a trout dish that was a masterclass of how to use texture to create excitement. Crispy trout skin and cauliflower added crunch against brown butter, capers, and golden raisins. On their own, that would be a beautiful dish, but the addition of almonds added an earthy, soft flavor that lingered on my palate with every bite. I forgot the cod while eating this dish. I forgave it.

Often overlooked for some of the more recognizable French classics on the menu, this dish is among the strongest in Gavin Kaysen’s repertoire across his restaurants, exemplifying what he does best: restraint and subtlety where good cookery can shine.

That night, the crepe cake fell into even layers as we cut into it with just a spoon. It’s the kind of cake you would never make at home, and so it felt so luxurious to eat it as the snow fell. It’s kissed by fire on top, and every layer was the same size and thickness, a feat that requires mastery. The challenge with a restaurant like this one is that every error is visible. I know, because I saw them. This night, though, there were no errors. It felt like the promise of Bellecour. On its best nights, it can be this.

“Was it worth the drive?” I asked my friend that night. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I’d do it again.”

Subscribe now

I’m grateful to my paid subscribers for helping me pay for this piece. In 2026, very few critics have the privilege of going to restaurants more than 3 times for review. I personally don’t think 3 visits is fair to a restaurant, especially when giving a mixed review. I went to Bellecour 7 times. My paid subscribers funded these visits. It’s how I’m able to eat dishes more than once and write comprehensive reviews like this one.

★★: Bellecour has flashes of brilliance and excellence, but they are inconsistent. My scale is more objective than the average critic’s scale, with consistency at the top of how I judge. When I asked every single friend if they would spend their own money to come back to the restaurant, all of them said, “No,” except one, the night we had the almost perfect meal. This factored heavily into my review, because I was thinking about you when I wrote it.

I normally include my three favorite bites, but I am going to be prescriptive here. For breakfast: order the quiche and a pain au chocolat. For dinner, order the trout, either soup on the menu, Parisienne gnocchi, and crepe cake. If you drink, skip cocktails and order wine. If you don’t drink, stick with water.

Where to sit for the best service: For dinner, sit at the chef’s counter. For breakfast, sneak into a corner booth directly to right upon walking in. If you have a group of four, call and ask to reserve one of the booths by the front.

Good for: Relatively affordable special occasion dinners, darn good quiche, a great burger, and sunny mornings coworking with friends.

My one big tip: Some restaurants are better at certain times of day or days of the week. In general, Bellecour takes some time to “ramp up” during service and, in my opinion, is best saved for a 6:30pm or later reservation on an off-peak night (Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday).

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!

I asked about it. “Is… Jook Sing back there?” They were. Secretly. Quietly. “We’re announcing in January,” they said, kind of sheepish as I walked to the kitchen to say hi. I could tell they were honing their craft, not yet ready to tell you they were there. I’m rogue, but I’m not rogue enough to make an announcement before a small team is ready. And, besides, it’s not the first time I’ve given Jook Sing more time to find its feet.

I had already written a review about Jook Sing in the summer of 2025. I decided not to run it. While at Bar Brava, they were finding their footing. I could feel they were holding onto some old dishes that were once their stars, even as they had outgrown them. Their newer dishes were sharper and far better. They were figuring out dessert in a way that I found deeply endearing, and also clumsy, with unset panna cotta and unbalanced flavors that had promise. I left on my last visit feeling like, “Come on, you’ve got this.”

I really felt like they would figure it out, if they just had more time. So I did what I do when I believe that to be true: I killed the piece and decided to review them the next time they found a place to cook.

Returning to try their food again at Steady Pour in February, the dishes I felt they were holding onto last summer were dropped from the menu. The dessert menu featured exactly one dessert, which seemed promising. All of my favorite dishes were still there, prominent stars on a menu designed for a long-term residency, and they had a new format that seemed like it fit their strengths.

My first dish back after their public announcement was a steak frites dish so good, it landed on my top steak dishes in the Twin Cities, topping over 40 other steaks I tried.

The dish features 7.5 ounces of NY Strip slathered in black pepper sauce and set atop fries for the rock-bottom price of $34, which is about half the price of most 6-ounce steaks at steakhouses. It was charred perfectly, cooked medium rare, and sliced thin enough that you don’t need a knife. The fries soaked up the black pepper sauce and steak drippings like they might a gravy in poutine, leaving them extra flavorful but somehow still crispy. This dish demonstrated range from the Jook Sing Boys, a nickname that was commonplace when I asked people in the industry about them.

It felt like they stepped out of any of the mandates they felt they had to restrict what they cook based on their concept, and instead decided to focus on what they do best.

To me, it was exciting, like Chefs Gao and Yuen were on the precipice of finding themselves.

Subscribe now

That same feeling of cooking where they excel is found in the onion dip. My friend, who came directly from a flight from LA, said, “I’m an onion freak,” as he ripped into it, proclaiming that his favorite dishes are ones where you taste the onion all day. This passed that bar, with onion throughout the dip, ample green onion and fried onions on top, and tons of chives. Served with Ritz, my only complaint is that after another extra order of Ritz, we still had dip, which isn’t a problem on its own, except that ordering two extra servings of Ritz feels excessive, and most guests wouldn’t do it. The dish needed more Ritz to begin with.

While many kitchens struggle with adding one too many items to a dish so it’s no longer cohesive and a little chaotic, Jook Sing doesn’t have that problem. I rarely felt like a dish needed an edit down. But Gao and Yuen have a few moments like this on their menu where their restraint goes a bit too far. I wanted far more citrus in the citrus salad, for example. Or the crudo felt like any other crudo, less signature than even their crudité, which feels distinctly like Jook Sing and less like vegetables and dip.

In general, though, that restraint leads to triumphs, like tea eggs, where the black tea is just slightly there, and the chili crisp is the perfect amount to coat your mouth without overpowering the more subtle flavors.

It also shines in a crab rangoon dip that left my gluten-free friend exclaiming with a full mouth, “This tastes just like a crab rangoon.” She misses them, of course, and at Jook Sing, you can get them with house-fried wonton chips or shrimp chips, so the gluten-free can dig into those comforting flavors, too.

This is a menu of a mix of good bar food mixed with creative fare that could wind up on any finer dining menu. That more creative, finer dining fare leads to show-stopper after show-stopper. Like char siu ribs that were sold out every time I went, so I never got to try them. Or dongpo pork belly, which is served on top of a bowl full of celeriac puree that tastes just like celeriac, where most purees taste like spices, cream, butter, or cheese.

It’s a great Chinese take on Midwestern meat and potatoes. Hearty, stick to your ribs, craveable.

Yes, you should try the steak at Jook Sing, but on your first visit, it would be a shame not to get another beef dish, the XOXO Beef Chow Fun. Instead of rice noodles, this dish has a rice noodle pavé reminiscent of the texture of a scallop. Thin layers of rice noodles are stacked on top of each other and pan-fried, served with exceptionally tender beef, and dusted with chive blossoms. After eating the pavé in the summer of 2025, I went up to the chefs to ask them what inspired it. “Necessity,” they said.

They don’t have the space to make their own noodles, finding local noodles in the Twin Cities is impossible, and they don’t have a wok burner, because they’re not a custom-made kitchen. That required them to rethink this classic. They order packs of flat noodles from San Francisco, sheet them, stack them, and pan-fry them. It’s a stroke of genius that can only be born out of less-than-ideal conditions. It works.

This dish feels like an icon, the kind of dish that might join the ranks of Bar la Grassa’s cauliflower and orange gnocchi, Myriel’s duck, or Tilia’s butternut squash soup as a unique signature dish people order again and again. It’s the kind of dish that might send you looking up to your roommate or partner one day and saying, “I really want the XOXO Beef Chow Fun from Jook Sing and nothing else will do.”

While the XOXO Beef Chow Fun is a creative take on the classic, the fried rice is more standard. Eating the fried rice at Jook Sing is like eating the platonic ideal of fried rice. It’s lighter in color than many of its contemporaries, but don’t let that fool you, the flavor packs a punch. It’s not flanked by shrimp or chicken but rather lap cheong, a type of Chinese sausage. Lap cheong is made of fatty cuts of pork and includes three S-es that make it a flavor bomb: smoke, sweetness, and seasoning. It typically includes rice wine, soy sauce, rose water, and added pork fat. It’s perfect for fans of salty-sweet dishes, but it’s also perfect for fried rice because the pork fat renders as you cook it and seasons the rice.

With this dish, chefs Gao and Yuen aren’t trying to reinvent fried rice, they’re trying to perfect it.

The dish I personally feel most excited about on the menu is another plate that tries to perfect a classic: General Gao’s chicken. When I had this dish in the summer, it needed a lot of work. This dish is the reason I bailed out of my first attempt at a review. I didn’t want to tell you that I thought the two chefs working tirelessly toward their dream had a boring, dry dish with tough chicken and an improper fry.

I nervously ordered it at Steady Pour, and when it arrived, it looked nothing like the dish I ordered in the past. This was sa-a-a-ucy, with the simplicity of just onions, chilis, chicken, and rice, meaning that I could taste the sweetness of the onions. Whether you know this instinctively or not, General Tso’s chicken is sweet, and so the addition of these onions felt like it came with real thought. Yes, the sauce was well-balanced, and the chicken was well-cooked, but this is what I remember: onions so sweet, I went in for just a forkful of veg.

Don’t confuse the restraint for sitting in the comfort zone. That’s not what is happening at Jook Sing. One of the most promising things about Jook Sing is that it has evolved and grown–fast. While many chefs stay in their comfort zone, these two do not. You can feel Gao and Yuen pushing their craft with each menu evolution, which to me is the sign of a restaurant that might make it: chefs who keep pushing past good enough to the best we’ve got.

Have they figured out dessert? It’s better, but it’s not quite there yet. They keep trying. With evolution like they had with their General Gao’s chicken, I have no doubt that they’ll have a stellar dessert in no time.

Subscribe now

★★★: Jook Sing is consistent and excellent, which is my standard for three-star reviews.

My three favorite bites: XOXO Beef Chow Fun, Dongpo Pork Belly, Crab Rangoon Dip.

Where to sit for the best service: I like to sit at the bar at Steady Pour!

Good for: Girl dinner of dips, solo dinners when all you want is beef, and first dates over whipped tofu.

My one big tip: The drinks at Steady Pour are excellent, and I recommend you ask a bartender to pair one for you!

__

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!

Nestled in the North Loop behind Spoon and Stable, Demi hosts 20 seats that wrap around a U-shaped counter. In the center, chefs prepare a tasting menu with expert precision. They are led by Chef de Cuisine Alan Hlebaen to execute Chef/Owner Gavin Kaysen’s vision of a Michelin-level restaurant in the heart of Minnesota. When I talk to most people about Demi, they talk about the food. But there’s one group of people that gush about something else: people who don’t drink. Those people gush about Jessi Pollak’s Temperance Pairing, the non-alcoholic offering at Demi.

It’s rare for people to know the names of Beverage Directors, generally. Whereas people know a good amount of chefs where they live, really only the best of the best Beverage Directors are known by their names. Most Beverage Directors are known by their drinks, like an icon, the Wondrous Punch, or maybe everyone knows the bar with a really good Old Fashioned.

People in Minnesota, though, do know Jessi’s name–as well as the names of many of the bartenders at sister restaurant Spoon and Stable.

There’s something about Gavin Kaysen’s restaurants where we don’t just know him, but the people who work or worked for him. We got to Diane Moua before Diane’s Place. Alexandra Motz is a household name, too, known for her daring pastries. Chefs Adam Ritter and Cory Western became known entities at Demi before Alan took over, and before they opened Bûcheron. Jessi Polak, who has been Beverage Director at Soigné since 2024, joins the ranks of Soigné staff we know by name due to her creative cocktail programs across all restaurants and her thoughtful pairings at Demi.

Subscribe now

Jessi started at Spoon and Stable in 2017 as a bartender. “I come from a cocktail background,” she told in a phone interview, “It comes naturally to me.” In 2024, when she took over as Beverage Director after seven years with the company, she was faced with a challenge that was less natural to her: pairings. “The training of most bartenders whether in MN or anywhere in the US doesn’t really include training on pairing. It’s such a divided thing and that’s something we’re all doing wrong is how separate we keep those worlds,” she said. Like many people who go from bartender to Beverage Director, she had to learn on the fly.

At first, she paired NA beverages like a lot of Beverage Directors do. She inherited a program where NA pairings weren’t necessarily seen as collaborative, or a dialogue, between food and beverage. “I made good drinks but didn’t think about it intentionally about pairings early on,” she told me. That changed when Bobby Stuckey from Frasca Food and Wine came up for one of Demi’s North Star Series in May of 2024. “The wines he brought were incredible. I felt like there couldn’t be a gap.”

The pressure was on. For Jessi, the NA pairings had to hit the same mark as wines hand-picked by a Michelin-starred chef known for his knowledge of wine.

That’s a tough challenge for any Beverage Director, let alone someone who is a few months into the job.

Jessi found her own philosophy of NA pairing at that dinner. Unlike wine, there’s fewer rules, more space for play. Some people pair based on matching flavor notes in the dish. Other people pair based on trying to find 1:1 bottle replacements for wines. Then there’s people who think about it like a chef: if this dish had an added element, what would that be?

Jessi thinks of NA pairing as a triangle. She thinks about the dish first, then she asks, “What wine would I pair with this dish?”

She writes down the notes of that wine, or the reason she chose it, and she builds her NA pairing with those same qualities.

Take a dish from her New Year’s Eve menu, for example. The dessert is caramelized white chocolate namelaka with vanilla chanitilly, chestnut, candied kumquotes, and cranberry sorbet. Jessi decided to pair it with a Cappellano Barolo Chinato, which has a ton of spice notes in it and a little bitterness and a lot of citrus peel. “It can be confectionary but also rich and fruit forward,” Jessi said. “I wanted those same things in a non-alc version.” She mixed cranberry juice with Abstinence cape spice rum because, “It has a ton of molasses and burnt brown sugar flavor,” along with a mix of black tea and chai spices. “Just like the Barolo Chinato, it has a sharp edge, spices, and herbal qualities,” she said.

I’ve been drinking Demi’s NA pairings since 2023–and I noticed this shift when I was drinking Demi’s pairing in mid-2024.

Something clicked for Jessi on NA pairings.

I started to see some of the things I loved about pairings in New York and Chicago appear on the menu, like focusing on over-stepped tea which dries out your mouth in a similar way to red wine, so you want to go in for another bite of fatty cuts of beef.

I also noticed a shift in body. On the phone, Jessi and I talked shop about how none of the NA spirits have the right texture. “It’s often more challenging to pair NA because they don’t have the weightiness or texture from alcohol,” she said. “Lots of products or mixed drinks do things to try to mimic those qualities like adding capsicum or glycerin, which are poor replacements to get the right grip on your palate.” Glycerin seems to repel food, so when drinks have a lot of it, I feel like I taste less.

“It’s often harder to pair non-alcoholic drinks with food,” Jessi said, but it’s clear she puts in the effort to do it right.

A good Beverage Director can make a great dish even better. It’s just that most NA pairings make food taste worse.

As a sober person, going to Demi is such a treat, because of this level of thought.

Demi is expensive and it’s not an every day restaurant for most of us. Splurging on a pairing that’s all juice feels sad in the same way that splurging on subpar food feels sad. At Demi, though, the $85 price tag for the temperance pairing comes with 8 curated cocktails or drinks and I personally always leave having tried something new. I also feel like it elevates the food and the NA pairing sits in a small handful of tasting menus across the country that do NA right (the short list of other menus I love are Beckon in Denver, Indienne in Chicago, and minibar in DC).

It’s why I encourage every Beverage Director to go to Demi and try the Temperance Pairing: it’s a world-class program, better than any non-alcoholic pairing I’ve had in New York and better than any three-Michelin-starred restaurant I’ve been to… and it’s not close.

