This has been, quite frankly, scary.

I left a date this month with a woman who said she didn’t realize who I was until we were on the date. But after getting her full name, I looked her up on Substack. The day we matched, she read every piece I wrote about having breast cancer. Before the date, she read my review of the restaurant we went to.

Another date, someone acted like they didn’t know who I was at all, but then they knew things only an avid reader of mine would know, that I hadn’t shared. The day of the date, they opened over 20 articles of mine.

People have been shouting at me on my runs to say hi and I hope you can understand why this scares me. Over the past year, my life has changed in ways I didn’t expect. I am approached almost every day by someone who reads my work. I love this! I want to say hi! But there are moments where I genuinely worry about stalking.

If you don’t know this yet, I can see how often you view my work on substack, whether that’s a local writer who obviously uses me as baseline research and reads my work multiple times while working on pieces about the same restaurant or someone I’m going on dates with.

If you’re a fan, please swipe left on the apps. And if you’re heavily using my work as a reference point, it’s obvious enough that I am regularly approached in restaurants by people who have noticed.

Anyway, here’s a palate cleanser of my new foster dog, Pretzel.

What we all seem to be missing in the whole Banana Bread Recession Mania is a round-up of actual banana bread. And she deserves the spotlight!

Banana bread has all the things that make a GOATED pastry. It has a clear identity both from the flavor and texture of banana. It drives debate and opinions (are you team walnut or chocolate?). And, finally, when done right, it’s messy, getting all over your fingers so you can lick them clean.

I looked to see if there was a banana bread round up in the Twin Cities and the last one was seemingly done in 2015. So I went on a mission, running around town (literally, I built my weekly runs around this) to eat banana bread. And I have two banana breads that came out clearly on top after eating ten varieties, one with nuts and one without.

Neither of my top two banana bread picks come from bakeries. One comes from a coffee shop. The other? A restaurant better known for pho.

Have no fear, those of ye who want banana bread drinks! I also have options for a banana cold brew, a banana bread latte, and a banana matcha, so you can go on your very own Banana Crawl.

Why is this piece behind a paywall?

I normally have a standard disclaimer for why my pieces are behind a paywall, but for this one, I wanted to give you a little bit more of a look behind-the-scenes. On Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, I work 10am-6pm at my day job in order to be able to eat breakfast for my writing. For this piece, I went out on each of those mornings for two weeks and also did little excursions on weekends, totaling 5 banana breads in one morning. Unlike most food writers, beyond beurre blanc isn’t my full time gig. I work really hard to write pieces like this one, literally working over time every single week to produce my column. Most of my work is free. Pieces like this take a lot of time to research and write, so they live behind a paywall. If you want to help fund my independent project, the best way to do that is becoming a paid subscriber.

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Ideal is a neighborhood institution. It’s a Northeaster’s paradise with very few people venturing there if they don’t live in the neighborhood. It’s like Cheers, if Cheers were for breakfast.

Al’s, to me, is all about housemade hot sauce and slightly elevated diner fare in a really fun setting. They have a menu that includes benedicts and waffles, which is rare at a counter-style diner. Al’s isn’t just any ordinary diner. It’s an institution that got its name for twists on classic fare. (My go-to order at Al’s is below.)

Our Kitchen is a diner person’s diner. And babe, I’m a diner person.

There are no frills or gimmicks. The bread comes out of a bag. The jam is Smuckers. The syrup isn’t real maple syrup, but your eggs come out how you ordered them every single time, no exceptions. The morning news is usually on, and if it’s not the news, it’s Food Network, and chef/owner Danny Ziegler (the greatest to ever do it) is on the flat top working magic while servers call you hon and sweetie and ask if you want a top-off on your coffee. Our Kitchen is the place I go when I wish I were in rural Minnesota but am stuck in the city. It reminds me of diners in the northwest edge of the state, with old-school hospitality.

My go-to order at Our Kitchen is easy to remember: it’s the kitchen special.

You get two eggs, hashbrowns, sausage, and a choice of toast or a pancake for $18.95.

If I’m ordering toast, I ask for my toast with extra butter, but I only get toast if I’m going with a second person, because at Our Kitchen? It’s all about the pancake, baby. If you’re not ordering a blueberry pancake at Our Kitchen, you’ve been led astray. This is my favorite pancake from The Big Three diners. It is as big as a plate, packed with blueberries, and pufffffyyyyyyy. If you like crispy lace edges, this isn’t for you. But if you like a classic diner-style pancake packed with enough blueberries to get in a good serving of fiber from your breakfast sweet, this is the best around.

