Offbeat Eats

Almost every time I’ve come through the Twin Cities, I try to get together with my PhD Advisor, Terry, for a meal. He and his wife Nancy are pretty good at finding interesting places to go, a mix of newer spots since I moved away from the area, and newer spots. In this case, they wanted to take me to one of their current favorite spots, Holman’s Table over in St Paul.

Back in December, I was invited to the University of Minnesota’s Department of Mechanical Engineering to give a talk on some of my autonomous drone development work. I always love these sorts of visits, since they are a chance to keep caught up with what the University is up to… as well as having an excuse to visit some old friends and favorite food haunts. Indeed, it’s become a bit of a running joke that on most of these visits I end up going to Al’s Breakfast, often multiple times. But they also take me out to dinner. Last time, it was to a new-to-me place, Cafe Biaggo, but this time, it was a return to a long-ago favorite of mine, W.A. Frost & Co in St Paul.

A recent trip for a conference in Minneapolis gave me plenty of opportunities to both check up on some of the new happenings in the Twin Cities dining scene, and revisit more than a few of my old favorites. In this case, I was heading out to dinner with Prof. Simon, my PhD adviser, and his wife Nancy, who were kind enough to take me to an old favorite that I hadn’t visited for many years: Khyber Pass Cafe. I rather liked Khyber Pass as a graduate student (scary how events when I was in Graduate School include things happening almost 25 years ago). At the time, Khyber Pass was an established small cafe on St Clair Ave a few blocks east of Macalester College, and was a notable exception to the generally “American” food offerings of most of the local places (Groveland Tap, the now-defunct St Clair Broiler, etc). But the owners, who had come to the Twin Cities and opened Khyber Pass in the early 80s after leaving Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion. The Afghani offerings on their menu were a welcome addition to St Paul’s up and coming food scene, and Khyber Pass got a lot of good coverage in the food media.

As you can see from all of the other Twin Cities postings, earlier this month I was visiting Minnesota. The reason for my visits was than I was an invited guest speaker at the University of Minnesota Mechanical Engineering Department (where I got my PhD, for those that don’t know about my ‘day job’ as an engineer). After my seminar, several professors from the department took me to Caffe Biaggio in St Paul for dinner.

(Closed) A few years ago I did a review of Toscanini’s Ice Cream in Cambridge, MA, in which I mentioned that their burnt caramel ice cream is my second favorite ice cream ever, losing out to my favorite ice cream, the salted caramel from Izzy’s in St Paul, MN. However, I recently went to go point someone to my review of Izzy’s, and I realized that I’ve never actually written them up. Well, last week’s trip to the Twin Cities gave me another opportunity to visit Izzy’s, and this time I figured I should actually write them up.

Last week’s schedule had me flying to the Twin Cities to give a guest lecture at the University of Minnesota (anyone want a lecture on radioisotope power supplies for space exploration?), and my flight arrived at lunchtime, so I decided to check out one of the area’s better-regarded Jucy Lucy joints; the Nook. First of all, some background for those not familiar, a “Jucy Lucy” is a hamburger with a layer of cheese crimped between two patties. Done right, it’s a nice combination of cheese, crispiness, and juice, albeit with more than a bit of a hazard of hot cheese burns on one’s lips. As you can read over on my review of another Twin Cities stalwart, Matt’s Bar, there’s always the perennial question of who makes the best Jucy Lucy in the Twin Cities. When I lived in the Twin Cities, there were always two places that claimed supremacy and had their followers, the abovementioned Matt’s Bar, and the 5-8 Club located a few miles south on Cedar Ave. But since I left the cities in 2001, the Jucy Lucy phenomenon has spread greatly, with over a dozen places selling them (and the trend is even national, I noticed a “Juicy Lucy” is on the menu at Richard Blais’ place now). The Nook is a relative newcomer to the Jucy Lucy scene in the Twin Cities, opening in 2000, but in the last few years, their Nookie Burger (their variant of the venerable Jucy Lucy) is now frequently mentioned in Jucy Lucy supremacy discussions, so I figured it was worth dropping by.

On my recent trip to Minnesota, we had several opportunities to dine out by ourselves, or with our hosts. As a result, we had several fine breakfasts at local establishments, many of which (Maria’s Cafe, for example, or better yet, the venerable Al’s Breakfast) I’ve already reviewed on this blog. However, this time we dined at several new establishments as well. Two of them I’ll review today, and I can combine the reviews since both places (Longfellow Grill in Minneapolis, and Highland Grill in St Paul) are sister restaurants operated by the same company, and indeed, have approximately 90% overlap in their menus.

(Closed)I’ve just returned from a trip to the Twin Cities. As a former resident, it’s interesting seeing the places that have popped up since my last visit. Unlike other areas where it has died out, the Coffee Revolution is still in full swing, with both the number of independent coffee houses and locally-founded or -based chains (Caribou and Dunn Bros) on the upswing. More interesting to me, however, is that a number of good chocolate places have apparently cropped up in the Twin Cities as well. Particularly, we ran across Legacy Chocolates…