The creativity in Demi’s pairings is what sets it apart, like pairing a mix of bay leaf, pine tea, and a blackberry poblano shrub with duck, huckleberry, and black truffle. Whereas most shrubs drink very vinegar forward, this is just there like any acid and while most of the time the use of peppers in drinks blows out the palate, it’s more present here on the nose than the tongue.

Or, one of my favorite pairings that I’ve had, pairing a cocktail of ginger, apple, smoked agave, and hemp amaro (you read that right) with grilled striped bass, burdock, and seaweed. The smoke of the agave matches the smoke on the grill and the ginger complements the seaweed. It’s one of those rare drinks that elevates a dish. Without it, the dish is a great fish dish. With it, the dish is elevated.

Defying the standards of most NA menus, there’s no fresh citrus on the menu as of writing (Jan 16, 2025*). This means these drinks read as more complex and are made for eating and not just drinking, because too much citrus blows your palate out. It’s thoughtful and well-curated, with the food at the center of the drink design.

When we spoke in early January, Jessi said, “I want people when they experience the temperance menu at Demi or drink an NA cocktail at any of the Soigne restaurants, I want them to feel normal and cared about. That’s all that matters to me.” She’s accomplished that—and more.

Subscribe now

*I am currently undergoing cancer treatment and all of my January and early February pieces were pre-written. If you want to help me sustain an income as a writer as my standard job is on pause while I recover, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

This rating is for Demi’s NA pairing. Not something that is normally done, but it’s something I plan to continue to do!

★★★★: Best in class, category defining, excellent.

__

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!

When I went to Chi-Chi’s at 5:25pm on a Monday night, I expected it to be quiet. Instead, there was one open spot at the bar. I grabbed it. After I put my jacket down, I ran over to the host and asked, “How long would the wait be, by chance?” An hour. At the bar, almost everyone had a blended drink. Someone had the jumbo margarita. All the TVs were playing Monday night football. The bartenders never stopped moving. I texted a friend of mine, “It’s a zoo.”

I had to put aside any thoughts I had of “authenticity” before I even walked in the door. Authenticity is a tough concept, anyway, as it often isn’t defined by the communities themselves.

Here’s a good quote from my dear friend Jeremy Moran about why “authentic” isn’t always the best word. “When I think of authenticity, I have to ask, authentic to who? Mexico is big, with 31 states (not including the federal district Mexico City), the way one dish is made in one region won’t be the same in a different region.” So, authenticity is complicated, and it’s not a good metric for a good restaurant much of the time.

But with a place like Chi-Chi’s or Hey Y’all, you have people running restaurants actively working from approximations of complex cuisines. In the case of Chi-Chi’s, Michael McDermott, son of one of the original owners, doesn’t appear to have ties to Mexico. I never want to presume someone’s race, but it’s very fair to say that he appears white and is white-passing while profiting off of both Japanese cuisine and Mexican cuisine as a restaurateur. Though… one wonders about his success in turning a profit, as previous enterprises, Shag Sushi (70s themed sushi) and Rojo Mexican Grill are shuttered, with not all of the Rojo locations turning into Chi-Chi’s.

So asking about how they benefit from simplifying a cuisine is important, because Chi-Chi’s, with no spice and very little seasoning, is appealing to white palates.

On my first visit, it’s worth noting: all the guests in Chi-Chi’s were white or white-passing while mariachi music played over the speakers and people said, “Salud,” to each other at the bar. The only time I heard any other Spanish spoken in this restaurant was when two men behind me were bussing tables.

You know the old adage, “Don’t fill up on bread?” It also applies to free chips at Chi-Chi’s, except it was really my only option, as the bartenders were getting their asses kicked so hard no one had time to take my order for a long while, and I knew, undoubtedly, the wait would be long.

That’s just how it is in packed restaurants like this one, where all ~150 seats were sat between 5:00-5:30pm. Behind me, chicken fajitas passed close enough to my shoulder to make me worry about getting burned. They were sizzling, a dazzling show. They smelled not like peppers or chicken but straight grease. In front of me, at the bar, my bartender checked the tickets after realizing my drink hadn’t been made. The ticket had, somehow, fallen to the floor. When he picked it up, it was covered in brown liquid. When that NA margarita came though, it was giant, in a standard beer glass to distinguish it from the alcoholic counterparts, a touch I admired a lot. It was also pretty darn solid.

I sipped it and turned around in my seat to look at the doorway packed with at least 20 people waiting for tables. It was chaos, electric, pulsing to be in this restaurant. It’s rare for anywhere to be this full on a Monday night.

My first thought, sitting at the bar, was not about the warm chips and salsa that appeared in front of me in classic Chi-Chi’s fashion.

My first thought was of all the taquerias on Central and Lake. If they were this full on a Monday night, it would make a real difference in their bottom line.

Subscribe now

A ROMANTIC STORY

The owners of Chi-Chi’s want the revamp to be seen as a romantic story. It’s a story where a son reopens the shuttered restaurant chain owned by his father, Marno McDermott. But it’s also a sinister story. Chi-Chi’s OG didn’t close just because his parents ran out of money. Towards Chi-Chi’s end in 2003, around 600 people were infected with Hepatitis A from scallions at the restaurant. According to the Associated Press, four people died. The restaurant was sued. One single person got $6.25M in a settlement. That man needed a new liver.

National press almost always has covered the Chi-Chi’s Hepatitis outbreak in their announcements of its return, but most of the local coverage of Chi-Chi’s has… not.

This isn’t a story of a child bringing the restaurant back from his parents to run it for another generation. It’s a rewriting of history. And–the brand isn’t indie. Chi-Chi’s is owned by Hormel. The Star Tribune reported that Michael McDermott struck a deal with Hormel, and the CEO of Hormel said in the same article, “We’re happy to play a part in helping bring that back to the consumer, to the restaurant patron.”

This isn’t some romantic story of a mom and pop shop being revitalized by a child. This is a story about capitalism, money, and profiting off of Mexican culture and memory while also making a caricature out of it.

Local media spin has made this reopening feel like it’s all about nostalgia, with nary a mention of their past sins, with multiple outlets making light of the culturally insensitive at best and straight-up racist at worst history of giving people a sombrero on their birthday.

Chi-Chi’s doesn’t do this anymore, and staff tell you this like it’s an apology for having done it in the past. “Oh no,” they say, “We don’t do that today.” On my birthday, our server said, “People are often afraid to tell us it’s their birthday.” That’s because we know that how they used to wish us happy birthday was really messed up.

You might be saying to yourself, Kirstie, didn’t we just not know better in the 80s and 90s? And my answer to that is even if we didn’t, we do know better now!

But also, I have a distinct memory of my mother saying, “This feels a little racist,” with a sombrero on her head and a margarita in her hands as the staff sang “Happy birthday, ole, ole, ole,” to her.

I’m guessing this kind of rewriting of history is what Chi-Chi’s is banking on. They’re banking on you forgetting that in the end, you and your family probably stopped going because the food got worse. They’re banking on you forgetting that they used to put a sombrero on white people’s heads when they sang you happy birthday. They are hoping their target audience doesn’t know enough Spanish to know that the name is slang for breasts, which is, at its base, an offensive name for a white-owned Mexican restaurant. They’re probably so happy that local media isn’t covering the outbreak. With their current subdued decor, they’re hoping you forget that Chi-Chi’s OG was sometimes over the top, with decor often representing a caricature of Mexican restaurants, like piñatas hanging from the ceiling.

They are hoping that you forget or just don’t care that what they are doing is reducing Mexican culture to novelty. And that’s still true in 2026, as ICE surges in the Twin Cities and takes away our immigrant neighbors from their cars, while showering, and at work.

IN THE HEART OF THE OCCUPATION

During the occupation, I’ve been spending a lot of time at another restaurant, Pineda Tacos Plus. To get into Pineda, and most other restaurants (not just immigrant-owned) in the Twin Cities right now, someone has to unlock the door. One time, while I was there during lunch, I heard whistles from outside. Three short fast whistles signify that ICE in the neighborhood. Long whistles, active detention. These were the short whistles. Lots of people inside Pineda stood up. I’ve seen it a lot of times now, the changing of the guard.

Some people ran into the restaurant door and some people ran out of the restaurant. I was one of the people running outside. The people who ran out of the restaurant took whistles out of their pockets, opened their phones to get in touch with their neighborhood watch group, or started recording. The people who went inside benefited from the sign on the door that says ICE is not allowed to enter without a judicial warrant.

It might seem to people outside of the industry that restaurants have those signs on the doors to just take care of their own workers, but especially on Lake Street in Minneapolis, they’ve become a refuge for an entire community.

As a restaurant critic, I’ve been out every single day going to immigrant-owned restaurants to understand what is happening on the ground and to personally support them. Almost every day, I am face-to-face with ICE. While many people run into the street, I stay by the door. I put my body between ICE and the restaurant. Going out for tacos right now is an act of solidarity for so many reasons, but this is one of them: you are a body that can block the door.

ICE passed through, but when I came back to eat my tacos, the air was thick and heavy. Some people who ran inside stayed inside just in case. Some people, like me, stayed outside to make sure there wasn’t another pass. After 15 minutes, I went back inside. “Do you need anything?” I asked the woman at the door. She shook her head, not shocked, but battle-worn.

That same night, I walked into Chi-Chi’s to meet my friends and their toddler. There were no signs on the door warning ICE off. There was no sign of stress in the restaurant patrons. There was no security guard watching out for their workers, even though the back of house at Pineda and Chi-Chi’s are demographically similar.

Every single person I saw eating there was white, except two: my friend and his child. The joyous noise felt jarring to me. Most of the restaurants I go to lately are quiet, because we are listening. Here, it was raucous with birthday celebrations and chatter.

At the bar, there was a man in a thin blue line shirt–and I can’t help but feel like this tells me all I need to know about Chi-Chi’s right now.

There were so many margarita glasses. The guests here have bought the message of the rebrand: it’s not really Mexican food! It’s just fun. It’s nostalgia, like the 80s or 90s!

It’s like Chi-Chi’s is saying, “Remember how much fun we had then? You can have it again. You can leave all that politics at the door, and hey, we’ll forgive your past sins, too, if you forgive ours.”

After I went with my friends on my last visit, during the heart of the occupation, we saw three Cadillacs with tinted windows, all parked together near Chi-Chi’s. On foot, with whistles, we approached them to vet them to see if they were ICE. They weren’t. But it struck me: if I had blown the whistle in front of any Minneapolis Taqueria, some people would’ve flooded into the streets to join me. Here, at Chi-Chi’s, I wonder what would’ve happened had they been ICE vehicles. Would the guests have helped ICE apprehend the person who just fed him? What about everyone else who was laughing and drinking margaritas with no tension in the air except towards the back of house? Would they just keep partying?

Meanwhile, while I was eating dinner at Chi-Chi’s, somewhere in the city, someone was being kidnapped by ICE.

OKAY BUT WHAT ABOUT THE FOOD?

The chips are over salted and greasy. The queso tastes like raw flour. The sweet rice, which is rice with sweetened condensed milk, is like a cursed risotto that your almond mom would call dessert. As for the Spanish rice, boxed is better.

The black beans are full of liquid. The achiote chicken is dry and gristly. The chicken flautas were soggy and tasted like mozzarella sticks. The plating, like many plates I had, included sauces on the edges and underneath the plate.

The chimichanga, burritos, and enchiladas seem to have enough cheese for X-Large pizzas, but… you can’t taste the cheese.

The homemade tortillas are more like pita. The mahi-mahi tacos are too fishy, even for mahi-mahi.

The salsa is flavorless and sometimes had onion pieces as big as my pinky hanging out in the mix. The birria is like a La Croix version of birria, birria in essence only. The “Mexican pizza” is a bastardization of both pizza and Mexican food, so terrible that me and my dining companions (including a toddler) could not finish one single slice across the four of us, so terrible that a chef texted me that I was braver than him to eat that and he had eaten baby seagulls before. I could talk about the knife cuts on the pizza, but what’s the point?

The best thing on the menu? The chicken tenders. My dining companions and I fought over them, while a toddler looked up at us like, “Wait, isn’t that mine?” (Sorry, Auri!!!)

So, yes, you could go to Chi-Chi’s for the nostalgia of it all, but I’m recommending that you chimichan-go somewhere, anywhere else.

★: Skip it

A note: I don’t think guests or restaurant workers get that a one star review is a good review, much of the time, and I hate that one star means “good” in most cases, so I use one star here as the lowest ranking for clarity. For example, a Motel 6 is a one or two star hotel, and I think people see star ratings more for hotels than restaurants and think of them as twins, not sisters.

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

When Jon Cheng visited Valerie’s Taqueria in 2022, Valerie herself proudly suggested he order the lengua (tongue) tacos. When my friend Jeremy Moran and I went earlier this fall, he asked her what the best meat was on the menu. “Pastor,” she said.

In Spanish, he challenged her. “Everyone says that,” he said. “Tell me something else.”

She told him, “Tripe.” Jeremy likes to say she said it with her whole chest.

Jeremy is not a fan of tripe, so he turned around to me with a face that screamed

GET ME OUT OF THIS.

“Tripe?” he asked me.

“I’m down,” I said, to his disappointment. (For the record, I will try any dish put in front of me, no matter how challenging because I believe that getting over aversion is a noble pursuit, and so I’m a bad person to get you out of it.)

We went here on a day when we were doing a carnitas crawl, criss-crossing the cities to eat darn good tacos. But when we both took a bite of that tripe sope, it was clear to both of us: this was the best thing we had eaten all day.

Jeremy and I went back, this time with his wife Laura DeRosier-Moran and kiddo Auri in tow. We went as snow was falling outside, watching it cover the sidewalk from our spots at the counter. It was the perfect day for a feast and that’s what we did. Five tacos, sopes, alambre, three tamales, chips and salsa, and soda lined an entire counter. We ate and talked while their kiddo Auri danced with the kitchen staff, waved hello to passersby, and delighted over the big trucks that drove through the snow.

At one point, Valerie had to run to the meat market next door to get us a tamale, bolting out the door into the snow without a jacket.

The sopes at Valerie’s are Laura’s favorite in the city. They’re made by hand, in-house, and that means sometimes they sell out. That day, we were lucky. Soft, with the perfect crunch on the edges, this sope is good enough to eat alone. For us, we topped it with chorizo and drizzled it with the emulsified salsas you get with every order. Our fingers were stained red. Each of us, at one point, had juice from the chorizo dripping down our necks, and Auri (who isn’t a big fan of sopes) kept asking for more of it faster than his parents could cut it. Like all meats here, the chorizo is finished to a crisp on the flattop, giving it this signature sear that screams Valerie’s.

Of course, we ordered tripe again. And tongue. But we also ordered cecina, which is salted and air-dried beef. Crispy, thin, and packed with flavor, this taco topped the pastor, chorizo, and carnitas. If I were picking three tacos for you to try on your visit, it’s these three.

If you’re scared of tripe because the lining of an animal’s stomach doesn’t appeal to you, you’re not alone. But this tripe is fried up like chicken skin might be. Crisp. A little chewy. Glistening. Not tough at all.

This was Laura’s first time trying it and while she’s not a big fan of buche (pork stomach lining), she was a fan of this.

The best way to try new foods that many see as challenging is at a place like Valerie’s, with cookery so good that it makes those challenging ingredients accessible.

Valerie’s is a gateway to ingredients most people skip over, like that tongue she recommended for Jon. Here, the lengua has the consistency and flavor of tender braised beef, with just a touch of gaminess. If you’re worried that tongue will be too soft, chewy, or spongy, try it here. It’s none of those things. Just know that if you like tongue here, it doesn’t mean you’ll like it everywhere else.

Valerie is especially adept in cooking offal, producing the best tripe and lengua I’ve ever had.

I don’t think you can go wrong at Valerie’s. Everything is delicious. But like all restaurants, some items are better than others. Tamales here are moist, but need a bit more salt. We all wanted a bit more of something from the pastor (salt, seasoning, crispiness). The carnitas are solid, but if I want carnitas, I’m headed to Carnitas don Tacho. While eating the asada, I just wished I had ordered tripe, even though the asada was good! That’s just simply because the tripe is better.