The hashbrowns at Our Kitchen also have the crown for my favorite hashbrowns in the city. These are thick-cut and always perfectly crispy because the hashbrowns are smashed like you might see a smash burger: with a big metal weight. These are hand-grated with the skin on and don’t have the problems many hashbrowns have where they are soggy in the middle or over-oiled. They’re always perfect and you get enough of them to cover half the plate. I love to get my eggs sunny side up so that I can break a yolk and let it ooze into the hashbrowns. A note is that Our Kitchen, like many diners, lets you salt your eggs to taste.

Rounding out this dish is coffee and sausage. I normally avoid sausage at diners because the middle is often cold. Not here. The sausage is hand-smashed extra thin on the flat top. Coffee here comes in a tall branded mug, and my hack for all diners everywhere is to pour syrup into your coffee, not sugar.

Sure, there are other things you can order at Our Kitchen, but this breakfast has never let me down, and it’s what I order the most when I walk here on weekday mornings when I just really don’t want to cook eggs myself.

I have three tips for you on going to Our Kitchen.

1. If you think you can walk into Our Kitchen at 9am on a weekend, think again. The sign at the door in the summer warns away people on a tight schedule. But weekday mornings are generally mild, and as a solo diner, I’ve never had to wait for a spot on a non-holiday weekday.

2. They offer takeout and you can call ahead for it, skip the line, and go to the lake to eat your pancake. Highly recommend.

3. They have a bathroom in the back, but only for the brave. You have to walk through a prep area to get there, but they’re more than happy to let you do it.

Enter: Kirstie’s “Balling on a Budget” series.

I am on the hunt for deals for you every single day of the week, starting with Monday. And starting with burgers. So, here are four Monday night burger deals where you can get a burger plus fries (and in one case, a shake, too!) for under $10.

Why is this piece behind a paywall?

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

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But… I don’t have an editor or any real publication deadlines. It’s all just me holding myself accountable. So sometimes I get a bee in my bonnet and I change course. This is what happened two weeks ago, when I felt a craving for a breakfast burrito (and it’s what is happening right now… as I drink banana bread cold brew and eat banana bread for a banana bread piece slated to come at you soon..ish).

Here’s the thing, bestie, I never get a craving for a burrito. I know, I know.

This is a controversial take, but I will always slam tacos over burritos, and for breakfast, I want huevos rancheros, salchicha con huevo, or chilaquiles. So a hankering for a breakfast burrito? RARE. And it being rare means that I haven’t gone around and tried all my favorites, as I have with chilaquiles.

So, I Googled, “Best Breakfast Burrito Twin Cities,” and I took other people’s advice. I went out somewhere that everyone said had really good breakfast burritos, and then I was thoroughly disappointed. The potatoes? Soggy. The salsa? Bland. The tortilla? Not crisped. Objectively, it was just a mid burrito all around. Would I eat it again if you handed it to me and I was hungry? Yes. But I sure as heck wouldn’t seek it out.

Then, there’s the other problem. There are great breakfast burritos at places like Lito’s Burritos and Brito’s Burritos. The problem? You can’t get these before work. And that’s what I want: a breakfast burrito before a long day at the Computer Job Factory.

I did what I do in these kinds of situations. I reached out to my readers, and I ate where you told me to eat. When I say beyond beurre blanc is our project, I mean it. I was specifically looking for a burrito that I could get before 9:00am on a weekday, and I got about 30 recommendations. I scoured the Internet, too, and then… I ate 12 breakfast burritos in 14 days, including the spicy breakfast burrito at HCMC of local Reddit fame (it’s good, but not good enough to actively go to HCMC to eat it).

After eating all of those burritos, two early morning burritos stand head and shoulders above the rest. There are two burritos to rule them all, two burritos to find them, two burritos to bring them all and in the darkness satiate them. Or something like that. Anyway, one has a lot of potatoes, and one has a lot of protein and clocks in under $10 including a drink. Either way, you’re winning.

Why is this piece behind a paywall?

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

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• 100% nixtamalized corn tortillas - natural, warm, local, and fresh

• Fresh corn masa

• Oven-baked corn tostadas

• Yellow and blue corn chips

But this sign undersells what waits for you inside the restaurant. When you walk in, your gaze can’t help but go left to the corner where rotisserie chickens turn over and over in a gleam of red light. The fridge to the right is small, but packed, with more than just tortillas. There’s mild green salsa, spicy red salsa, guac, pickled red onion, and pico. Then, there’s an array of drinks.

For a long time after opening, there were no menus sitting on the counter. You just kind of had to know what to order, but now, there are menus broken up into clear sections. There are family combos of rotisserie chicken or sirloin barbacoa. There’s the “pantry” section of tortillas. There’s a section with six different tamales (chicken, pork, rajas, sweet corn, cheese, and beef). Then, there are the lunch and dinner specials, which include sides like red rice and black beans. Sometimes, there are muffins sourced from elsewhere by the register. In the mornings, there’s coffee that owner Wilbur de la Rosa will offer to you, for free. And that’s it.

