The Best Breakfast in Minneapolis isn't on Eater's Best Of List
The magic and glory of Modern Times
When you look up Best Brunch/Breakfast Minneapolis, you don’t find Modern Times on those lists.
You find a list of mostly trendy places with $20 omelettes and french toast with flavors better suited for lattes or not suited for anything at all (I’m over the pickle trend, I’m sorry). But when I match with men on dating apps who are coming in for conferences from out of town and they ask me the one place to go in the Twin Cities, my answer is clear: get the hell out of downtown, skip your morning keynote, and get your ass to Modern Times. They show up in suits (I don’t give them a head’s up that it’s a punk spot) with mild disdain for me until they try the food.
Or–I drag fancy chefs, almost by their ear, to this spot in the morning when they tell me it’s fine for vegetarians but otherwise not all that special. Except, they went once, with a vegetarian, who didn’t know what to order, and then I order for them and they look at me over the plates with something like disdain, because chefs hate when you’re right and they hate even more when you look them dead in the face and say, “I’m right, aren’t I?” And they’ll respond with some version of, “Shut up,” because one of the secrets about chefs is that they know how to cook, but there’s only a handful of them that know where to eat.
Or once, I wound up here with a man who hadn’t told me yet that he was a graffiti artist and when he did, I stared at him and said, “Guess which name in the bathroom is my ex-boyfriend’s,” and then we sat there in a standoff as my name matched with me the person matched with him the man. “Oh my god you’re [tag]’s bougie ex-girlfriend,” he said. I burst out laughing, because yeah, sure, I’m everyone’s bougie ex-girlfriend. “I can’t do it again,” I said. I meant the leaving the house at midnight, me staring at the ceiling, wondering if the man I loved was safe. I also meant the man who thinks I’m too bougie, like my love of fancy food is somehow different than someone who spends money on good concert tickets or sports games or in this case some goddamned paint. Like: the next man I’m going to love is going to be able to slip into a seat next to me at some fancy restaurant and when we’re asked if we want to get a $100 truffle upgrade that’s like actually $20 worth of truffle on something it doesn’t need to be on, we’re going to say, “No,” in unison.
It’s not like Modern Times is the only good brunch spot in town.
Maria’s, Victor’s, Ideal Diner, they all are solid places to go get breakfast. Minneapolis is a town that gets brunch. You can shoot a dart and get good breakfast here. As a woman who travels all over the country, I know not every town has good breakfast (looking at you, San Diego). But the thing is, none of the answers in the “best of lists” are correct. The best breakfast in town is Modern Times. It’s always been Modern Times.
On my way to write this at the 70s colored striped bar at Modern Times this morning, the Taylor Swift song Right Where You Left Me came on my Spotify shuffle and I let out a laugh.
“Fitting,” I said, directed at the car, at the song, at god, and a man. Because the places we come back to, the places we’re regulars at, the places we eat at time and time again, they hold memory and story, which is why I don’t write review, I write story.
I’ve been coming to Modern Times since I was 20, over a decade. I started coming with my boyfriend at the time. It was the only restaurant, alongside Hard Times, Galactic Pizza (I’m sorry Wrecktangle killed you but their pizza is better), and Muddy Waters (RIP) that he felt comfortable inside of. He was horrified at the restaurants I occupied most of the time in. Bar La Grassa was (still is) my stand-in at that time and he wouldn’t be caught dead in there, the same way I wouldn’t be caught dead in a Yard House in the suburbs eating frozen onion rings.
So, it was here and it was Muddy Waters where we spent time playing Scrabble on the tables while the sunlight streamed in. We were young and both haughty and stupid–I was drinking myself to death. He was staying out late with another woman pretending to be painting graffiti–and then on other nights, actually painting graffiti.
With that busy schedule, it was just maybe one or two nights a week when he was home sleeping next to me, and he talked in his sleep so I got to hear the name of the woman he was cheating on me with (this is how I found out). The rest? I stayed in our first floor apartment as apartment after apartment in our building got broken into, pleading with him to stay home because what if something happened in ours? His response wasn’t to stay home. It was to tell me to sleep with a knife under my pillow and then he went to see her.
We came there the mornings after, him not having slept, me having slept alone. I would ask him questions like, “Who is Becca?” That’s not her name, but let’s pretend. And he’d say, “What?” And I would say, “You keep saying her name in your sleep.” We came here together on those mornings until he said he cut it off with her and he didn’t and well, I’ve always been the kind of girl that will take your shit and give you a chance to get right until I can’t anymore. So I left him. He didn’t say he was sad to lose me. He went face down into our couch and said, “But who gets the dog?” And I was in love but I’m not stupid, so I said, “The dog has always been in my name.”