At the end of our giant feast, Jeremy turned to us and said, “Do we have any room?” I didn’t.

But he tilted his head and said, “One bite?” Yes, there’s always room for one more bite.

I’m glad I said yes, because now there’s an off menu secret I have for you: chicken milanesa. Thin chicken is lightly breaded and deep fried. The chicken is somehow juicy, even though it’s so thin, and the breading is extra crispy. In a taco, it was divine, but we all recommend getting it with the alambre, a dish where tortillas are piled high with meat, veggies, and cheese. Here, peppers are the star and the ooey gooey cheesy mess is perfect for when you’re craving a quesadilla but want something a bit more sophisticated.

Valerie’s is the kind of place where the staff get to know you. Staff were more than game to dance with Auri and no one batted an eye when Auri picked up the wet floor cone and dragged it around the small restaurant. Everyone was happy to be greeted by him at the door, even the guy carrying a giant box of chicharrones, and staff have come to remember all of us and our love of tripe, even in our short tenure there. We could all tell that Valerie was proud of her tripe, but on all five of my other visits, I was the only person that ordered it.

So sure, you could get that pastor or barbacoa, but after trying every option on the menu, to me, it’s all about the offal.

Subscribe now

★★★1/2: Three stars means: 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. I gave an additional half star because I think that Valerie’s is category-defining for her cookery of offal.

What to order on your first visit: Three tacos (tripe, cecina, and lengua), chorizo sopes, rice and beans

Where to sit for the best service: There’s eight stools by the window so that’s where you are sitting, my friend!

Good for: Families, trying offal for the first time, and actually spicy salsa

My one big tip: If you want sopes, go early

__

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!

Acknowledgements: Much of this piece exists in this form because of Jeremy Moran. I am grateful for his friendship for so many reasons, like when he brings me tamales and VERY SPICY salsa he made. It’s important for me to say that I’m indebted to him for his knowledge on this review and my knowledge of the city’s taco scene. When I have a question, I often gut check it with him, and I’m exceptionally grateful for it. Food critics often don’t talk about the people who help them understand their city’s food scene, but I think it’s important to note that most writers have sources like this who are invaluable to our work.

I have been to a lot of restaurants over the years, but I’ve never had someone bring up dessert at breakfast.

When Chef/Owner Andrew Novak at Stonegarden, said, “I know it’s 8:00am, but our grilled peach dessert is really good,” I realized I had massively mis-assessed this restaurant. I had that mis-assessment because the tagline is Breakfast. Brunch. Broth. The broth threw me. So did an image I saw online of a mushroom painting in the dining room. I thought this was going to be a health-food restaurant by a guy who did a lot of mushrooms. I was dead wrong.

Upon sitting down, I kept seeing the word house. House-smoked bacon or chicken. House-made sausage. House-cured gravlax. House-fermented hot sauce in little tincture bottles. Scratch-baked biscuit. House-made bone broth. House-made chili. I could go on.

Stonegarden is a place you can bring your Almond Mom and still leave full. Tell your Almond Mom to get the parfait (a coconut cream chia pudding with housemade gluten-free granola, served in a fancy glass) and order up the pulled pork benedict for yourself. Is this a benedict? Not really. It comes on toasted brioche with mop sauce and, well, sure, there’s hollandaise. These creative takes on benedicts abound on the menu. The house is served with bacon and comes with a scratch buttermilk biscuit. The Norwegian has house-cured gravlax and comes on a croissant. You can sub in arguably the best gluten-free bread in the United States, Heaven, for just $3.

Each of these unconventional benedicts is excellent in their own way, but that pulled pork one calls to me on Saturday mornings when I wake up later than normal and arrive at the restaurant a few hours after my normal weekday breakfast, hungry.

Drippy, messy, and absolutely packed with flavor, this is brunch done right.

Subscribe now

My favorite dishes on the menu here are the ones that scream hearty.

Sure, staples like waffles and french toast are beautifully executed here, but it seems a waste to go to a restaurant with breakfast poutine(!!!) on the menu and not get it.

The breakfast poutine is slathered in a smoked tomato gravy. The mix of that gravy and the cheese curds is reminiscent of tomato soup and grilled cheese, but instead of being served on bread, it’s served on fried smashed potatoes and topped with a perfectly cooked sunny-side-up egg. I often feel that vegetarian options at brunch spots fall short, with most of the options leaning sweet or light. Not here. This is one of my favorite vegetarian breakfast plates in the city. If you’re coming with a group, split this across the table. It’s R I C H.

Another hearty option, the rancher’s eggs, is a Chilaquiles meets Huevos Racheros inspired dish that sits atop a spiced bean puree and is covered in fresnos. It is massive and kept me full during a 10-hour workday where I didn’t have time to stop for lunch. As a notorious northern biscuit hater, I wasn’t expecting to like the biscuits and gravy, but I ordered it more than once during the time I was eating for my review.

The menu item I was most hesitant to order was the Madame Cristo. Raspberry compote and pulled pork? I don’t know! Sounds weird! But I loved that pulled pork on the benedict so much, I decided to get it. This dish is not for sweet and savory combo haters, and it’s surely not for the faint-hearted, but splitting it with a table of friends was exceptionally fun (think of it like ordering a Table Pancake). After a few bites, we all had our fill of it, but we each loved those few bites.

Even those broths that threw me towards thinking this was a health food spot were truly delightful.

A little trio of mini coffee mugs was placed in front of me from light to dark: chicken, vegetable, beef. Each one was perfectly salted and full of body. The beef broth was rich and deep and perfect for the first day I could see my breath outside. The vegetable broth, which doesn’t benefit from the fat of the chicken or beef broth, still had a great mouthfeel. But the chicken broth was the star. It was crystal clear and tasted the way fried chicken might after being generously salted.

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, the teeny tiny dishes called little luxuries more than once saved me from hanger. They come out of the kitchen fast, so if you arrive at Saturday morning brunch starving, they’ll tide you over until your meal comes. Like all great brunch restaurants, weekends are (sometimes) very busy. Plan accordingly. I recommend getting the gravlax or the cherry lardon, both of which highlight the house-made meats that the menu centers around. That gravlax appears in multiple places on the menu and is a must-order, whether in that bite, in an omelette, on a Benedict, or on a tartine (I tried them all).

At every turn, Stonegarden defied my expectations. I worked my way through 75% of the menu, and every dish I ordered? I loved it.

Excellence in execution is the name of the game here. Every single egg I had, whether poached or sunny-side, was the platonic ideal of what that egg should be. Every dish I ordered twice came out almost identical on visits one and two. Part of that is that Andrew is very present in his restaurant, wearing his classic uniform of a flour-covered shirt, flannel, and shorts. He’s incredibly present, running dishes to tables, troubleshooting, running expo, and asking questions like, “Are you working again this morning?” He didn’t ask that because he knew I was working on a review. He asked that because I always brought my laptop and he remembered that.

Today, Stonegarden is celebrating year one of being open and it’s one of my favorite brunch spots in the city. So… if it’s so good, why haven’t most people heard of it?

On my last visit, a woman at the table next to me said, “I came last week and I loved it so much I had to come again. I didn’t even know you existed.” When I brought in friends, they’d also lament with full mouths, “Why haven’t I heard about this place?” So many people told me they found it randomly and fell in love. No one I’ve talked to has ever used any word other than “love” to describe this restaurant to me. That’s rare.

The reason you might not have heard of it is that Stonegarden is a victim of the hype cycle.

The most comprehensive coverage of it comes from Racket, where Em Cassel also implores you to get breakfast dessert. Racket, if you don’t know, really tries to cover restaurants our other publications won’t pick up. So comprehensive coverage there often means lack of it elsewhere.

Our bigger presses let this restaurant down.

There’s one very short post-opening write-up (that I could find**) in the Star Tribune well after opening, as well as two of the standard mentions in their opening lists.

There’s a short write-up and also a very brief opening announcement in and a small bite segment in Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.

There’s a review in Minnesota Monthly where Jason Derusha laments, “Truth is, there’s nothing on the menu that would make you go, Holy crap, I have to drive to 54th and Chicago to try that!” Breakfast poutine, Jason!!! Breakfast poutine!!

So, you can see, our main presses did cover the restaurant, mostly in short form. And the one long-form piece sort of implied… it’s not worth driving to. If that’s true, why would you drive there?

I am sure the presses will take issue with me saying they didn’t properly cover this restaurant by saying, “We did write about it,” but give me a couple paragraphs to plead my case that their coverage is uneven.

(To be fair to Jason, I do think he did his due diligence here and we just have different opinions of the restaurant, which happens a lot in restaurant criticism. Having a diversity of opinion is good.)

I want to look, specifically, at the Strib, our paper of record. For comparison, the opening of chain Parlour Bar in Excelsior had more mentions in the Star Tribune than most independent restaurants will get over their entire lifespan (nine to be exact). Just in case you don’t believe me, I catalogued them: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

While Stonegarden was relegated entirely to lists at the Strib, more than one of those pieces for Parlour are standalone write-ups, or Parlour is mentioned along with other Jester Concepts openings.

Again, Stonegarden got one single two paragraph write-up on its food (that I could find**) well after it opened in the Strib, as well as the general opening announcements that most restaurants get pre-open. All of the mentions of Stonegarden are list-based articles, not standalone pieces. In the Star Tribune’s 2024 wrap-up of new restaurants, Parlour’s Excelsior location was mentioned, but the Taste team left Stonegarden, arguably one of the best 2024 openings, off the list.

I respect the Star Tribune Taste Team. I really do. They work hard and they have thankless jobs.

As your independent critic, it’s also my responsibility to punch up and apply a little bit of pressure on our paper of record when I think they got it wrong. And in this case, I think this is a glaring oversight of a beautiful restaurant, partially due to the heavy, heavy coverage of every single new spot from the giants (Jester, Travail, and DDP).

This isn’t the coverage I want. It’s not the coverage the average Minnesotan wants. It’s not the coverage that keeps small independent restaurants alive.

Imagine the impact on independent restaurants if half of the pieces about Parlour were stand alone write-ups about restaurants with relatively empty dining rooms that are at risk of closing, but that are putting out incredible food. The impact is potentially saving that restaurant. People will go to Parlour regardless and they don’t need this volume of coverage. People can’t go to restaurants they don’t know exist.

With this uneven coverage of small restaurants in favor of restaurant groups, indie restaurants like Stonegarden need you to show up.

So cancel your next brunch plans, grab yourself a rosemary miel or a mocktail at Stonegarden, and order based on what looks the most fun. And hey! Bring a non-perishable good when you go. From November 1st-December 19th, Stonegarden is hosting a food drive benefiting disabled vets.

Subscribe now

**The Star Tribune has an objectively bad web interface, to the point that in order for me to read everything Rick Nelson ever wrote, I had to go to libraries and ask for physical copies. Going to the digital archive they partnered with wasn’t good enough, as the star rankings were often lobbed off or the review was cut off halfway or the search would show up incorrect terms. I brought lists of articles I couldn’t find online to libraries across the city and read some of his best work in print.

It’s not just the past archive that stinks. You can’t even look up Stonegarden on the Strib’s website because it looks up stoneware.

I had to turn to Google. When Google failed me, I literally clicked through the Star Tribune Taste archive to go all the way back to before Stonegarden opened and read articles to find where the Star Tribune posted their opening announcements. This is, of course, not the failing of the Taste team at the Star Tribune, but… it is a website failing of the paper itself that’s not befitting of our paper of record.

I did this research as best I could, but if I miss a mention, you’ll have to forgive me, because I put over 10 hours into the research to make sure I got it right–and that’s research I should not have to do and research I do not have to do for any other paper. I did this research as intensively as I could with this unfortunate interface and I came up with two pre-opening mentions that are pretty standard and one short write-up. If I’m wrong, I’d love for someone to link me to other articles so I can issue a correction.

★★★: Stonegarden is excellent and consistent.

My three favorite bites: Pulled pork benedict, Gravlax anything!, chicken broth

Where to sit for the best service: Grab a table. Bar service is slow, especially on weekends.

Good for: Brunch with the girls, hangover feasts, big parties (they have a big semi-private table in the back), and anyone who loves chef-owned restaurants that scratch-make almost everything.

My one big tip: Stonegarden is pretty full on weekends but pretty slow on weekdays. If you can go on a weekday, you’ll likely be more impactful to the restaurant’s bottom line.

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!

For a long time, these were the two fried chicken crown royals of Madison, with everyone having their choice of location. Both are also incredibly affordable. At Marie’s you can get six jumbo wings, two leg quarters, or three pieces of dark meat (thigh, wing, and leg) for $8.49. At Zippy Lube, you can get a four piece (half bird) for $12.99.

At Butterbird, that same four piece will run you $23–the same price as a whole bird at Zippy Lube.

Other Butterbird prices are also expensive. Whole rotisserie chickens to-go (affectionately called The Road Bird) are $28 at Butterbird to Costco’s $5. Three hand-breaded chicken tenders are $15, whereas many places would charge less than half of that cost for the same thing. A rather small serving of banana pudding is $8. Each side of sauce is $1. I could go on.

Look: I get it. I get that most of the people in Madison walk into Butterbird expecting the prices and seasonings of Zippy Lube or Marie’s Soul Food.

But I also think I get Butterbird–and before Butterbird is a fried chicken spot, it’s a hip Badgers bar. And hip Badgers bars don’t come cheap.

Walk into a dive-burger spot versus a bougie new-school spot, and you know you have two different missions, two different customer bases, two different price points. One burger is $7 with fries and one is $15 without. We’ve come to accept that and choose where to go to dinner accordingly.

Two lattes across the city will be priced differently if one is at a third-wave shop and one is at a neighborhood haunt with peeling seats.

And we all know that new-school pastry shops can sometimes charge double what the older shops charge for the same pastry. Sometimes, what we’re paying for is vibe, ample staff, or curation, even if we don’t want to admit it.

So, if what you’re looking for is value, Butterbird is not the place.

Expensive burgers aren’t my jam and neither is expensive fried chicken, so I found my flummoxed. Why did I love being in Butterbird?

Walk into Butterbird on a slow day and you’ll be hit with, “Welcome!” immediately. The exclamation point is intentional on my end, because it’s cheery. During my stay in Madison, when I walked into other restaurants in their slow periods, I was faced with college students on laptops behind the bar or empty counters. Here, someone in a headset is ready and waiting to help you with an exceptional amount of pep. It was something that stuck with me across all three of my visits: the hospitality is uniquely Midwestern and upbeat.

It felt like every day at Butterbird was game day. They always put their best foot forward.

If the Badgers gear and TVs all over the walls don’t tip you off that Butterbird is, at its heart, a college sports bar, the option to add booze to any shake for $4 would be a dead giveaway. Other college sports bar classics appear on the menu, like $15 beer pitchers, JELL-O shots, a soft pretzel, popcorn chicken tossed in buffalo sauce, and fried cheese curds covered in the same batter as the fried chicken. On a weekday at Butterbird, it’s quiet. On a chosen game day, good luck finding a seat.

If Butterbird is a Badgers bar at heart, it makes sense that the best things scream bar food.

Knowing I could get a rotisserie chicken somewhere else for $5 really did put a damper on eating the rotisserie plate for me. It’s not like the fried chicken, where it’s double the price of other spots–it’s $23 more expensive. Now, if it was the best rotisserie chicken I’ve had in my life? Sure! Count me in, but it was just fine. I’d skip it. But the fried chicken? I liked it.

Online, people call the chicken bland, but I think that people think the chicken is bland because they’re used to the flavor-packed breading of Zippy Lube. Both, to me, are good (good! not great! good!), but I had them head-to-head on the same day and the fry of Butterbird’s chicken was golden while Zippy Lube had a slight flavor of burnt flour and the seasonings overpowered the chicken.