There’s no seating to speak of. This is a takeout joint that rivals all others.

Sure, maybe you think you can find this place in Minneapolis or St. Paul by the description, but that’s not where it exists. Some of the best tamales I’ve ever had are here, in Rochester, Minnesota.

On one trip, the thermometer on my car said that it was 96° and I was sitting in full sun with two tamales on my lap. One was rajas (strips of roasted peppers). The other, elote (sweet corn). There was one other car in the parking lot sitting next to me with a similar setup: guac on the dash, salsa in hand, tortillas for dipping, and surely, like me, a stain on their pants.

Opening tamales always feels like unwrapping a present to me, but here, it feels even more so. When you open up the husk, there’s a pure yellow color to the tamal that just screams, “THIS IS GONNA BE SO GOOD.”

Rajas has a mix of peppers and onions. It’s a flag of color and flavor: yellow, red, and green are mottled into a perfect bite. Running through the tamal is a squeaky cheese that reminded me of a cheese curd. There were bites of tomatoes. This tamal was moist and smooth. It glistened in the sun. It was soft, even late in the day, hours after it was made.

The corn tamal was a bit drier, but not in a bad way, it reminded me of cornbread. It’s corn on corn on corn in the height of corn season, in a town that has a corn-shaped water tower. The corn inside the tamal hadn’t lost its bite even with all of that steaming. Going back and forth between the two of these felt like a perfect summer meal.

I nodded to the people in the minivan next to me as I dipped a tortilla into the salsa. We had both made the perfect choice for this hot afternoon, eating tamales from the take-out-only operation La Mayzteca in their parking lot with our ACs blasting.

Over all my visits, I ate every single one of the tamales. A note is that these aren’t vegetarian, even the seemingly vegetarian varities. Instead of lard, which is traditional, they use beef tallow. You could order them on their own as a meal, but I think it would be a shame to go to La Mayzteca and not get some of their guacamole and salsa and a pack of their fresh tortillas that come in at a rock-bottom price of $2.50 for a pound.

The guacamole is cilantro-packed, lime-forward, and sprinkled with tomato and red onion. The avocados aren’t over-smashed, giving it texture. It’s perfect paired with broken-up tostadas as chips, but I like to make my own DIY chicken tacos, scooping out heaps of guacamole to cover the tops of the roasted chickens. I did this once with a friend in the parking lot and another time while watching Love Island in a hotel room, with cold chicken and a saved Jarritos, hours past my bedtime. It felt luxurious to lick my fingers after eating tacos while sitting on bright white sheets. The tortillas scream fresh, as they should. What you have in your hands was made on site and packaged hours or a few short days before. I feel envious of the people who live here who can grab the tortillas on a random weekday. Often, I take home packs of them to freeze for my own breakfast tacos.

Salsas are equally divine, like a smoky, thin red salsa where the heat creeps up on you and begs you to keep eating. If you think the thin texture means it slides off of anything it touches, you would be wrong. It holds the edges of tostadas perfectly and seemingly soaks into the chicken when I pour it onto tacos. “Watch out,” another patron said to me as I picked it up, “It’s spicy.” They were right. It’s a tongue-burning, air-sucking kind of heat, edging just past Minnesota hot into the land of actually spicy. On its own and on tacos, it’s excellent, but my favorite way to eat it is over eggs in the morning.

Four visits in a row, when I went to La Mayzteca, they were sold out of rotisserie chickens. Sometimes, a few would be turning on the spit, but they were promised to people who called ahead. So instead of driving down in the afternoon like I usually did, one morning I drove down early and arrived at 11:00am before the lunch rush crowd. I was starving, having skipped breakfast to be able to house most of the chicken in one sitting. I arrived before the chickens were ready and de la Rosa told me it would take 20 minutes or so. I shopped at the Savers that was a few minutes away, picking up a pink and yellow checkered shirt, and when I came back, my order was waiting for me, all packed and ready to go.

There was a whole rotisserie chicken that was broken down for me, that same spicy red salsa I loved so much, a whole pound of fresh and warm tortillas, and black beans. I added on the pickled red onions with jalapeño and cilantro and headed out to the parking lot to start assembling tacos. I put everything on the hood of my car. The beans were so full that when I took off the lid, because of the slant of my car, they spilled all over the hood. I put my fork into the liquid immediately, grabbing bites of perfectly tender black beans with one hand while I took the lids off my salsa and red onions with another.

