The best thing I ate in June: an homage to a classic, made gluten-free

The Birchwood Waffle's legacy lives on.

I have a secret: I have the Birchwood waffle recipe. Not the one in the cookbook, but the one they used in the restaurant during asparagus season.

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.

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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.