If you want to be blasted with seasonings, Zippy Lube it is! If you want juicy chicken to dip in sauce, head over to Butterbird.

If you want really good fried chicken worth “hype” of any kind, friend, we’re in Madison, Wisconsin. For that kind of fried chicken, you have to get in your car and head south.

Upon biting down, I immediately noticed how juicy the chicken at Butterbird was, how crisp the skin was, and how much flavor the sauce had. The craggy, crunchy breading picks up sauce in all those little crevasses that can hold onto so much sauce. This feels decidedly Midwestern to me. We’re a People Who Love to Dip. Every sauce I had was excellent. My top three sauces were the dilly ranch, green garlic mayo, and chipotle mayo in that order.

I don’t think it’s a fair assessment to call Butterbird’s fried chicken bland. I think it’s a stylistic choice to let the chicken be the star, a stylistic choice that Madison residents aren’t used to with your punchy other choices.

I think it’s important, as a critic, for me to say that, because I think that much of the commentary from Madison residents and critics is actually commentary that demonstrates a lack of knowledge about what constitutes good fried chicken in the south versus where you live.

For example, Butterbird is infinitely better than any fried chicken in Minneapolis, my hometown, because we just don’t really have great fried chicken. In the south? I would go somewhere else. Context is important and the forums seem to be missing it.

I just think that giving you a super crunchy fry without a ton of seasoning on the bird with really good sauce to get your flavor-punch is as Midwestern as fried chicken can get.

What I do think is a fair assessment of bland is the sides. The mac-n-cheese I had didn’t have the punch I wanted from it. The coleslaw was watery and flavorless. The broccoli salad felt phoned in and lacked salt. This isn’t uncommon at fried chicken or barbecue places though. The sides often let us down.

But order a series of bar-inspired sides and bestie, we’re banging. The $5 Frickle Tuesdays are no joke. These were lightly breaded chips worthy of ordering a second round. The cheese curds in their standard fried chicken batter are exceptionally fun. The kale caesar, while small for its price, has the bite of anchovy you want from a salad. I loved it. Order your fries well-done and you’ve got a whole little basket of crispies or order them straight up and you have a classic, blonde McDonald’s style fry. Grab the pull-apart rolls, too, they’re my favorite side on the menu.

There are good meals to be had at Butterbird, you just have to know how to order them, and the things that scream BAR FOOD are the right choice.

So, yes, you can go in and get a rotisserie plate and be a bit disappointed, or you can get the Badger Hot Chicken Sandwich, which actually has a good amount of heat and packs a punch of flavor. This was my favorite item on the menu, with a toasted bun and sauce oozing in every bite. Two sandwiches with fries and four tall boys during happy hour will run you $38, and honestly? For a darn good sandwich, two orders of fries, and four drinks, that’s cheaper than what you’d pay at other comparable spots.

Am I skipping the rotisserie chicken along with a lot of you? Yeah. But I’m not writing the place off, because Butterbird is a ton of fun, and their happy hour goes hard.

I think Butterbird is a lesson for all of us that sometimes you have to look below the obvious choices on a restaurant’s menu to find the stars, but it’s also a reminder that not every restaurant serving the same types of food has the same pricing model and structure.

A Badgers bar with eight different dipping sauces, excellent cheese curds, $15 pitchers of Spotted Cow, boozy shakes for dessert, and warm hospitality? Bestie, this is as Midwestern as it gets. When I’m craving a $15 fried chicken dinner, I’m going to Zippy Lube or Marie’s. When it’s game day? Take me to Butterbird.

Subscribe now

Writer’s note: I blew my cover at Butterbird on my second visit. I was gifted a pumpkin shake because the manager heard me gushing about how much I wanted it, but I didn’t order it. I was planning to order it on visit three. I paid for that shake at the register and explained why I couldn’t take the gift. It was clear to me that the restaurant did not know I was a critic when they gifted this to me. My last visit, I ordered pick-up under an alias because I was known to the restaurant.

★★: My three star rating is excellent and consistent. I start all restaurants here. I knocked a star for having to really know how to order to get a good meal and value.

My three favorite bites: Badger Hot Sandwich, Fried Pickles, and Cheese Curds

Where to sit for the best service: It’s open seating, but the vibes are so different spot to spot. We sat by the big windows in the front because I needed light for photos, but if I got to choose for a non-work dinner, I’d sit in one of the booths with a good view of the TV.

Good for: Date nights, Badgers games, Kale Caesar lunches with a chicken tender on top, and drinking with friends

My one big tip: Order extra sauce!

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!

Sitting in front of me is a perfectly shaped itty-bitty cannoli. They have the crackling of an expertly fried cannoli shell. Two of them fit into a bowl usually reserved for olive pits. They are crossed over each other delicately, covered in pistachio, and drizzled with saba. You might expect a sweet ricotta filling just by the appearance. Instead, when you bite down, the taste of chicken liver and black pepper explodes on your tongue.

This dish is a salty and zippy delight. It is an incredibly approachable dish for chicken liver if you’ve never had it, one that shows you the richness and playfulness of this ingredient. At just $8 for two, it’s also an affordable luxury. More than anything else, though, this dish is incredibly fun.

In 2025, a lot of the restaurants that are going for “fun” miss the mark. AI-written menus, The Office-themed $150+ dinners, and being handcuffed before your first course are gimmicks that feel more like dinner theater and less like good cooking.

While Alinea ends a meal with a helium balloon trying to get a squeal of excitement, they often don’t. People just pop it with a knife and let it deflate in that spacious, hollow dining room. It’s a sad spectacle to watch. But at Liliana–there is a dessert that does what the balloon was designed to do, with no theatrics. On the menu, there’s a popsicle that is teeny tiny and meant for one.

Ordering it alone at the bar, it felt like someone had thought really intentionally about offering solo diners dessert. A woman next to me at the bar gasped when she saw it, like she developed cuteness aggression. “That is so cute,” she said. Everyone who sees this popsicle at someone else’s table has to order it.

That’s because what Executive Chef Kenzie Edinger has created is a restaurant that leans into fun directly with food and not with artifice. It works.

Subscribe now

The Merging of Two Legacies

If you don’t work in kitchens, you might be asking: Why did I say Kenzie instead of Chef/Owner Jason Hansen and Owner Peter Sebastian? Isn’t it their restaurant? The answer to that is yes, but who owns the restaurant and who runs the kitchen are often two different questions.

Jason and Peter set the location, the name, and the vision. Kenzie wrote the menu within their vision.

That first iteration, she and Jason co-created, but now as they move into fall, the menu changes are all hers.

People often think when they go to restaurants of celebrity chefs, that the chef whose name brought them in the door is the name of the chef cooking every night. The reality is that is rarely the case for celebrity chefs or chef/owners like Jason. There’s a whole brigade of chefs that make up a restaurant. The one who is in charge of the kitchen might be a chef/owner, an Executive Chef, or a Chef de Cuisine. In this case, at Liliana, it’s Kenzie.

Why does it matter to know this? Because you can follow your favorite chefs across the city if you do! For example, if you loved Demi when Adam Ritter and Cory Western were running it, going to Bûcheron is a no-brainer. Similarly, if you liked Wise Acre when Kyle Lussier ran the kitchen, you’ll likely enjoy The Pines. Enjoying Tim Niver’s restaurants like Mucci’s and Saint Dinette means that you’ll love Liliana, because those restaurants are where Kenzie cut her teeth.

Liliana feels like a mash-up of the legacies of two of St. Paul’s great restaurant dynasties, with Jason and Peter’s refinement meeting Tim’s creativity and unique approach to hospitality.

Over dinner one night, a chef friend joked, “Is Tim Niver in the room with us right now?” He’s not, but that hint of fun is something that he and Kenzie both share and something Kenzie took with her when she came to Liliana.

I asked Tim Niver how it feels to watch Kenzie step into her own voice out in Woodbury. He said, “Being a chef is cumulative. The intuition, instinct, the way you taste, the artful eye you might have, those things, after you have technique on how to cook, are the things that separate you from others. Kenzie has always been special. With this accumulation over the last few years, I think she just has more of that strength needed to kind of push into her own identity.”

Pasta Brings the Heat

That theme of fun follows through to the pasta, where the rotolo is described to guests as a “lasagna roll-up.” It’s not just a red sauce, but an arrabiata where pepper is the star. There’s a brave amount of spinach in this pasta and dollops of whipped cream cheese that are torched by the oven and hardened into perfect, crispy cheese bites.

Then there’s the ravioli which features small (and numerous) corn ravioli that delighted every table around me that received it. “This changed my life,” my friend said when she ate it. Singularly, it is my favorite pasta on the menu, with warmth from the Aleppo pepper contrasting the sweetness of late summer corn.

The mafaldine with meatballs has a similar, familiar yet novel feel. A man to my left at the bar ordered them and asked, “Why do the meatballs taste so good?” The answer is guajillo. Pepper and chiles abound on the menu here: Aleppo on corn ravioli, chili crunch on top of smoked octopus, guajillo in meatballs, and calabrian chili against burrata and lobster. You might read this as a spice-averse diner and wonder if Liliana is too spicy for you, but Kenzie has a deft hand.

These are not spicy pastas. The pepper is there, just slightly, adding a kiss of warmth.

I tried every pasta on the menu from August to the end of October. Only one I wouldn’t order again. It was the cavatelli with duck ragu, tomato sauce, and… apple.

The dish was originally going to come with peach, but when the season changed, they changed the fruit, too. The problem is that you can really tell that the dish was designed for a peach. Peach and apples have significantly different flavor profiles, and while you might be able to substitute them in a dessert that is cream-based, the spices in the red sauce and the duck itself don’t lend themselves as easily to apple as they might have to that peach. The dish felt over-ambitious and under-delivered, reading only of apple.

Pushing for Bold

There were a few other dishes that fell into this category, like the hanger steak which was served on a bed of undercooked potatoes and underneath a handful of oversalted watercress. The green peppercorn sauce and the marsala battled for dominance in a way that read wayward, not dialed in. Then there’s the garlic bread which is filled with mostly unseasoned cream cheese. It felt conceptually out of place on a bold menu not to cut it with herbs or ricotta–and as a diner who is garlic-bread obsessed, it didn’t quite land.

Sometimes, it felt that when Liliana was pushing for bold, they ended up missing on some of the details. Still, I would rather eat a dish that has too many elements every so often than go to a restaurant that is playing it safe every night.

That bold attitude towards cookery pays off far more than it falters, with craveable, creative “girl dinner” dishes like smoked white fish atop fried polenta or brussels topped with potato chip bits.

Each time I ordered a dish, I found myself experiencing surprise and delight, like fried olives stuffed with sausage in place of pits, which felt like taking a State Fair classic and dressing it up for finer dining, or tiramisu dusted with feuilletine giving it a bit of crunch I always think tiramisu is missing.

There’s no better example of this than the supplì. It was described to me as a cross between arancini and mozzarella sticks and it is exactly as described.

Rice croquettes are stuffed with mozzarella and fontina and served alongside a pepperoni ragu. My friends and I ate these scalding hot because we couldn’t keep our hands off them. This happened often at Liliana. My friends didn’t bother with niceties as they reached across the table to grab bites of bruschetta or bites of cacio e pepe fries. Food here was so craveable, they didn’t ask permission. They just dove right in.

At Liliana, I had a clear sense that I was watching a chef find her voice, too. When I talked to Kenzie briefly for a fact-check interview, I also asked her what she wanted people to feel when in the restaurant. “Playfulness and creativity,” she said. She’s achieved that. In 2022, Jason Derusha called Kenzie a chef to watch, but sitting at Liliana three years later, I feel like she was no longer one to watch.

This restaurant is her best work. With Liliana, Kenzie has made it.

Subscribe now

★★★ : Liliana is excellent and consistent. Yes, there were a few falters in my visits, but that almost always happens in the early days of a restaurant. I ordered a few dishes over and over again to test consistency after I ordered the hanger steak. I also couldn’t get enough of the cannoli, ravioli, and mini popsicles. Each time, they came out executed the same. Cicchetti, Antipasta, Pasta, and Dessert at Liliana are almost across the board excellent. I did consider 3.5 stars for Liliana, but because of the Secondi section of the menu, settled on 3. One note for diners is that I had many of the Secondi items and while I think some are great dishes, like the Chicken Parmesan and Dago Smash, when friends asked me to make up orders for their own date nights here, I only worked from the other parts of the menu because I think that they are significantly stronger. I would love to see Liliana hone this section of the menu to feel as cohesive and creative as the top three sections of their menu.

My three favorite bites: These are all filled things: Cannoli, Supplì, Ravioli (and I’m cheating–a fourth is the popsicle!)

Where to sit for the best service: Anywhere you like–service is even. But if you want a table and not a bar seat at peak hours, you will not get one without a reservation.

Good for: Special occasions, date nights, people curious about trying chicken liver, solo pasta meals at the bar, and girl dinner (get the first three dishes on the menu with a friend, along with popsicles)

My one big tip: If you drink, it really would be a shame not to get Amaro or Vermouth here. The curated menu is lovely. If you don’t know a lot about Amaro or Vermouth, ask your bartender or server for a good entry-point drink. They’ll know what to reach for. The NA after-dinner drinks aren’t as strong. I’m crossing my fingers for an NA Amaro like Lucano and 3Leches Vermouth. Someone let me know if they get them and I’ll be right there. 🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️

__

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!

Before I even ordered my savory courses on my first visit to The Pines, the couple next to me insisted that I had to get the peach thyme dessert that was on special. The duo of women to my right agreed, “A must,” one said. Throughout the night, everyone from guests on their way out to servers told me that it was a must-order. Everyone wanted to make sure that everyone else got that peach and thyme tart. I did not need convincing. Peach? Thyme? Ice cream? I’m in.

I heard a chorus of this during my visits to The Pines. Local people encouraged other local people to try new-to-them dishes. Once, a man didn’t like the look of his cauliflower and tried to send it back. His server, Maddie, left that cauliflower on the table while getting him another main course. When he took his first bite of that cauliflower, he regretted almost sending it back. “It’s the best thing I’ve ever eaten,” he said.

If what co-owners Kyle and Amanda Lussier wanted was to push people out of their comfort zones and encourage them to try new things up in the woods, they have succeeded.

Somehow, though, I assume that they have other, loftier aims.

Based on how the menu reads and based on the food that hit my table, I think the Lussiers want to put Grand Rapids on the map as destination dining in Minnesota.

And to know if they achieved that? For that, I had to eat.

The Bounty of Late Summer

The Pines is produce-centered and hyper-seasonal, so seasonal that my welcome dish of ricotta and vegetables switched produce from Thursday to Friday on my first two visits in late summer. On Thursday, it was beets. On Friday, it was tomatoes. That first bite of produce sets the frame for the rest of the meal where meat is abundant, yes, but produce is the star.

In late summer, the Bryndlewood Tomato lived under the section “for the table,” and arrived on a giant 15-inch plate. Bryndlewood refers to the farm that the Lussiers partner with for most of their produce. It’s meant to share, but you could order this at the bar to finish for just yourself. Well-salted, with toasted pine nuts, burrata, a generous portion of gremolata and olive oil, this dish was the highlight of my first two visits. Everything on this dish, including the bread, is made in- house. Days after I went home, the dish was gone, replaced with early fall crops.

Other vegetables were just as delightful. The peas in the ravioli stood up to heat and a butter sauce. Each one was toothsome, like they had just been kissed by fire.

Even the gem lettuce was memorable, with halves of romaine and frisée that were so exceptionally crisp, I still think about them months later.

My skirt steak, also listed under a small plates menu at 6-7 ounces, was also produce-centered. No leafy greens were found here. There were shaved radishes, pickled onions, long ribbons of cucumbers twirled before plating, jalapeños, and halves of tiny tomatoes. Topped with cotija cheese and dolloped with salsa verde, this turned the idea of rural Minnesota as steak and potatoes country on its head. While these vegetables had texture and bite, the steak itself was tender enough to cut with a butter knife. At $28, this was a bargain I wanted to order again upon my return in the fall. By then, the dish was gone.