It’s funny, because when he tells this story, he calls me his bougie ex-girlfriend like a joke and not a tender young woman who loved him with all I had and who in the end he couldn’t get his shit together for. He would be with the woman he left me for for seven years, which in the scheme of being cheated on, isn’t so bad. It was something I stopped resenting eventually, like okay, obviously I was the wrong person and she was the right person (she’s very nice!). Obviously, he had changed. He loved her. I was a part of that story, as women often are, the making of a better man. I was, on the balance, fine with that. I softened into that fact with time. Then–he left her the way he left me, this time cheating on her with one of her friends. And what can you say at that point except motherfucker?
So hey, maybe I’m a bit bougie, but if you’re a punk looking for love? Babe, you can only trust one of us with your heart.
And let’s be real, it’s not the boy who won’t step foot in Bar La Grassa out of some weird type of purity test on being hard or punk or anti-capitalist; it’s the girl who wants to take you there in an a hot pink jean jacket with wild horses painted on it and consignment designer high heels with wide arms at the pasta bar, saying, “Welcome to my world,” and sharing some of the best pasta of your life. Because sure, I’m bougie, but I’ll give you everything I’ve got.
You can find part of me in my ex-boyfriend (his ability to cook) and you can find part of my ex-boyfriend in the bathroom and on the bike rack outside Modern Times: an alter ego, a word, a name that describes him pretty well. After I left him, he yielded this Times to me, taking Hard Times for himself, us divvying up the city. But it’s been almost a decade and his name is still etched in multiple places. It used to make me mad, but now it reminds me of my youth and my first love, which if you look around Modern Times, you’ll see young punks in their first love, too. Like it’s an eternal place for people like us to come in the morning with hope that we found someone who shares the vision for the life we want.
And look, if you’re coming from like the North Loop or whatever? Don’t fuck that vibe up.
If you aren’t in by nine, expect to wait.
If you’re coming after nine in the summer on a weekend, expect to wait a long time. Perch somewhere, bring a game, or a deck of cards, or a friend who knows what to do with a forty five minute wait for a table and a potentially hour long ticket time and cozy in to one of my favorite places in the world. All wacky colored and funky fonted with staff who seem to never turn over, the same faces every time you come like:
Upon moving home from the East Coast, Modern Times was my third stop. Early morning. Breakfast. The first time I went, one of the staff looked at me a little confused. I used to be blonde–and skinny–I had far fewer tattoos and none of them visible. It had been almost four years since I crossed the doors into Modern Times, six since I had moved to the east coast in search of a different kind of life (I found it–and like many Minnesotans, I returned).
That morning, I sat in a booth, when normally I sit at the bar, because like most meals I eat, I come solo. I was with a friend who obviously wasn’t from here, who drove me home from New York, she was without a proper winter jacket, on the morning after a snowstorm when most people stayed home. I could see the staff person’s eyes trying to answer the question of if I was the person she thought I was, but in that morning she didn’t answer the question. She decided, probably not.
It was the second time I came in that she realized: yeah that’s that girl. When I sat at the bar, with my hair pulled back in a ponytail, and me once again in the athletic apparel I used to wear in my youth between teaching yoga classes. She didn’t take my order. It got to the point where it was long, even for Modern Times, for someone not to take my order, but I didn’t ask. I was just happy to be there. Home. Twenty or so minutes went by and then my order appeared in front of me. The same one I’ve had for years. Half order southside hash, vegan, extra poblano sour cream, toast, smashed tofu. I still eat it even though I’m not vegan anymore.
She put it down and then she said, “Hey, welcome home.”
Modern Times meant home to me in so many ways.
I learned how to make the southside hash myself in my tiny kitchen in Philadelphia. Three times a year, I made giant batches of poblano crema and stored them in the freezer. When people would come from Minneapolis to visit me, they’d say, “Hey that’s pretty close,” when they ate my approximation. The best hash browns I’ve ever had (top tier, god tier, ace) slathered in peppers and onions and mushrooms, smashed tofu, vegan chorizo, and poblano crema. And for me, I always got it with extra crema and dipped my toast in it. I loved it.
Then I left Philadelphia and moved to Kingston, NY before the COVID boom, which brought in a new batch of restaurants and killed most of my favorites. There weren’t places like Modern Times at the base of the Catskills. No punk diners with teeny tiny three seat bars to sit up and become a regular in. The Catskills and Hudson Valley, on the whole, does not know how to brunch. It’s designed for tourist breakfast, which is expensive and bougie. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can say Cafe Mutton or Phoenicia Diner or Kitty’s are solid, but on the whole, brunch in this region is expensive and just fine. So when I wanted really good breakfast, I made it myself, mostly approximations of my favorite dishes in Minneapolis–The Waffle from Birchwood or the mango pancake from Victor’s or this defining dish of my early twenties.
Because Modern Times is not for tourists. Modern Times is for locals, and specifically, it’s for its neighborhood.