It felt somewhat incongruent when I opened the styrofoam container that held my rotisserie chicken and then saw what lay underneath such humble packaging. This is not a humble chicken. The rotisserie chicken’s skin is crispy in a way you might expect at a fine dining establishment where one person’s job is simply to crisp the chicken skin, not like you might expect of a standard rotisserie chicken. Part of that is the origin of the chicken itself. They’re regeneratively grown on pasture using slow growth methods, with lots of land to roam, in shaded pasture underneath trees, meaning this is nothing like the chicken you might get at Costco. But there’s also spice to them, not just salt and pepper, but a mix of secret spices that de la Rosa dreamed up when he combined Mexican and Peruvian chicken recipes.

The preparation of the chickens is also a slow process. They turn on a spit behind the register, glowing and calling to you from the corner of the small take-out-only restaurant. The skin itself is the color of caramel, with flecks of white from the coarse sea salt and pops of red from chiles. When I picked up a thigh and took a bite, my hands were stained red from all the spices. I tore into the chicken with my hands, pulling the meat apart and assembling it onto a warm tortilla. I added the red onions and the salsa, fighting away bees from trying to grab bites before I was able to get one.

Standing in the hot summer sun, I took a bite into my DIY taco and felt juices from the chicken, the salsa, and the onions begin to ooze out of the tortilla and onto the asphalt. It was a juicy, spicy, delicious mess. I imagined if I had children, this would be the perfect take-out meal for dinner, handing each of them a stack of tortillas and a chicken thigh and saying, “Have at it,” while standing here.

There’s something feral and primal about assembling tacos yourself in a parking lot. I assembled taco after taco while listening to people order in the drive-through line at Burger King that shares the lot. I wanted to shout out to them, “No! Come over here! It’s just as fast and so much better.” While they ordered Whoppers and fries, I stuffed my face with five tacos, licking my fingers in between each one. By the time I was finished, the hood of my car was covered in the juices of everything I ate, not too far off from resembling the signature Alinea table dessert.

In the world of critics, four stars are often reserved for a certain kind of dining, with sky-high prices and formal dining rooms– restaurants like Alinea where the splatter on the table is intentional, not restaurants like La Mayzteca, where the splatter on my car is because of a lack of a dining room.

But every visit, I just couldn’t imagine a restaurant more worthy of four stars than this one. This place is the home of the best tortillas I’ve ever had. They create some of the most moist and corn-packed tamales I’ve ever tasted. They craft the crispiest chicken skin I’ve ever put in my mouth. They make some of the best salsa, with tons of heat, full of fresh flavor. Every meal here was a stunner, with a menu that seems deceptively simple when the techniques required to make food this delicious require an incredible amount of varied and hard-to-learn skills.

And then, there’s de la Rosa, who was always present and always trying to give me free add-ons to my meals like Colombian muffins or pickled onions. He wants people to try things. Eating here, it always felt like I was in the home of my most generous friends. I watched him patiently explain to someone who had never eaten tamales how they’re made and how to eat them while simultaneously mentally preparing to grab the order of a regular that arrived behind them. The warmth of the hospitality here extends beyond many of the most renowned restaurants in the Twin Cities, with de la Rosa remembering on one visit which tamales I had tried before and which I hadn’t. “You’ll like the elote,” he said. “It’s sweet like dessert.”

Any restaurant, with the right front-of-house team in place, can make you feel at home in a dining room. It takes a real master of hospitality to make you feel like a restaurant is home when you walk in and out, eating standing up under the beating sun while fighting for your life to keep the bees from stinging you and listening to people order at Burger King.

★★★★

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My top 3 dishes: The whole menu, top to bottom, is bangers. Get a rotisserie chicken, a tamal of your choosing, and tortillas.

Where to sit: Your car, babe.

Good for: Lovers of tamales, families looking for a great interactive dinner, and meals after long days at the Mayo Clinic.

My one big tip: Bring salsa and tortillas home with 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!

The first berries of summer, I often eat with abandon. The balance in my bank account be damned, I will throw quart upon quart at the market into my bag, spending $40 on strawberries in one go. By the end of the season, I am usually more hesitant. When I bought these strawberries, I imagined I would split them over three meals.

Except, this year, so much has changed. On my birthday, I blew out candles. Then, the next day, my preventative breast MRI results came back abnormal. Then, I was diagnosed with cancer. Then, an surgeon amputated my breasts. Then, my oncologist filled me with poison. Then, the snow melted. Then, my dog died. Then, I fell in love. Then, my cat died. Then, I broke my own heart in search of a love that burns hot. Then, it seemed like maybe my cancer had spread to my armpit. Then, it hadn’t. Then, treatment ended. Then, the leaves changed. Then, my oldest dog, who I have loved for 15 years, died on my roof in the last gasp of summer.