The Sweetness of Early Fall

Six weeks later, I returned, exceptionally eager to eat here again. That amuse had changed over from fresh produce to candied peppers, cucumber and radish kimchi, and fish sauce. The Pines had made a full pivot into the depth of colder months.

Buzzy, seasonal dishes like tomatoes gave way to more humble ingredients like turnips.

I was delighted to see the turnips on the menu, because this is a hard dish to convince people to order. But these are worth ordering and if anyone can convince a crowd to do it, it’s this team. These turnips are poached in chicken stock and topped with a generous dusting of crispy chicken. The thing that takes this dish from good to spectacular isn’t the chicken; it’s the celery salad on top. This is how a farm-to-table Minnesota restaurant does green in the coming Persephone Period, with the often unused parts of winter vegetables like beets, turnips, and celery.

That crispppp chicken skin atop the turnips followed through to the chicken main I ordered. This dish was shades of beige, which might sound basic, but it’s not. This dish is bold, with a twice-cooked parsnip presented without any pomp and stewed mushrooms. The herbs in my summer dishes at The Pines were mint and basil. Here, they yielded to heartier flavors like thyme. The star of this dish, though, was the sunchoke puree. It was so immediately craveable, I wanted an entire bowl to drag bread through. In this dish, I am reminded of Myriel, which lets the ingredients do the talking. Here, at The Pines, the hand of the chef is light and the mark of the season is its guide.

Two dishes I had over the course of my visit had minor errors. The scallop dish with its leek ash against the smoked cream felt like it perfectly matched the vibe of my flannel outfit. It was dusted with housemade chips. The texture they promised was needed–and missing, as they were too soft. Similarly, the one small plate I’d skip is the wild rice fritter. It’s one of the few fried items on the menu and screams North Country. I wanted to love it. It needed far less oil, as it pooled on the bottom of my plate, and could have benefited from both lemon and salt.

A Four-Star Pastry Program in the Making

I was surprised to see the name of a pastry chef written on the menu when I arrived. Her name is Britta Letendre. She is 22 years old, from Grand Rapids, and went to culinary school in Colorado before doing a stage at Tobies. After that, she worked at the local co-op turning out cookies and birthday cakes. Many local restaurants have chosen to forego pastry chefs. Here, Britta is responsible for in-house popovers, bread, pasta, and dessert. “We weren’t expecting to hire a pastry chef,” Kyle told me in an interview. “When we posted job descriptions, we didn’t even post that.” Britta emailed him her resume. “I told her, ‘We need a pastry chef. You want to be a pastry chef. Let’s do this.’” This is her first restaurant job. Kyle took a risk on hiring her–it paid off.

The popovers are a must-order. Almost every table got them during my visits. These eggy delights are served with a rotating selection of butter, leek and garlic or roasted red pepper, as examples, and jam like plumberry or triple berry.

I found myself eating all three of the popovers I got at my table of one, unabashedly.

That peach dessert? It was as good as people said it was. Rustic, with Colorado Palisade peaches, brushed with thyme syrup, and topped with a big scoop of ice cream, it’s a late summer classic. For $10, it was larger than most $15+ desserts in the Twin Cities and also the most expensive pastry on the menu. The rest are under $10. My only quibble with this dessert? The thyme on my galette needed to be picked more intently (there were stems).

When I came back in the fall and saw an apple dessert with 12-year aged cheddar on it, I did a little dance in my seat. Yes! This is the kind of dessert I want to see in the North Country. When it came, the cheese was on the side, not melted on top like is standard in the Midwest. The dish was delicious when you grabbed a bite of all three of those elements together. In reality, most people probably don’t know how to craft that balanced bite on that fork. They might be too timid with the cheese, taking just the smallest sliver. In my hotel room at midnight, I deconstructed the dish and crumbled cheese on top of that apple cake. I melted it in the microwave. Just the warm gooey cheese on top took it from good to exceptionally special.

I understand it. It was a hard sell in the restaurant. When servers told people that the cheese came on the side it made them more likely to order it. But… what would take their pastry program from good to one of our best is the bravery to say, “Yes–the dessert has cheese. And you’re going to love it.” Because, hey, if cheese on dessert isn’t their style, there’s always chocolate cake.

“Talent Pool”

In the city, I hear chefs lament all the time that there “isn’t the talent pool” for them to hire line cooks who can execute their dishes.

But northern restaurants like The Pines prove that the only talent missing with that sentiment is teaching talent from the chef.

Kyle told me about his line cooks over the phone. “Some of them came from fast food,” he said. He taught them everything from knife skills to flavor profiles. The only “non-local” person on the back-of-house team is Sous Chef Chris Proctor, who is from McGregor, 45 minutes away. Kyle didn’t ship in talent from the city. He built up the talent here, which means that one day, his line cooks might have the skills to open their own restaurants.

Food runners and hosts are local high school students. Most of the servers are transplants from the suburbs who were already working in the area. Deputy of the Bar, Nathan Bergstedt, was born and raised here and is working on his sommelier certification. This is a team that’s local with experience at other restaurants. Each one of them has bigger ambitions. Each one wanted more. “They’re loyal and dedicated,” Kyle said. Teaching and training are at the center of his philosophy as a chef. You can tell.

In 2025, there’s no restaurant I want to see succeed more than a small town fine dining restaurant. This one, with its full dining room, affordable luxury, and sights set on greatness, seems destined to make it. It’s a destination restaurant in Minnesota, one that should be on your bucket list. Here, the Lussiers, Sous Chef Chris Proctor, and Pastry Chef Britta Letendre are showing that the heart of restaurants in Minnesota isn’t the city, but places like theirs, nestled in the pines.

★★★: The Pines is consistent and excellent, which is my standard for three-star reviews.

My three favorite bites: The menu here is seasonal and will change by the time you come here. I chose to list dishes that stayed on in both my summer and fall visits. My recommendations are getting the popovers, any chicken dish on the menu, and whatever dessert has a savory element.

Where to sit for the best service: You can sit anywhere, but I love the main floor tables because you can see into the kitchen.

Good for: Special occasion dinners for locals, pilgrimages to North Country restaurants for Twin Cities residents, and anyone who loves produce

My one big tip: Grab a drink at The Understory (the basement bar) before your reservation

Writer’s Note: Joy Estelle Summers and I were working on our pieces about The Pines at the same time. She wrote a great piece for the Star Tribune that details more about the vision and creation of the restaurant. You can read that here.

__

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!

My journey to Mothership Pizza Paradise began, like many food outings do, with a desire for one specific food item. In this case, that was mozzarella sticks. As a food writer, you often have to eat foods you aren’t “in the mood” for. If you’re writing about a steakhouse, you simply must eat steak, even if you’d prefer a salad that night. So every food writer can–and should–save one night a week for cravings. Tuesday night is mine.

I grabbed two of my closest friends and carpooled to Mothership Pizza Paradise. When we arrived, it was packed. We got the last table. Service was dive-bar slow, but when our server came around to us, she was fine-dining attentive. The mozz sticks arrived a few minutes after we placed our order. The cheese pull was so intense that we had to physically cut the cheese at the end of our arm’s reach. These are not just housemade like housemade bread crumbs, but housemade like the cheese was made in-house.

Ooey-gooey, thick, and covered in parmesan, these mozzarella sticks are one of the stars on the menu.

That first night, we got three other dishes. A lumache with taleggio cream, leeks, and truffle. One of my friends remarked that it was what you always hoped the white cheddar boxed mac might be like (this was a compliment). The sauce was so good that I dipped the pizza crust into it. For that pizza, we got the Care Bear, covered in thin slices of fennel, pork sausage, rings of Fresno pepper, and a large portion of olives. It tasted like an elevated version of a deluxe pizza, where there’s fennel beyond the sausage, and it’s actually (kind of) spicy.

Then we got the cookies, which came out warm. Can the dough use more wet ingredients to give you a more decadent cookie? Sure. But in my mind, all warm cookies are good cookies, and so flaws and all, we didn’t leave a crumb. For reference, this is how the cookies look on Instagram.

And here’s what they look like at the table. I pay attention to these things, because I believe the cookies are meant to look like the above. But after three visits with three different cookies, they always looked like the below. It felt to me, often, like the recipes Mothership Pizza Paradise opened with creeped away from their former glory over time.

The next day, I went back. Walking in that afternoon was like walking into a different restaurant. No longer abuzz and filled to the brim with bodies, there was only a father and son out for lunch. I could see the restaurant more closely.

There were ox blood colored old-school leather chairs at the marble bar. The mismatched multicolored lights over the table and the colored glass panels on the door felt reminiscent of Tiffany lamps in many local pizza joints. The place isn’t dark like many of the new openings in the Twin Cities. It’s well-lit. There’s a taxidermied fox? otter? creature? above the bar. Then, in the corner, there’s this big round booth for large groups that is almost always full of families with dancing kids.

Online, people call it “retro,” and while they aren’t wrong, retro feels simplistic.

Mothership Pizza Paradise is doing more than just buying retro-styled chairs and tables. They’re making a retro-styled pizza joint experience, one that is affordable and deeply craveable, where families, former frat boys, and first dates can commingle in the neighborhood they live in. Not pretentious, even though almost everything is housemade here, it feels like it might fit into South Philadelphia rather than one of Minnesota’s most expensive ZIP codes.

Garlic Knots, Meatballs, and… Tuna Crudo.

That second visit, I ordered garlic knots. When they came, they looked less like a knot and more like a garlic dinner roll. One look at the bottom shows that they are, indeed, knots, just fancy ones. The knots are slathered in garlic butter and served atop marinara to seemingly answer the “Can I double dip?” question ahead of time (you don’t have to, it has been pre-dipped).

Where most restaurants use their pizza dough for their knots and haphazardly shape them, these are puffy rolls more akin to a really good milk bun than their dry, doughy counterparts.

I got these knots on another visit after gushing about them to two pizza chefs. When they came, the two of them looked at me like maybe I do not understand what a good garlic knot is. “I swear,” I said, “They were better last time.” You can see that directly for yourself. This is something that plagued my time at Mothership Pizza Paradise. I would find a dish I loved and then when I came back, it would be entirely different.

I followed those knots up with the bucatini, immediately cutting into the meatball when it arrived at my bar seat. Meatballs abound on the menu here, appearing in all sections but dessert. You can order them solo as an app, atop the Connie Pizza, and in this dish. To have a menu item appear three times means you believe it is one of your stars. A mix of beef and pork (but no veal) serves as the meat base, and loads of parsley round it out. The buccatini, like all pastas I had at Mothership Pizza Paradise, was perfectly cooked, with a sauce that clung to the noodles and acted like a vessel for a generous amount of parm (there’s a theme here, almost everything is covered in parm).

I often feel that people want meatballs to change their life. More than once, I’ve recommended great meatballs and people have told me it didn’t feel special. “Was it a great meatball?” I’d ask. They’d always say yes, but they were looking for more. I’m not sure what people want out of meatballs. Gold leaf? A caviar center? Delivery straight from the farmer?

A great meatball isn’t good enough anymore. It needs to be revelatory. But a meatball is just a meatball. I say this, because I think it’s important for you to know that I am not expecting a meatball to change my life. Still, for this to appear in three different sections on the menu, I wanted more. More salt, more herbs, more tenderness, more flavor. I found myself ordering the meatballs two other times and both times, it fell short of a great meatball and was just fine.

For small plates, stick with Italian classics. The tuna crudo, heirloom tomato, and wood-fired veggies were all dishes I wanted to love, but didn’t.

The tuna in the tuna crudo was… rough. The agrodolce on top tasted like store-bought raspberry dressing. The knife work across the board on this dish is subpar. The amount of herbs is unbalanced. So, too, for the heirloom tomato. It included peaches that needed at least a few more days to ripen. It had far too much vinegar and basil. I couldn’t taste the tomato at all. The wood-fired veggies followed suit, with veggies that were overcooked and over-oiled, making them both charred and limp. These plates felt like Mothership Pizza Paradise was trying a little too hard to fit into Edina.

Caesar salad, garlic knots (on a good day), and mozzarella sticks? Those are in a whole other league, not only far better, but also more cohesive with the menu.

A Pizza Paradise?

To assess a restaurant’s pizza, it all comes down to the cheese. Toppings can hide bad cheese, under or over-proofed crust, and too-sweet sauce. With cheese, there’s no room to hide.

I started with the EZ Cheezy, a basic pie with red sauce, cheese blend, basil, and parm. I took my first bite of this pizza while a toddler danced to a drum and bass track in the space between the big, round booth by the front window and the door. Bartenders seemed to genuinely enjoy this and it’s definitely a sign of a Family-Friendly joint with capital Fs. Every time I went, a kid was up to some kind of shenanigans. One kid was making “snow angels” on the floor. Another kid who had headphones on was headbanging at the table. Once, a kid came up to me to ask me if my hair grew out of my head pink (I said yes).

All intrusions were welcome by the staff and by me–and if you’re not kid-friendly as a patron, don’t come here and spoil the joy.

Pizza comes out hot, with big bubbles in the crust and a spat of olive oil drizzled on top. Most of the time, that olive oil drizzle is spot on.

It’s my duty as a critic to tell you that one time, our pizza came out covered in enough olive oil that it seeped through cheese, sauce, and crust. If you look at the video below, you can see how oily the pizza is. I’m shaking the pan so you can see it has pooled enough to make little tiny waves.

On every other visit, the olive oil drizzle was truly that: a drizzle.

The sauce is light, and just like with those mozz sticks, the cheese pulls. The edges of these pizzas are slightly charred, the slice itself perfectly chewy, and every time you get close enough to smell the pizza, you inhale the scent of wood smoke and good olive oil. Do yourself a favor and get a sauce to dip the crust in–like the garlic butter, which requires a stir every so often to make sure the garlic rises to the top. This pizza is thinner than lots of the other wood-fired spots in the Twin Cities, but the structure of the dough holds up to gravity when folded (even on that over-oiled pie).

That’s a sign of good structure, and good structure is a sign of mastery of dough.

Mothership Pizza Paradise is trying to tow the line between Neapolitan and New York Style crust, which leads to some questions for a pizza aficionado. New York and Neapolitan pizzas are cooked at wildly different temperatures, for example. They also have different ingredients (New York dough has sugar and oil, normally), use different flours, and have different cook times. Combining those doughs might make pizza purists cringe, but I think purity is the thief of joy–and I think this pizza is a heck of a lot of fun (when executed right).

I took two pizza chefs out to dinner to discuss. They didn’t have much to say other than: good chew, good crust, good pizza. Two people I would have suspected might have criticism of any crust had none. Mothership Pizza Paradise has a pie good enough to turn skeptics into believers. With a base that good, you can add any toppings you want. I’m partial to the Karen. Salumi, leeks, chevre, and hot honey top this pie.

Somehow, even with those heavy toppings, when you fold it, Einstein’s law of gravity suspends in time.

The problem? It’s just not the same every time you go, which tells me as a critic that Mothership Pizza still has some work to do before it’s a true Paradise.

Subscribe now

Rating

★ 1/2: Mothership Pizza Paradise is extremely inconsistent. Wildly different garlic knots, the misses on the menu in terms of execution, and the one time I got completely wet pizza (though the crust somehow held up!!) are the reason for 1.5 stars. This restaurant needs significant coaching on ordering in order to get a good meal, which is why I reduced it from two stars to one and a half. I’ve outlined more about how to order here than the average restaurant, but as you can see with the garlic knots, even ordering a normally excellent dish might not result in a good meal. Some nights, this is a three star restaurant. Other nights, it’s a one star restaurant. This is a restaurant I recommend you go to if you have the budget to eat out a lot and won’t be upset if you get a bad meal. When it’s on, it’s on! But if you’re making decisions about eating out once a month, I wouldn’t risk it. Of my five visits, two were great, one was fine, and two were rough.