This is something that I think is a lost art in many places, but that some of my favorite Minneapolis restaurants have maintained. Tilia, for example, feels like the neighborhood and always has. Good Times is a sleeper of a pizza shop and neighborhood joint. Nightingale is where expats from the CC club go to drink when they realize they’d rather go somewhere with drinks that don’t taste like battery acid. The Lowbrow was made with families in mind–that’s the neighborhood. And Bole, specifically in St. Paul, feels like a gathering place for the cross sections of the neighborhood it was born inside of. There are places in Minneapolis that are destinations, say Young Joni or Bar La Grassa, but something that defines Minneapolis dining to me is the neighborhood joint done right, across all types of food and all price points.
I think Modern Times does it with the best of them and I think part of the reason that Modern Times isn’t on the “best of” lists is because it’s not trying to appeal to you, it’s just what it is and fuck you if you don’t like it.
But that’s why I think it should be on the best of lists. It’s not pickle french toast (can we please stop?) or a $20 breakfast sandwich with steak and grape jelly (this is a real sandwich in the Twin Cities and no one I know who has had it likes it) and it’s not a $24 beurre blanc omelette that I could make you at my house for the cost of three eggs and some butter (sorry guys, I love you, but that price point is ridiculous). It’s the best punk food you’ll eat in your life and it’s like $10-15 a plate and the plates are giant and the drink specials bang so hard and if you’re into getting high, you can get high at breakfast with their THC drinks. What more do you want from a breakfast joint except damn good food and a line out the door most days a week?
I made the southside hash by myself for years and years and years, perfecting it. I haven’t made it one time since I’ve been home, because that wasn’t what it was about. I made it because I wanted to eat it in Modern Times at the bar and if I couldn’t eat it in Modern Times at the bar, my giant kitchen in New York was the best I had. As a girl who travels the country eating breakfast and being a big curmudgeon about it, I can tell you that Modern Times is not just some of the best breakfast in the state, but in the goddamn country (for me, it sits behind only two restaurants, both sandwiches: Zylberschtein’s Veggie Frankel specifically on a croissant not a bagel and literally anything at Matt Rob’s Biscuits—hey you know it’s real when you get a 404 on the website—including whatever fucked up looking special he puts on the board–it’s going to bang).
But one thing Modern Times has that those places don’t? If you go often enough, it will become home to you, too.
I’m here this morning for the biscuits and squash gravy, which early in the year, sat the top of my best of the year list for a hot moment–overtaking really fancy restaurants.
It’s now dropped to number ten and when I go to Chicago, I know that there is a restaurant that is going to drop it off the list (Ever, maybe Thattu), but that doesn’t mean it isn’t special. When I put it in my mouth the first time I said, “Shit,” then I came back the next day and the next and the next and the next until the special was no longer on the menu.
I’ve only done this for a few dishes like how I drove 90 minutes one way to eat at Chai Pani for five days in a row or how every day in Seattle I went to Zylberstein’s or the first time I had the hottoek at Kim’s, I went back three times that week just to eat a single one of those at the bar with the corn tea.
So when I saw, months later, the special boomerang back, I sent out the alert like a bat signal. I ran into two people who were coming that morning just to get it. Each of us in our own world, one person pushing the start of their work day, me writing this at the counter, a very old friend getting squash a different way that morning (via a burrito). If it’s true that you’ll always run into your worst ex-boyfriend at the CC club even if he doesn’t live here anymore, it’s true that you’ll run into people you have loved but haven’t seen in a long time at Modern Times. Some mornings, I stand waiting for a table outside in the sunshine with friends I haven't seen in five years catching up while petting other people’s pitbulls and quietly wondering if the cute guy with the battle jacket who just biked up is single (he’s never single).
This dish special in the kind of way I can’t describe, where I just melt into the dish and tell people to go and eat it.
Sitting at the bar that morning, writing this, I looked around the dining room (full on a Monday) and asked myself what I love about Modern Times so much, why I come at least once a week when I need to get to Inbox 0, why after so much of my life has changed, Modern Times remains the one place I tell every man who matches with on dating apps to go to.
Part of it is that I was made in this restaurant–I loved and I lost here, I used to take dates here, I have spent so many mornings with people I love here on the sidewalk in the sun and no matter what you can or can’t eat (you can be an omnivore or gluten-free or vegan, doesn’t matter), you can eat here.
But it’s more than that. It’s proof that restaurants do survive and thrive without gimmicks or velvet interiors or big investors. It’s proof that good hashbrowns exist and a good sauce goes a long way. And for me, it’s one of the only places where I don’t sit out and look at the restaurant and wonder, “Will this meal make me feel anything?” It always will. It will always feel just like home. And it’s one of the only places that everyone’s bougie ex-girlfriend shows up at with unbrushed hair and a laptop and a bad attitude and hunger and no one is going to give a shit, they’re just going to hand me a vegan menu and sit me at the bar and say, “It’s good to see you.”
So hey, if you want sunny side up eggs with no white in the yolk, go to one of the brunch’s on Eater’s list and pay $30 for pretty good food. But if you want the best breakfast in Minneapolis where you can show up just as you are as long as you’re willing to wait? This is the spot.
The Southside knows how to do brunch :)