And then, I was standing at my kitchen counter with an entire quart of strawberries before me and my house was so quiet without my two dogs begging me for the berries I shared with them over the course of their lives. It was always this way. If I was eating berries, they were eating berries.

There is a saying that goes something like, “Do not save your favorite dress for a special occasion,” as in, always wear your favorite dress. It is something I live by, wearing my most beautiful dresses on first dates with men who show up in sweatpants with very few questions to ask me and even less attention to give me, or out to dinners with friends on random Wednesdays.

I thought of this while holding the strawberries. Sure, yes, I could have saved them for tomorrow and the next day, except… they were here now before me on the counter. So I ate them all in one sitting, while listening to Sufjan Stevens’ Will Anybody Ever Love Me?, biting into the flesh that felt like it hardened slightly against the cold and savoring the sweetness on my tongue.

I ate them like I might eat the earliest strawberries of the season when not only are there more berries ahead, but there is more of everything ahead. On my counter were the season’s last tomatoes, too, and a rogue watermelon from a friend. They were the last of the summer’s harvest until we climb through the Persephone period into spring.

We are approaching fewer crops, less daylight, lower energy stores, fewer outings. The bears are right about many things. One of the things they are right about is that it is our duty to gorge on berries when they are here and then, mostly, to rest.

As I ate the berries, I thought so many disparate thoughts, like…

I would like one day like to be devoured by someone the way that I am devouring these strawberries, for someone to love me so completely, they want all of me right now.

I also contemplated the change in seasons, how climate change is stealing winter from Minnesota. October used to mean snow and now it means strawberries.

And then I wondered if people in California know how special moments like these are, as you feel the land inching closer to almost barren.

But I spent most of my time contemplating this question: will I still be here next year to taste this again? The odds are in my favor, yes, but it is not guaranteed, and if you asked me if you should put money on it, I would answer, “I wouldn’t.” As I ate the last of the season’s strawberries in my kitchen, I felt my mortality like a run through me the way I can feel the contrast dye in the MRI machines run through me, tasted it in my mouth the way you can taste saline when they flush your veins, let it take over my fingers and toes like neuropathy does when I’m five miles into a run.

One day, I will eat my last strawberry.

One day, you will eat your last strawberry.

It will be a moment like this one, standing in your kitchen, and you will likely not mark its occasion.

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The problem? Most (but not all!) of those new sandwich shops haven’t considered their vegetarian options with the same care as their meat-filled ones.

After eating 22 veggie sandwiches, I have five that I can recommend to you again and again and again. Here are the rules for this list: the sandwich has to be served on bread and not a bun, it has to include at least one vegetable (so no straight-up grilled cheese), and it has to be darn good.

This list includes a brie and veggie stunner, a skyway stop worth braving downtown parking for, an artichoke-packed grilled cheese at a coffee shop, a sandwich stacked with tofu and mustard greens, and a funky cheese plate-inspired sandwich.

If you’re wondering why there’s no veggie reuben on this list, it’s because I’m eating my way through 10 veggie reubens to crown my favorite for an upcoming piece, because veg-heads, that’s my personal favorite veggie sandwich. Same with the missing GOAT sandwich category: banh mi.

Why is this piece behind a paywall?

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

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I’m over the way that restaurants have taken the girl dinner trend and turned it into “a bad Caesar salad and lukewarm fries.” It feels… reductive.

I’m going to say what others have not: the girls deserve better.

Girl dinner started as a trend where you just sort of grabbed things from your fridge to make a meal. You might grab some salami, cheese that maybe had some mold on it, grapes that were withered, and cereal. It was low-effort meals for working girls on the go, without much time to make anything. It was a real and honest portrait of what it is like to eat at home alone. As a single woman, I loved it.

But now, “girl dinner” has been reduced to three things that feel more fitting for an episode of Portlandia than actually eating dinner: caesar, fries, and a martini. It’s often restaurants trying to appeal to single women with one menu item, versus appealing to us through their entire menu.

They aren’t catering to us. They’re pandering to us.

The portions are often teeny tiny. You leave starving. The flavor in the dressing is often missing entirely, like the men who wrote these menus think that the girls aren’t smart and snappy enough to understand what tastes good and what tastes bland. The goal is not to feed you a full meal. It’s to get you into the door to order drinks.

Personally, as someone who often uses the word girl instead of woman, I’m annoyed by the trend.