My three favorite bites: Mozzarella sticks, Garlic Knots (this is a risk!), and Care Bear (with garlic butter)

Where to sit for the best service: The bar

Good for: Weekday date nights, gossiping with friends at the bar, kid-friendly Friday night noshing, gluten-free or vegan pizza cravings, and watching The Real Housewives while sipping an Aperol Spritz

My one big tip: This is a walk-in only joint that gets really crowded on weekends, but if you come before 5:30pm or after 8:30pm, you’ll usually find a table.

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!

She taught me how to transplant ramps onto my property while she shared her hopes that the late nights with the baby goats would pass soon. We traded her eggs for pastries I brought from Diane’s Place. Both of us are the kind of women who love the crow economy (the exchanging of treats). I used her eggs only for dishes that required the best eggs: salted strawberry ice cream, fresh gnocchi, eggs in purgatory, and one simply poached and seasoned with salt and pepper.

While she was hoping for the long nights with the goats to pass, her father, the man who taught her how to be a beekeeper, died. The obituary for her father is deeply vulnerable and touches on her father’s alcohol use disorder. Laura wrote, “We hope his story might inspire others to seek help sooner.”

It was a hard summer for Laura. “And yet,” she said in an Instagram post, “The farm kept farming.”

In this swirl of a hard year, something had to give, and that something was her farmstand and microbakery.

When she announced she was opening it on September 27th, I was excited for two reasons. The first is that I had been out of town for every other rare farmstand pop-up she did have this year. The second is that I was one visit away from writing a review.

Happy Song Farm is out in Afton, down a residential, tree-filled road. When I drive down it, I start to dream of a life like this for myself. Not a city girl, I dream of the country, and only live here out of necessity (it is hard to be a food writer in the middle of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan). But Afton? Afton is close enough to the city, about 40 minutes from Uptown if there’s no traffic or construction on I-94.

Arrive after 9:45am and you’ll see a line already queued up, cars circling the cul-de-sac. The farmstand opens at 10:00am, but it’s best to get there early.

Laura is cooking in a residential kitchen, collecting honey by hand, and turning out small batches of wild garlic salt. The sweet galium (a wild vanilla-y flavored plant) is picked from her land. She calls it “vanilla of the north.” She taps, boils, and bottles the maple syrup herself. This spring, she, somehow, found the time to make lavender goat milk soap. In the summer, her kids poured spruce tip lemonade for tips. In the fall, they poured cider.

Laura Leu and her children climb up to the top of the apple trees in order to pick those apples to press into cider. For 100 pounds of apples, they get 6.5 gallons of cider. It’s laborious work. Then, they take that precious apple cider and serve it to you on a cul-de-sac street. Or Laura turns it into caramels made with the milk from goats that she has milked and raised herself.

This is an artisan candy, at a level that we hardly see anymore. Even most candies of this quality are not this intensive and hyper-local. Other producers buy the milk they use for their caramels. Other producers buy the apple cider. Not Laura. The whole point of the candy is that everything that can be grown on the farm is grown on the farm. All of those on-farm ingredients are marked with an asterisk on her bakery boxes.

Everything here is limited by the land, the size of a residential oven, and because, as Laura likes to remind us, “I only have two hands.”

Those two hands work magic, producing some of the best baked goods Minnesota has to offer.

Over the past year and a half, I’ve had half a dozen scone types from Laura, like an elderberry scone with elderberries she picked, processed, and turned into syrup herself. These were covered in a honey-lemon glaze and felt like the solid incarnation of tea. A sweet corn scone was topped with tarragon and honey. Lest you think this scone was savory, it was sweet, playing up the sweet in sweet corn. On her final farmstand day of last season, she had spiced pumpkin sourdough scones made with homegrown pumpkins and a brown-butter sage glaze. These hyper-seasonal delights are even more special if you’ve ever been back in Laura’s homestead farm. Her vegetable beds are a small sliver of land, expertly curated.

On my most recent trip, I got a beet, chocolate, and bay leaf scone. This scone is beet light and chocolate heavy. If you’ve ever wondered what a bay leaf tastes like, this scone will answer that question. Like most things at Happy Song Farm, that bay leaf is grown on site. Many scones at other places are dry versus crumbly—a not-so-minor distinction that’s hard to get right.

Not here–Laura’s scones are made with goat’s milk and have the characteristic soft interior of expertly-baked scones.

The spiced caramel apple scones from last week’s farmstand took her goat milk to the next level, with goat milk caramel drizzle made from cajeta, essentially, caramelized goat’s milk. The first part of eating the experience is the smell when you open the box. It’s familiar, like a fall apple scent, but better. These scones are equally special as the beet ones, spiced not with “apple pie spice,” but organic cinnamon, prickly ash berries that came from (you guessed it) Laura’s land, and sweet galium extract.

When I went last Saturday, there were 30 scone boxes costing $10 a piece (or about $3.33 per scone). They were gone by 10:45.

Occasionally, I secured other wild treats like spruce tip blondies, mulberry rugelach, or beet and thyme crackers. Once, before going out glamping, I picked up homemade graham crackers and honey marshmallows. I made sure to get really good chocolate to pair with them for s’mores, because Laura’s treats deserve the best companions.

The sourdough is also excellent with a crust that is distinct without being overly crusty, making it perfect for sandwiches. The bread has a soft and sturdy interior, holding up to overripe tomatoes. The main thing about this sourdough is the texture: soft and pillowy, without too many holes. Her focaccia is extra bubbly. Last week, it was topped with leeks that were almost sweet, and the tomatoes had that just off the vine taste. Covered in a generous amount of tarragon and flaky salt, this late summer treat was perfect with my homemade tomato butter.

A couple pantry staples are always on my to-get list. I choose what feels right at the moment, like honey, elderberry finishing sugar, pickled peppers, or eggs. I always have one of her sweet galium extracts on hand, drizzling into my coffee on weekends as a treat.

When I returned to review after an almost half-year hiatus (once again, a long story we don’t need to get into!), it was important for me to consider what I was going to cover and why. I decided the answer was everywhere, everything, restaurants, bakeries, fine dining, and dives.

An occasional farmstand like Happy Song Farm doesn’t really stand a chance of getting a review in a major press, but what if that occasional farmstand is one of our best spots for baked goods and honey?

That’s what I’m here for. I’m your local, independent, homegrown critic who knows Minnesota like the back of my hand. It’s my job to find local, independent, homegrown spots and contextualize them within the greater narrative of Minnesota cuisine.

A four-star restaurant or bakery, for beyond beurre blanc, is excellent and category-defining. Laura Leu’s farmstand is.

This is self-proclaimed Depression Grandma Baking at its modern-day best, run by a woman who does everything from milking the goats to making the scones to pickling the peppers. Everything is made from things grown, raised, or foraged on this homestead. When it’s not perfect, she discounts it, though I have to admit that the one time she discounted sourdough bread last year, I couldn’t find a darn thing wrong with it once I cut into the loaf.

Laura doesn’t push for precision like a fine dining kitchen might; she pushes for honest and homegrown. What she delivers is a farm-and-table experience where every ingredient she uses to bake is grown on the very land she is baking on. It’s like a Blue Hill at Stone Barns, but for everyday people.

When I go to her farmstand, all I can think is, “I want more of this.” I want more small spots with mad scientist mothers cooking up home-baked goods while their kids pour me cider. This is Minnesota magic. This is who we are: hearty and capable of surviving on land we tend ourselves.

If you see Happy Song Farm is open on a weekend, go, but if you beat me there on my recommendation and see me in line behind you, you better save me a scone.

★★★★

My star ratings are not traditional star ratings like you might see in a paper. Those traditional ratings are often confusing with little leverage for objective differentiation. In my ratings, I default every review to start at three stars. My first question is, is this spot consistent and is it excellent? Consistency is as close to objective as you can get with restaurants. If it is neither, or only one of those things, that’s when I reduce stars, a half point for each one. If it is both excellent and consistent, that’s when I asked my next question: is it category-defining? For me, category-defining is exceptionally rare. It requires you to either be cooking or baking in your category at the highest level or introducing a category to the region. Happy Song Farm does both.

My three favorite bites: Scones, Focaccia, Goat Milk Caramels

Good for: Early morning farmstand dates, surprising your foodie friend with creative treats, a gift for your hard-to-shop-for friend who cooks a lot, and serious bakery lovers.

My one big tip: Get here early and then go to 10th Street Farm after for some of my favorite veggies in the state.

My one big ask: When I send you to places like this, I am sending you there with the knowledge that you will show up and be good guests. I am trusting you not to ruin the vibe. Share the love, only get a few things, and if you see that there are two left of something, just get one. If you come late, sometimes you might get some goodies! Other times, she’ll be sold out. This happened to me last year. Please be exceptionally kind if this happens. She’s baking out of a residential oven with very occasional pop-ups and already has a devoted fanbase.

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!

Still buzzy at 8:30pm on a weeknight, when I walked in, I was lucky. A staff member was right at the door, which meant I was ushered to a table in about 10 minutes, after one was cleared. Other entrants weren’t so lucky. More than one group left after standing in the door for upwards of 20 minutes. The staff here runs on a skeleton crew. No host. No formal servers. At Hot Grainz, you have to break your Minnesotan habits. When you’re standing in the door and see staff appear from the back, if you want to be seated, you have to say something.

Once seated, everything is self-service. You order from a QR code. You get your own chopsticks. Hot sauce and chili crisp are on the counter. You have to ask for napkins, because they won’t appear unless you do.

You definitely will be waiting for your food, but don’t worry, it is coming—albeit likely out of logical order.

Curry comes before appetizers. Sticky rice comes out alone. I saw someone get their dessert of fried bananas before anything else. Perplexing if you’ve never been here, but if you’ve come a couple of times, you know what to expect. To order piecemeal in order to try to course your meal out how you want is a mistake. The clock restarts every time you order your food. If the bananas come out first, you’re eating dessert before dinner tonight.

I was there for 90 minutes total on my September visit, and that’s fast for Hot Grainz. The wait is worth it.

My favorite dish of the month is the Pad Kra Pow. It really is a pow of a dish. My advice is to order it with ground beef and two eggs. I got one egg and wanted more egg in every bite. This is a traditional dish of ground beef, thai basil, and chiles. Sure, you can order another meat to go with it (they have plenty of options), but this is a classic for a reason. Slightly sweet and served as hot as you want it to be, this is one of the most popular dishes in Thailand.

Be warned, though. Hot Grainz is one of the only places in the Twin Cities where you can get exceptionally hot food.

There are no awards for blowing past your spice tolerance, so start low if you’re unsure. The range goes from none to 2tbsp, with a warning under the .5tsp option that this is not mild. Before writing this piece, I decided to eat one meal at full spice—for science! My spice tolerance is exceptionally high. I can pop a habanero in my mouth and get out of it like a bell pepper. I hunt heat for sport.

Still, I do not recommend you order the 2 tbsp level of spice, unless you are a fire-breathing dragon or masochist in need of thrill.

It is a punishing, unyielding heat. Anyone who has eaten with me knows: you should take that warning seriously.

If you order a spice level 1 on a 1-5 scale, do not order any spice. If you order a 2-3, get .5 tsp. If you order a 4, go with 1 tsp. And if you order a 5, start with 2 tsp, and go up to 1 tbsp on your next visit if that wasn’t enough. The heat here, when within your tolerance, is lovely. It hits the back of your throat first, then blossoms in the front of the palate with a gradual build. It’s kind of like a weed edible. At first, you wonder if it’s working, and then a few minutes later, you realize it definitely has.

If you’re mad at me that I put you under the spice level that is ideal for you, fine, but you’d be madder if I made it too spicy.

If you need more heat, get it next time. I’m sure after eating here once, you’ll feel you must go back.

Subscribe now

Ramp pizza. That’s why I got in the car for my first visit to Hendrix & Siena. It’s one of the first things that northern foodies flock to at the end of winter. Ramp haters say it is just expensive leeks and my response is to look around in April and ask, “Okay, well where are the leeks?” Not ready! But do you know what is ready? Ramps! Ramps are not beloved because they are the best flavor in the world (though it is a lovely flavor). They are beloved because they are the first local green thing most people have eaten in months. Ramp haters are, in my opinion, absolutely no fun.

That first bite of ramps I had that year was on the Pizza del Momento, a rotating pizza with tantalizing flavors like buffalo chicken or kale pesto. When the ramp pizza was delivered to my table, I was stunned to see an entire bunch of ramps on it. I counted at least 10 ramp leaves on the pizza. These precious, foraged things are often afterthoughts on dishes in order to stretch them out. Not here. At Hendrix & Siena, they give them to you like luxury. Same with the morel pizza, which featured more morels than some of my forager friends brought home all year. This seasonal ingredient was paired with breadcrumbs reminiscent of the top of a crunchy baked mac-n-cheese and a sauce made almost entirely of just green garlic and a dash of taleggio, showing that Chef Rhett Roberts knows how to bring in more humble ingredients, too.

These pizzas were worth ordering again, except, in both instances, I got one of the last ones.

I got five of those seasonal pizzas from April to September and I have to say that I love them far more than the standard pizzas on the menu because they are exceptionally creative and almost always wild (literally). Hyper-seasonal is the name of the pizza special game, so if you see one you like on their Instagram, it’s in your best interest to go get it tonight. Just know that if it’s Friday and you don’t have a reservation, you’ll likely have to wait.

Where to Start, Where to End, What to Skip

The thing is, you really should make a reservation.

Out of my seven visits, five were at the bar. Each one of those visits to the bar had major service errors. Once, another bar patron’s check was run instead of my own. On another visit, I sat at a bar table for 21 minutes with my table untouched by a bartender (I’m methodical. I set timers.). On a different visit, I sat next to an uncleared trio of bar spots for well over 10 minutes while there was a line waiting to be seated. The host came to clear that spot, desperate to move the line. This isn’t because the bartenders don’t care. It’s because there aren’t enough people working in the bar. The bar team never stops moving, but sometimes the drink tickets don’t stop coming, and bar tables and bar seats are forgotten about.

The service in the dining room? Fine dining quality. Stellar. Attentive but not invasive. I want to see that in the bar, too. They just need another set of hands.

Once you’re sat, you’d be a fool not to order the apps. The lemony beans feel like a nod to Bar la Grassa’s signature beans with a new spin. I always ordered them for the table with puffy giardiniera focaccia and watched my friends respond with looks of delight. Topped with a heap of Grana Padano and flanked by crunchy broccolini, everyone I know who has eaten these beans gushes over them. It’s a must-order on every visit–unless you really don’t like lemon. I save focaccia for the end and drag it through the oil once the beans have been eaten, begging my server not to take the bowl from me, because I do the same with the pizza crust.

The summer salad, an elote caesar, isn’t phoning it in. There’s no iceberg lettuce here. It’s all bitter greens and sweet corn, with big slices of jalapeno, an uber creamy dressing, and an unapologetic amount of cilantro. My friend who ate this with me hates cilantro–they loved this dish. They took their fork and wiped the plate. If you see a salad on the menu, get it.

You can order most of the menu, but I have a couple of dishes I wouldn’t order again.

The first is the lamb ribs (or as I call them, lamb lollipops). These ribs arrived glistening with pomegranate molasses and were served atop a yogurt worth writing home about. These ribs also arrived Rare with a capital R. Lamb has a lot of connective tissue and waxy fat that requires a good amount of heat to render, but it’s also easy to overcook. It’s a tough meat to get right. When you eat the rare meat off the bone in this dish, you also get a mouthful of tissue and unrendered fat, which me and my meat-loving companion both found texturally unappealing, even though we both love lamb. I took another person who loves blue steak here to eat this dish. It was also too rare for them.

The Budino del Momento is also a pass for me. I had it four times, always hoping for better. Every single time, some element on it was burnt. Not just over, not at the edge, burnt. That doesn’t mean all the desserts are bad. The french silk cannoli is a fan favorite, but my choice for dessert is the affogato with banana ice cream.

I know what you’re thinking: an affogato? Yes.

What Hendrix & Siena does best is fun spins on classics. This classic’s twist is banana ice cream that is so rich and creamy, when it melts, it feels like drinking the best banana latte you’ve ever had. The just so slight sweetness of banana against the bitterness of the espresso is a perfect end to a rich dinner of pizza, pasta, and beans. This affogato is so craveable that one hot summer day, I drove to Hopkins just to have that in the bar. It was worth it, even though it took almost 30 minutes for someone to ask me what I wanted to order.

Deceptively Not Simple Pasta

Most of the pasta menu might look “simple” to an untrained eye, but it requires a high amount of technical skill to execute. The current version of the sopresine is the first dish I’ve had all year that screams fall. It had ribbons of smoked pork on top, mushrooms just kissed by fire, and a sauce that almost tasted caramelized. The two-sheet lasagna is a showerstopper. It is an ode to wild mushrooms and rustic indulgence with a crispy top sheet of pasta that puts mac n cheese breadcrumb toppings to shame. My friend who hates mushrooms loves this dish–a different friend from the aforementoned cilantro-hater.

This is a theme at Hendrix & Siena. I kept bringing people who hated certain ingredients and Chef Roberts turned them into believers.

The current agnolotti comes with a broth, not a sauce, showing the best of late summer bounty. That broth had so much depth of flavor, my dining companion took a spoon and drank it. The breadcrumbs held up in that sauce, somehow, for over 20 minutes. And look, never in my life have I finished a pasta dish before I finished the kale that came with it and said, “I’m going to go back in for kale.” Here, I did. I piled it high on my fork and finished it. I would have eaten a whole bowl of it.

At Hendrix & Siena, pasta is king. Perfectly cooked every time and almost always seasoned with precision, this is the pasta joint Hopkins has been waiting for.

The signature dish, to me, is the Papparadelle alla Lisa. The three-day meat sauce has big hunks of beef short rib, big noodles, and big personality. So many meat sauces taste like carrot or celery, but this one tastes like meat. The tomatoes seemingly have been infused with it. The pasta is coated in it. It’s like a step into Nonna’s kitchen, if your Nonna was also a meat guy. Chef Roberts has figured out depth of flavor in his sauces. They are layered. They are nuanced. They are complex.

You can taste the flavor of the bone in the sauce. I ate this dish with my most talkative friend. I don’t ever remember a moment when she and I have stopped talking over dinner, except this one. Minutes passed with both of us in silence while we ate this dish. We were tasting the depth of the short rib against the pork. We were trying to craft the perfect bite on our forks. We were eating with reverence. This bite has a richness and depth where you know the recipe has a story even before you ask about it.

Lisa is Chef Roberts’s mom. She’s also part owner, meaning this is a multi-generational restaurant. Lisa would make this sauce when he was a kid. Roberts and his brothers would relish in the smell while she cooked it and then, just like at the restaurant, she put it away for three days before they could eat it. Those nights were full of anticipation, childhood joy, and “mild torture,” my server said.

With this dish, I can understand why people call Hendrix & Siena a neighborhood spot. It’s unpretentious, warm, family-owned, and rustic.

It’s a true mom-and-pop restaurant named after husband and wife co-owners Emily and Chef Rhett Roberts’ twins. But when my friend who lives 45 minutes away from Hopkins looked at me after finishing the last bit of sauce, she said, “We have to come back.” We did, two weeks later, because even if at its heart Hendrix & Siena is a neighborhood joint, it’s so much more than that.

★★1/2: Hendrix & Siena is excellent and mostly consistent. I don’t have a feelings-based scale. Are you consistent is a neutral question that separates 3 star and 2 star restaurants. I love Hendrix & Siena and they execute most dishes exceptionally well and are consistent most of the time. The knocking off of that half star came down to the budino, lamb ribs, and service errors on every visit I had in the bar.

My three favorite bites: Pizza del Momento, Pappardelle alla Lisa, Lemony Beans with an order of Giardiniera Focaccia

Where to sit for the best service: The main dining room (see my one big tip)

Good for: Cozy date nights, weeknight solo bar trips where you don’t have a timeline, and introducing your parents to your boyfriend

My one big tip: Sit in the dining room. You need a reservation to sit there, but don’t assume a reservation seats you in the dining room! Put in a note. Ask for it directly. The two times I made reservations without specifying, I was sat at a table in the bar. If you sit at the bar, please be patient with them. If it’s been a bit since someone has touched your table, look up. You’ll see them working really hard.

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!

Hey Y’all Tipsy Taco Bar is embroiled in controversy. 3.2 stars on Yelp, multiple Reddit threads warning locals away, and an (alleged) runaway Ferris wheel have colored most people’s feelings about the restaurant. As a lover of all things Austin, I was also skeptical of the idea that this was Tex-Mex done “Austin-style,” as owner Joe Radaich claimed.

It felt like how a Minnesotan who had never been to Austin might define Austin Tex-Mex (guacamole, taco salad, and queso) versus how foodie locals do.

Tuna or bone marrow tostados, Texas brisket nachos, housemade chips, grilled quail, and cactus juice slushies all make appearances on popular Tex-Mex menus in Austin. They’re a foodie city. They’re proud of it.

Still, upon entry, I was resolved to stay neutral. Maybe Hey Y’all got a new chef or updated recipes. They did make two big changes already: they dropped the prices and swapped out some menu items. Maybe they had, with time, figured it out.

Walking in, my first thought was slapdash.

You could see every seam in the wallpaper, with many junctions lifting. There were hand-painted silverware containers with paint drip marks and chips already, a few months in. Tables were cleared but not cleaned, with dust and crumbs dotting most of the open ones. In the booths, the dust lined up on the edges. On a wall behind me one evening, there were splatters of food, far above my head like someone had a food fight. One door got the landlord special. There were bits of food on the glasses, too, either lettuce or salsa, I didn’t bother to figure out which. The music was pumping so loud that any hungover guest might immediately turn around and leave during brunch service, but also loud enough that I worried about the neighbors. The last photo in that series of four? It’s in the bathroom—and I have lots of questions.

The menus were printed from a printer that definitely had a needs ink alert flashing. All the menus were wrinkled with water stains and some had food stains as well.

I had two different menus with two different price points on one visit.

I told my server about it. “I know,” my server said, with a shrug, turning to walk away. I never knew which menu had the right prices until I got my bill. If they knew there were two menus, why wasn’t anyone removing the wrong one when they dropped them off? The pricing on those menus was also chaotic. Not just price increases, but also decreases, in increments that made no sense to me.

Servers often ran in the restaurant like they had far too much work to do. Once, a server was swapped out on my table mid-shift without a word. She got cut, industry shorthand for sent home early due to lack of guests. I know that because I asked, not because anyone told me. Another time, a server asked me if I was ready to order tacos before anyone in my party arrived, and then once we were all seated, it took 15 minutes to be asked again. Water was never refilled on my visits without asking. Drinks were never asked after.

My tables took it upon ourselves to fetch silverware from other, empty tables. Once, I was chastised for it, and felt exasperated. I hadn’t seen a server in 15 minutes. I, too, would have preferred to ask. The other time my table did this, we saw the service team sitting at the bar. Someone looked up to see what we were doing, then back at each other.

A generous reading of this would be that the restaurant has a “fun, DIY flair,” as one of my dining companions offered. A more cynical reading would be that it feels like no one in management really cares.

And… that’s definitely not the way you want to feel about a restaurant that operates a Ferris wheel.

Fun or just falling apart?

The first bite I had at Hey Y’all was an elote dip with the distinct taste of canned corn. This was during the height of corn season, when corn is readily (and cheaply) available. As with most dishes I had here, it lacked salt, the dish wasn’t fully mixed, and the “sauce” was at the bottom: a flavorless, yellow liquid. The chips were store-bought, but they do give you a lot of them. This, along with a very flat NA mimosa, was my introduction to Hey Y’all’s version of “Tex-Mex.”

Other dips were not much better. The guac was made with unripe avocados. The pico had been sitting out so long that the tomatoes had lost their sheen. The queso tasted like straight Velveeta. The queso in Lunchables is significantly better.

Brunch staples were mostly out when I went for that first brunch. We were informed that the carnitas were out three different times, by three different people, including someone in the kitchen who seemed exhausted that people kept ringing in carnitas.

The masa pancakes were raw in the middle, with black flecks in (what we were told was) straight maple syrup. It was supposed to come with honey butter–it didn’t. The breakfast taco with chorizo was fine but not better than something you could make at home with little skill, and at home, you could choose better tortillas. That single taco was $8, which means if you wanted two or three, you’re looking at spending a small fortune on mediocrity (for the uninitiated to breakfast tacos, they average $3-4 in the Twin Cities).

The tortillas, in general, were clinging for life. Floppy and tearing as soon as they arrived at the table, it was clear they had been sitting in a steamer for far too long. Every taco that didn’t fall apart before it went into my mouth was a small miracle. The barbacoa didn’t have a chance in this tortilla, as it was covered in liquid that seeped through the corn shell, yet still, somehow, the meat itself was dry. The elote and potato taco fared (and tasted) better, with Taco Bell-style fiesta potatoes against that same canned-tasting corn.

The tortilla was so over-steamed, bits of it stuck to my fingers every time I set the taco down. This was the best taco I had and I’m not saying it’s good.

The pork rib taco tasted like char and little else. It didn’t look a lick like the glamour shot the website. The quesa birria was too salty to finish, though the cheese pull was good. The carnitas were full of so much liquid, picking up the taco caused liquid to come out of both sides. It felt less like a taco and more like a sinking ship. The masa-fried avocado was a textural nightmare and totally mushy—and I love fried avocado.

The “smashburger” taco is just a gringo taco with pickles and poorly fried onions. You don’t even get enough pickles to get one in every bite and you get four teeny fried onion bits. “War rations,” a friend said, frowning at the onions. The photo below is that taco—and it was $9.50.

The fried chicken taco? People in my party couldn’t swallow it, spitting it out into napkins. One person said, “Oh… oh no,” upon putting it in their mouth. The chicken isn’t fried chicken like you might imagine. It seems like cut-up bits of chicken in standard flour. The queso had been sitting on top so long that all that breading was soggy. This taco also came covered in fries, leading one of my companions to ask, “Is it a fried chicken or a fry chicken taco?” Honestly, either way, it should come off the menu.

We didn't know what any of the sauces were, mostly they are defined by color: red or green. The red salsa was orange. The sauce with the smashburger taco was called a green sauce and tasted like mustard. A different green sauce with the Tex-Mex rolls tasted like it belonged on shawarma, not anything Tex-Mex. One night, a dining companion remarked that the least greasy thing we had were the Tex-Mex rolls. They were also the only thing that was deep-fried.

The one time I decided to ask what a sauce was my server winced and said, “Do you want me to… ask the kitchen?” I said no due to the level of pain this appeared to cause her. It’s clear in the Yelp response comments that leadership thinks this is a hiring problem, like they just needs to retrain or fire their bad servers and hire a new team. But… food on the walls, two different printed menus, consistently bad food, being out of half your brunch menu, dirty cups, never enough silverware, a door with the landlord special, and bad service are management problems that only leadership can fix.

Radaich has already said publicly that he wanted the restaurant to be fun versus authentic, so I wasn’t expecting perfect barbacoa. But the menu items read as cheap knock-offs of these beloved dishes with rich histories, versus fun new ones.

The tacos that could be fun, like a fried chicken taco, aren’t that fun (or yeehaw) at all.

Where to instead?

I do think there is a lesson here for all of us: chasing the glitzy new restaurant doesn’t always yield better meals than the tried and true. There are far better tacos in Northeast, albeit with less trendy patios.

In this case, you’re better off going to other Northeast taco joints like El Taco Riendo or gas-station darling Hermanos Locos, all of which rival the best tacos I’ve had in Austin. One of my friends said to me, “I just really want to ride the ferris wheel!” If you, too, just really want a ferris wheel, head to the El Circulo Del Cielo at Mall of America and tell Dora and Boots I say hi. I didn’t even want to trust Hey Y’all with a third meal to write this review. I definitely wouldn’t trust them with a carnival ride.

★: Skip it

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!

There’s a lot of layers to answer that question, but one of them is that I used to work in juice and really love juice. Another is that anyone who eats a lot of restaurant food and has any sense chugs green juice in the morning. Food critics all over the country practice this ritual to prepare for days full of steak and deep-fried potatoes.

But the third reason, the most important, is that as a person who has been to almost the entire continental 48 and has drunk juice in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Portland, impulse juice is just the best juice I’ve ever found.

So when Brian Nanoff, owner of impulse juice, told me it was closing, it felt like a gut punch.

Brian Nanoff got his start working at Lakewinds co-op, then moved over to Agra Culture at 50th and France. “A buddy called me asking me about opening that juice program,” he said. He took the job. He built that program from scratch in 2014. Agra Culture wanted to be easily franchised and a $26,000 juicer was a barrier to entry for that plan, so they closed the program in 2016. Brian reached out to Truce Juice, advocating for his team, to see if they had space for his staff. This is the first time in this piece you’ll hear that Brian is a real mensch, but it won’t be the last. “They didn’t have space for them,” he said, “But they asked me what I was doing.” He came in as the Kitchen Manager in 2016 and reformatted the menu.

More greens. More balance. More fun. A simple green juice was enhanced with pineapple and mint. New smoothies speckled the menu. Some recipes he inherited, most he invented. Like many food businesses, Truce closed at the end of 2020. Brian didn’t want to see the juice shop at 32nd and Hennepin close, so he signed a lease. The first menu he had was done in Excel because Brian didn’t know how to use a design platform. “I just knew juice,” he said. The logo came from his friend’s old graffiti tag. Look closely at the sign out front and you’ll see the letters mpls in red.

Brian eventually worked up to being the COO at Truce, so when he got the keys, he knew the business wasn’t doing well. He made some changes to try to make it last. Not having waste was a big one. He said, “Waste is a killer.” Now, even with an almost zero waste kitchen, it’s just become harder and harder to stay afloat.

“We’re actually up in sales from last summer because of the construction across Uptown last year,” Brian said, “But we aren’t anywhere close to where we were from 2021-2023.”

Juice is about two pounds of produce on average. Some juices are more (turmeric and ginger have low yields) and some are less (cucumber has a good yield). impulse juice has never skimped on the organic thing, even though many juice shops with the word organic in the name have. Their produce is top notch—no green washing here. Factoring in labor, rent, food costs, and bottles which have gone up 20% in the last four years, Brian told me, “We’re getting about $2 a bottle after our $1 price increase this summer.” That’s less than 20% profit.

With rising costs, juice margins have become thinner than even standard restaurant margins.

Restaurants can shrink their portions and keep prices the same. We’ve all seen it. Pasta now sometimes soars over $30. Steak prices, in many places, have doubled while ounces stay the same. While people grumble about it, they still pay the cost of those dishes. Juice is an allotted number of ounces—and valued less than a cut of beef. If you go from a 16 ounce juice costing $13 to a 12 ounce juice costing $13, people notice. They don’t just notice, they really complain and start to tip less. People don’t see juice as manual labor (it is). They see it as “just another place trying to get me to tip for counter service,” not realizing the effort that goes into making those juices (or that counter service is worthy of tipping).

Subscribe now

The first year was the best in tipping for impulse. “During COVID, we were all champions of helping each other out,” Brian said. Then there was a steep decline. Brian pulled up his laptop to show me the raw data during our interview. He showed me the tip percentage for the year 2021. It was about 10-11% of the total volume of sales on an average day. Now, its about 6-7%. “That seems small,” he said, “But it’s not.”

Tipping is really important for juice shops because tips help bridge the gap between what juice should cost and what people are willing to pay. A juice from impulse should cost closer to $15-17 for a 16 ounce juice. But that sticker shock keeps people from coming in the door. Even tipping $1 helps close that margin and keeps juice shops afloat.