Every single time I think the trend is dying, it rears its ugly head, like some kind of Lernaean Hydra. I hate the trend so much that when I see a restaurant has a “girl dinner special,” I avoid them. I want restaurants to give the girls something hearty, something clever, something real. The samification of dining in the name of “girls” isn’t something that I find cute or worth indulging. It’s boring. And it’s bad marketing tactics for restaurants that can’t figure out how to cater to groups of single women.

So, please, join me in the “girl dinner” boycott. Here are five better girl dinners for you and your friends to eat while gossiping. Normally, pieces like this are behind a paywall, but I am considering this a public service, and releasing it for free. You’re welcome.

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Stewed lentils with a poached egg at Myriel ($17)

Most people save Myriel for their special occasion dinners. To do so would be to miss the point of the restaurant entirely. The most special place to sit at Myriel is the bar, specifically, at dusk. You can walk in and grab a seat most any night. I do this often, only having to wait a couple times over the past year. Once you’re settled, you can get a cocktail of your choosing (the Debra, if you’re new to drinking here and drink alcohol, or the dry sparkling tea if you’re not drinking), and order the stewed lentils with a poached egg. The poached egg always comes out exactlyyyy the way you want a poached egg to. Cutting into it over the lentils reveals a soft flow of yolk. The yolk, mixed with the small kale salad on top, takes this dish from a showcase of just lentils to a dinner befitting of any hot goss sesh with your best girl friend. If you want to add on dessert, it’s $14-15, and perfectly sized for a weeknight dessert split between two. If you thought you couldn’t get in and out of Myriel for under $40, this is the way. It’s my favorite relatively affordable meal at this four-star and James Beard award-winning restaurant.

Relish tray and popovers at Creekside Supper Club ($36)

When people tell me that girl dinner is a caesar and fries, I counter, “No, it’s a plate of RANDOM THINGS.” For that, the best place to go is Creekside Supper Club. This meal captures the original fridge goblin spirit of girl dinner with a chilled shrimp cocktail, cheese curds, smoked salmon dip, and toasted marble rye for the relish tray. Then, for your second course, you get a freshly baked popovers and absolutely crush them. Plus, going to a supper club with wood paneling on the walls to gossip about men you’re dating is absolutely elite. If you’re in Matthew’s section, you’re going to have an especially good time. A recent meal in his section was one of my favorite service experiences of all of 2026.

Chopped Caesar and Lasagna at Mucci’s ($44 for two)

CALM DOWN CAESAR LOVERS, I AM GIVING YOU A CAESAR OPTION. Mucci’s has had caesar on the menu far before the trend and it’s a banger of a caesar salad, with tons of dressing and a focaccia bread crumb crumble that means you get a crunch in every single bite. I mean loooook at it. This is one of my go-to caesar salads for when I actually want one that shows up with big flavor. There’s no gimmick here, just really good dressing, and it’s been on the menu for five years, before anyone ever even uttered the words girl dinner. This is your first course and your second course is splitting a lasagna with your friend. In the summer, it’s a veggie lasagna. In the winter, it’s a meat lasagna. I love this lasagna so much that when I had surgery, five different people brought me this lasagna (including, disclosure, chef/owner Tim Niver). Is there any meal more fitting for discussing the guy who ghosted you than stick-to-your-ribs lasagna? Me thinks not. If you must include a caesar salad in your plans, please include this one and only this one.

A goddamn steak, Jook Sing (Market Price)

Whoever said that girl dinner is a caesar and fries has never had a period. On your period, you want meat. You can get that (and great fries) at Jook Sing. This steak made my top steak list earlier this year and they’ve brought it back for Thursday nights. It’s on the menu at market price but has been $38 for the last few weeks. This is the best dinner to grab with the friend you’ve synced up with to discuss period cramps and perimenopause. Plus, the bar at Steady Pour, where Jook Sing is housed, has great drinks. I really like their False Fall, which is a corn and tomato soda that tastes just like summer. They have an alcoholic version, too, called Summers End, with vodka.

Foie, a salad, and soft serve at Aubergine (price varies)

If you’re looking for a girl dinner that reads fancy, my favorite way to enjoy that vibe is sitting at the bar at Aubergine with their NA negroni ($9) paired with whatever foie and salad are on offer. Prices vary for these two items, but you can expect to pay around $46-55, which makes it the most expensive option out of this whole list, but it sure does feel luxurious. Foie dishes range from torchons to pies, always paired with seasonal flavors that feel special and fun, where most foie dishes feel deathly serious. Salads lean bitter, with vinaigrettes that are power-packed with herbs. You can end your meal with their viral soft serve and sorbet swirled together and topped with some kind of crunchy morsel ($9). If I had a friend going through a break-up or telling me the tea about how a man treated her on a date, this is where I’d take her.

But I also do this because sometimes these lists by other publications read like, “Oops, this is everything I had the budget to eat from my publisher.” The deliciousness of items on these lists swings massively from, “YUM,” to, “That was… fine.” It often means that you have to still do your own research when you read these lists, digging through the top 10 to find what the best one or two might be. And that? That’s annoying!

As your indie critic, my goal is to find you a list of things I personally would go out of my way to eat again. I do the work, you reap the reward.

Enter, my Pumpkin Spice Era. I tried 15 Pumpkin Spice Lattes this year, because my favorite PSL was from Butter Bakery, which closed earlier this year. I overcaffeinated. I drank a lot of shitty syrupy drinks. I drank some okay drinks! I drank a couple good drinks. But I have MY FAVORITE to recommend to you, head and shoulders above them all.

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

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To Drink: Barley Iced Tea

Walk into Cafe Yoto at lunch and you almost forget that remote work is the norm. Tables are full of small groups sitting in suits alongside teenagers sipping strawberry matchas and snapping photos for Instagram. The dining room feels reminiscent of lunchtime downtown in 2019. “You have to get the curry broth,” the woman in front of me said to her friend. “It’s what I live for.” What do I live for? Barley iced tea. This drink is often called an acquired taste, like coffee, but the first time I had it, I became ravenous for it. Barley tea dates back over 1,000 years and is popular across Asia, with multiple different regional preparations. It’s nutty and toasty in flavor, with a slightly bitter finish and a subtle sweetness that comes not from sugar added to the tea, but the barley itself. I slammed one back at my table and went to grab a (free) refill. Regardless of whether you want barley iced tea or strawberry matcha, the teenagers are right to take selfies with those layered tea drinks: they’re good enough that they’re worthy of a solo shot on your ‘gram.

Udon: Curry Broth with Ribeye

When you go to a pizza place, you need to try the cheese before any other kind of pizza to know if it’s any good or not. So, too, for udon. You need to have just plain noodles in dashi to know if it is any good. The dashi broth here is clear enough to see straight through to the bottom of the bowl with only a hint of fish on the finish. It’s not overly salty and deep enough in flavor that the clearness is deceiving. It’s a lovely broth that lets the udon be the star of the dish, but the curry broth? Man, that’s where it’s at. The woman in line on my first visit was not wrong. The ribeye is my choice of protein for the curry broth, because it can stand up to all that richness flavor. It’s topped with green onions and wakame—and I ask for extra of both. This feels like a dish able to get you through a strenuous hike or a long winter snowstorm.

Donburi: Tofu

Not a soup person? Get out of here. Just kidding, I have an option for you, too, and it just so happens to be vegan. The first time I bit into the fried tofu at Cafe Yoto, I was hooked. It’s cloud-like, with a corn starch fry that a friend described as delicate. Topped with scallions and paired with cucumber pickles, carrots, and sesame, the tofu donburi is my favorite thing on the menu for hot summer days. Lest you think the toppings are the most special part of this dish, they’re not. Yumepirika rice from Hokkaido, Japan, is known for being slightly sticky, highly glossy, and ever-so-sweet. Yumepirika rice gets its signature qualities due to the cool temperatures of Hokkaido, which feels perfect for a restaurant in the heart of a city known for its biting winters.

Temaki: Mentaiko Scallop and Spicy Tuna

Cafe Yoto has the spirit of perfection chef/owner Yo Hasegawa honed during his time at Kado no Mise, with prices that make it accessible to all of us. Sushi lovers insist that everyone must go to Kado no Mise for dinner, but for people used to fried or saucy sushi rolls, all that raw fish can feel daunting. While Kado no Mise is for those who adore sushi in all its complexity, Cafe Yoto is for everyone. It would be a mistake not to indulge in the temaki at Cafe Yoto knowing chef’s history–and for people used to just getting Americanized sushi rolls, these two-bite stunners are a perfect introduction to fish-forward sushi before committing to a more costly meal.

The nori is noticeably crisper due to a plastic cover over the nori. It’s a bit tricky to get off, but my friends and I were able to get the hang of it after a couple of tries. The rice is perfectly sticky. The shrimp tempura is golden with an airy crunch. The mentaiko scallop balances the sweetness of raw scallop with the punch of briny and salty roe. The spicy sauce on the spicy tuna doesn’t hide the taste of the buttery tuna, but accentuates it. With every temaki, the neta is the star, not the sauce. I like to think these two bite stunners can serve as a step between sushi rolls and nigiri for those looking to dip their toe into the water.

I have been standing in line at Sohn for 20 minutes. Behind me, there is a duo of tech bros yapping on and on and on and on about AI. In front of me, there is a group of Gen Z women comparing bag charms. In front of them, a couple fights. About what? I am not sure.