Tipping is down everywhere. This is something that I’ve been hearing around the industry, from fine dining to coffee. It was also something that I noticed on Wednesday when I went to grab a smoothie. The man in front of me left the tip screen open, not even choosing the lowest option from impulse juice, which is 9%. I saw this over and over when I stood behind people in line. People just weren’t tipping.

Sure, you could also lament location, location, location when looking at the closure, except so many mornings, Brian watched a line form at neighbor Black Walnut Bakery. That line was often more customers than he would see in a day. The reality is that house made pasta and a steak made by someone in a restaurant are often seen as decidedly different than making those things at home. Same with those incredible, delectable croissants across the street. But juice is harder to sell, no matter how special. You can get it in the grocery aisle, sometimes for under $5 a juice. Juice is readily available on the shelves and mass produced juice has pretty good marketing.

If you can get juice for $5 from Whole Foods or you can get it for $13 at a local shop, why would you choose the more expensive juice?

Lots of juice lovers answer this question with finicky science. They say that every single minute a juice sits, it loses nutrients. Or that pasteurization kills everything off. I’m not that kind of juice person.

My answer to why you get the $13 juice from the juice shop down the road versus the grocery store is that those juices taste better.

We all know that grocery store croissants are not as good as Black Walnut’s. We all know that frozen pizza will never top the best fresh pizza in the country. Boxed mac-n-cheese is a nostalgic delight that can’t stand up next to a five-cheese mac your mother made for Thanksgiving. Even grocery store lattes have a specific chemical taste not found in their barista-made counterparts. But we haven’t applied that same logic to juice.

What I tried to tell people about impulse juice since I moved home is that the juice there is balanced in a way that is special. Most juices are far too sweet, too acidic, or it’s just a mismatch of ingredients you’d never put together in a dish. The best juices include things that you would put in a dish together. They’re liquid plates. That’s impulse.

Most juices are the same regurgitated recipes that you can find in other places. There’s little creativity in them. Often, the recipes are just found online. Going to juice shop after juice shop with a sharp palate means that I can taste the same juice being made over and over in different places. There’s little variation. Maybe lime is swapped with lemon. If they’re being a little spicy, maybe they’ve added in some orange to a green juice.

But impulse juice is exceptionally creative. These are juices you won’t find anywhere else.

The beet juice had chard in it. The impulsive mix, a sliding scale juice that rotates year round, was often a play on viral coffee drinks or dishes.

The dandy lion is a juice that stars dandelion greens and pears, with burdock. The strawberry smoothie had rose water in it. A pineapple smoothie was mixed with peppermint. The oat milk was house made. Even the lemonade program is hyper seasonal. Even the cashew milk includes fun, trending flavors like Matcha. Even the açai bowl toppings are made in house (think strawberry chia jam and house made nut butter). The team even cares enough about their regulars to let you bring in rhubarb from your yard and ask them to juice it, for a small fee (thanks, Brian!). “Cancer patients sometimes came in looking for specific juices,” Brian said. He would make them custom juices, based on what they wanted. Like I said, a real mensch.

A grocery store juice or smoothie is never going to come close to impulse.

Then there’s the savory food, which is relatively new and excellent. In my search to find the best tofu scramble in the Twin Cities, I ended up realizing that there isn’t really a good one. I wish there was, because even though I’m not vegan anymore, I love a good tofu scramble after a week of eating red meat. The best vegan scramble that you can get in the Twin Cities? It’s a cashew scramble (stick with me), made with byproduct cashew pulp from impulse juice. Everyone doubted me when I told them to try it, but then they had one, and they became believers. When I asked him why they were created, Brian said, “No pun intended, but it was a scramble.” He was trying to find a way to make more money in winter. Soup, cashew tacos, and other goodies hit the menu. But people just didn’t come in. “We lost money every day of winter,” he said. For a couple years, he took on a second job.

There’s ingenuity in this little juice shop at the corner of 32nd and Hennepin, ingenuity that we are now losing, because convenience reigns supreme.

The closure is a significant loss for the Twin Cities, but also a significant loss for juice nationally. If impulse juice, one of the best juice shops in the country, can’t stay open, who can?

Every time there is a restaurant, coffee, or bar closure, my advice to people is to go to a place that you really love. Tonight.

The only way to keep our favorite neighborhood spots open is by going to them consistently. The price we pay for local goods like coffee and croissants and juice is not just that we go there, but that we tip and tip well. If we stop going—or we stop tipping—we’ll be fated to get far more than just our juice from the grocery store. Cookies, croissants, and breakfast sandwiches are on the chopping block, too.

impulse juice will stay open until November 8 and I’ll be there getting my favorite smoothie. If you want to go and see what all my fuss is about, order an umber with cold brew and protein, get yourself a cashew taco, and order a goodhue. These three items have been a staple in my breakfast routine since I moved home in 2023. I’m even drinking a goodhue right now.

When Brian told me about the closure, I dusted off my juicer in the basement, put it on my kitchen counter, and told it to be ready in a few months to use. Until then, I’ll be drinking Brian’s creations at impulse juice.

Subscribe now

That was enough to convince me to order them. Regulars at restaurants are often far better guides than food writers themselves.

Those hotcakes arrived to my table emanating heat and leaking blueberry juice, the kind of pancake you can tell is going to be good on sight. Slathered in campfire butter (smoked salt is whipped into the butter), cooked in bacon fat, and topped with maple syrup, these pancakes glisten when they hit the table. I avoided all of that fat for the first bite, because I wanted to know if the hotcake itself was good. I dug under the top pancake that was already covered in melted butter to grab the edge of a bottom piece.

That first bite, I found myself in a slight crisis, staring out the windows of the restaurant into the street. “Oh no,” I thought, “This might be better than my favorite pancake.” This was August 2nd and every single thing I ate this month didn’t come close to this pancake. It held onto the top spot for the entire month.

The oh no is out of loyalty. All of us in the Twin Cities have some kind of loyalty to a diner. Our Kitchen, Al’s, and Ideal have staunch followers who decry the others as less than. I, personally, think all of them excel in their own ways, and that most loyalty comes down to the neighborhood. My neighborhood joint is Our Kitchen. I can walk to it from my house and have been able to walk to it most of my adult life. That pancake is giant, cooked right on top of bacon and sausage fat, and made in-house daily. Al’s and Ideal have their own believers—and their own great pancakes.

I’ve held on tightly to the belief that Our Kitchen has the best pancake for over a decade, eating every other pancake I can find in the city to compare them. My ratings, before Churchill were as follows:

1. Blueberry Pancake, Our Kitchen

2. Corn Pancake, Maria’s

3. Plain Pancake, Ideal

4. Blueberry Pancake, Al’s

For a while, Victor’s Mango Pancake rounded out the list, but it went downhill in recent years. The pancake is now drier, the mangos seemingly lower quality. And then Saint Dinette’s pancakes slipped in, beautiful right up until the end. It was the last bite I had before they closed.

This list is highly controversial and has started quite a few arguments in the Twin Cities, often by people who haven’t eaten all four of those pancakes in one day (I have). But honestly… they are all great pancakes! It comes down to preference, most of the time. Ideal’s pancakes are crispier, fried a little longer, buttery delicacies. Maria’s is great to fold around eggs and bacon for some kind of heavenly breakfast sandwich. Our Kitchen is puffy, puffy, puffy. And Al’s pancakes have a crust on them that hungover brunchers in other states can only dream of.

This list, with one of the Big Three at the top, was already controversial. If I was going to knock one of those diners off as my top choice, I knew I’d have minor hell to pay.

Subscribe now

I decided to do what I do in moments like this. I went and ate all five pancakes in one day, in rapid succession, back to back.

I don’t recommend the average person take on this endeavor, but for a food writer? I think it’s only fair. After eating all of these pancakes in a tight window of 7am-9:30am on a random Saturday, I hightailed it out to Churchill St. to try their hotcakes again.

I sat there staring at the pancake and then realized I had no other choice: I had to tell you that I think it’s the Twin Cities’ best pancake. Head-to-head, it won.

Does that mean I’ll abandon my classic favorites for a drive to Shoreview on the weekend? Not all the time. Because those other pancakes are exceptional and craveable in their own ways. But this one, with its fat slathered crust and real maple syrup is as close to pancake perfection as a girl can get. A crust that is just past golden brown, a super fluffy interior without any gumminess, and a size that seems more able to hold consistency throughout (all the other pancakes are dinner plate sized), these pancakes are worth the extra 20 minutes of driving.

Plus, the blueberries tasted exceptionally fresh. They were far gushier than other blueberries in blueberry pancakes I’ve had, like they were destined to burst as soon as grazed with a fork. This made a medley of blueberry, syrup, and butter that other pancakes didn’t seem to have. Those other blueberry pancakes had blueberries that burst only when chewed, while these seemed to have already burst on the griddle.

The rest of the brunch classics I’ve tried have been worth that drive, too. The Turkish Eggs are stellar. The smoked walleye toast is like a Midwestern take on lox. The berry bowl, a berry smoothie topped with housemade granola, is destined to be devoured happily by both almond moms and kids. The coffee, black, is excellent, and the seasonal latte can take on any 3rd Wave coffee house in the city. And if you’re not a brunch person? Every Tuesday in September, you can get these hot cakes on the dinner menu for their Family Night series.

If you think your favorite pancake is better, I don’t blame you—pancake loyalty in this town goes hard. Just promise me you’ll take a weekend trip to do a head-to-head, following your favorite pancake with this one. Even if you still think Al’s, Ideal, or Our Kitchen is better in the end, you’ll have another pancake to add to your list of brunch classics.

Have another pancake you think is our best? Tell me! I’ll try it.

Subscribe now

When a friend once asked me what long bygone recipe I dream of, this was my answer. I spent years trying to recreate it from afar, even before they closed and I just didn’t live here. Look, I even have proof. This is an email from me to me from 2017 sending waffle recipes to myself.

But here’s the thing, even though one of these recipes is the asparagus waffle, it’s wrong.

Having a sharp palate is a blessing and a curse, because yes I could tell the recipe wasn’t right, but I wish I wasn’t able to! I just wanted to eat that damn waffle and pretend. This is the recipe they gave to the public because the real recipe has a step none of you want to do in it. So I kept trying to adjust it and always seemed to fail. The reason that I kept failing was because I had the wrong ingredients.

“Oh,” my friend said, “I have it. Do you want it?”

Did I want it? That’s like asking a five-year-old boy if he wants your Charizard card in 2001. Of course I wanted it. “I’d sell a very small part of my soul for it,” I said.

My friend gave it to me, with two conditions: I’d never tell anyone who gave it to me and I’d never let anyone else see it. We shook on it. I got the recipe and went about making it the next morning, cutting off butts of asparagus and toasting a grain whose name I can’t give to you (it’s not quinoa).

So when I tell you that I know that the waffle at Darling isn’t the same waffle, it’s not just because we’ve been told that by the Darling team.

I put it to the test one morning, making one at my house and then going there and eating theirs. There are some clear differences. A collage of quinoa is the biggest visual difference and the waffle being gluten-free is another, but this waffle is a beautiful homage.

The bacon lardons have been replaced with bacon-bacon. It’s still topped with a flavored butter (radish) and marmalade (rhubarb-jalapeno), but where Birchwood regularly rotated those, these are more static.

And this waffle? It’s gluten-free, which means that texturally, it’s different from than the original. It’s also singularly the best gluten-free waffle I have ever had.

Gluten-free and all, when I don’t want to do all the steps to make the real Birchwood waffle at home, I come here happily. It reminds me of an era in my life when friends and I would split the former version of this waffle hungover with our sunglasses on in the AC because we couldn’t afford the cost of a unit or the cost to run it.

It also does something I wish more restaurants would do. It plays homage to the beloved restaurant that came before it, not with their recipe, but with the chefs taking a stab at their own version of it. In this, even when our favorite places close, their legacy lives on.

The people of Seward and its surrounding neighborhoods have not slept on Darling. Almost everyone I know who lives there begs me to go to Darling. I told them I do. Regularly. One of my readers came up to me excitedly when I was eating there to give me her recommendations—she lives on the same block.

I go once a month, eating their tofu scramble (best in the city, but it’s not technically a scramble for purists, there are some cubes) and dutch baby with ravenous desire. At first, I was a bit skeptical. Owners Juell and Ray Roberts are also the owners of local crunchy hippie hot spot Peoples Organic and I wasn’t sure they’d be able to pull off a dutch baby with corned beef (sorry). But here, the addition of Hi-Lo Diner’s Mike Smith is apparent. We aren’t just seeing Peoples Organic 2.0. We’re seeing a restaurant that has its own personality.

At Darling, owners have found the balance between locavore eating and a neighborhood joint that has something for Almond Moms and the rest of us.

A friend described it to me as a place you can go for breakfast every day and not feel like you just ate a pound of butter, and that feels true (Dutch Baby aside).

But even though Seward hasn’t slept on Darling, the rest of the Twin Cities has.

Influencers also mostly avoided it, which told me a lot about our influencer culture. Here, our influencer scene isn’t just about “new,” it’s also about “flashy.”

Darling isn’t flashy—and that’s entirely why it’s special. Neighborhood joints like this make up more of our restaurant scene than sexy, low-lit restaurants fighting to “put Minneapolis on the map.” For breakfast, on a Tuesday? I don’t want to be “put on a map.” I just want standard Twin Cities breakfast. We have some of the best breakfast in the country, far surpassing any East Coast city I’ve ever lived in. We don’t need to reinvent it, we just need to publish about it.

It’s really clear that the owners tried to keep the spirit of Birchwood alive while still forging their own path. It’s a delicate balancing act most and people fail at it. For them, it’s worked.

Darling is one of my top five openings of 2024 because it feels like Minneapolis to me: hearty, warm, and full of memories. If you haven’t been, you should go.

A warm voice greeted me when I called, asking me how I was. I could hear kitchen noise and guest chatter in the background. I knew exactly where the host was standing, smack in front of the door, 10 feet from the kitchen, in a waiting room likely full to the brim. “I’m going to make a few reservations over a few days, all for one,” I said. I could hear the noise growing louder in the background. “It sounds busy. Should I call back?”

I heard the schlick of the book they use as the host opened it. “Now is perfect,” she said, asking for the first date. I listened to the chatter of a full restaurant in the pauses of her writing each date down before she asked, “When next?”

My first visit for this piece was on one of those busy Friday nights. The restaurant was abuzz.

The table to my right was delighted when someone dropped off a free birthday dessert. The table behind me got a free pour of wine to go with their meal, because as their server Adam said, “You just always order white and I think you’d like this red.” They loved the wine.

Another woman was complaining that all of New Scenic Café’s dishes were meat in broth, and look, she’s not wrong, but instead of giving in or apologizing, Adam said, “You’ve totally picked up on something here! That’s the chef’s style.” Then, while refilling her water, he said, “I have a dish for you.” He turned to me, for a moment, and asked after drinks. I told him I was sober and he flipped over the menus to point out all he NA options. The list was massive. He left me to think for a minute.

When a new couple sat at the table in front of me, he said, “It’s so good to see you again.” Then he asked if they wanted the wine they had last time. The first—and only—time that table ever came was August of 2023.

Adam dropped warm pistachios at my table, the classic welcome gift at New Scenic Café.

Then, his name was called from the kitchen. It was an order for the woman who was complaining about the broth. On the house, he brought her a dish with no broth in it. “Don’t hesitate to ask what dishes aren’t brothy next time,” he said, “I’d love to get you something you would enjoy.”

He turned to me and said, “Want me to help pair the dishes you order with NA drinks or do you want to order them as you go?”

I joked, “How well do you know NA drinks?” It’s a valid question—sometimes flavor notes don’t pair like they might with wine or beer. Sometimes letting a bartender or server pair your NA drinks is a mistake.

His response was, “I wrote the menu.” So I put myself in his hands.

“Help me pair,” I said.

This all happened over 15 minutes, before I ordered food. It was unlike any hospitality experience I’ve ever had. On the busiest of nights, with a line in the entry, Adam took the time to take care of all of us. He is one of New Scenic Café’s greatest strengths.

Read more