My headphones died on the flight I came straight from. The sun beats down on me. I have a hot flash. I have not eaten in over 8 hours, and because of the Portola Music Festival, I had to walk a half mile to get here. I am determined. I am standing my ground in the line. I want the Galbi patty melt. I want the honeydew melon matcha. Every properly jade-colored drink that comes out beckons to me. It says, “Stay.” Every time the line moves forward, I am buoyed.

This is my first stop in San Francisco, for a work trip unrelated to my writing. I have so little time to eat the food I want to while I am here. If I leave the line, I do not have any space in my schedule to come back, and besides, anywhere else I tried to go would be so much longer of a wait if you factored in driving.

After 34 minutes, I am seated at a giant circular communal table filled with other solo women diners. They all seemingly wear floral perfumes. They are all deeply entangled in some kind of work on their laptops. Four of the five carry Chanel bags. They all drink matchas. I am envious (of the matcha, not the Chanel) and ravenous. I down an entire liter of water and wait. Then. It comes. A patty melt served on a sesame seed croissant, stuffed with kimchi slaw. I am in, objectively, the worst-lit spot in the restaurant, so forgive the photo. I devour it. As I eat, slaw and seeds tumble to the plate. I make a mess in front of these chic women, feeling decidedly Midwestern. The matcha? Remarkable. Each sip starts out with a sweet honeydew flavor and ends with a strong, neutral matcha finish.

Another food writer seems to think this sandwich could be better, that maybe it doesn’t live up to its promise. I disagree with her. I would wait in line again for this meal, straight off a plane, starving.

Sunday, 3:30pm

A Waymo is stuck in an intersection, diagonal. Traffic is stopped on one of San Francisco’s countless hills. People behind me honk, not realizing they are honking at no one. The driver in front of me raises her hands. She realizes if we are going anywhere, we need to go backwards. She tells every car, “Back up.” They start to, reversing down a hill into oncoming traffic. Is this progress? Is this the future? Are the children destined to scream at robots who refuse to move? My GPS says I was seven minutes away from my hotel. It has said this for over 30 minutes.

My brain cannot tell the difference between being chased by a bear and being in stopped traffic because of a Waymo.

I try to breathe. To focus on something else.

I look into the window of a Chinese restaurant. At a restaurant sat at the top of the hill, there is a baby sitting on the table amongst overflowing dishes of meat. Through the window, I can only see the teeth of other guests at the table reflecting in the light of the sun. It looks like the baby is the only person at a table occupied by headless smiles. The baby is delighted, flapping their arms. Imagine being surrounded by you-sized bowls of food, kiddie pool-sized platters of delights, oblivious to the existence of Waymos.

Sunday, 4:15

There is a roach in my hotel room, clinging to the curtains. When I call the front desk, the man who answers the phone is not surprised by the roach, but he is surprised that I don’t ask to change rooms. “If they are on my curtains in daylight, they are everywhere,” I say. For a moment, he is silent, and then he says, “That is the way of roaches.” A roach, somewhat remarkably, can symbolize the coming of good fortune. I name the roach Harold. I leave the room so housekeeping can kill him.

Sunday, 5:45pm

Sometimes, I think about going to the viral Minneapolis Buckthorn removal singles event, but I know it would be a lie to go. I can barely keep up with my own tiny yard. Most things I plant die, including the Peony I planted with my late dog’s ashes. I cared so much about that plant. I tried so hard to keep it alive. In my hands, the most important thing I have ever planted died. To try to meet someone in any way that might imply capacity for yard work feels like a farce. All this to say, I know nothing about plants.

On my way to a restaurant, I see a tree that is singed with the most beautiful red tinge to it. I have never seen this type of tree before. I don’t know what kind of tree it is. I briefly think about sending the photograph to friends of mine who have the app where you can identify what a specific tree is. But then I realize I would just rather not know. (Don’t tell me.)

It is enough to look at something and know that it is beautiful. We once lived in a world where not everything could be immediately known.

Sunday, 6:30pm

At Flour + Water, there is exactly one seat available in the whole restaurant, in between groups of people. It is fated, waiting for me. This is the joy of a solo diner. Sometimes, you get the actual last seat.

When I am seated, my heart rate plummets. The stress of the road disappears in the familiar hum of the restaurant. I think I hate San Francisco. I hate the Waymos and the tech bros and the hills and the multiple festivals I drove by and the roaches. It doesn’t matter. In a restaurant, you could be anywhere. They are international, universal places to exhale.

I am so close to other guests at the table that I can see the man next to me using ChatGPT to make his ordering decisions for him. I want to stop him. In my town, I would have stopped him. I want to ask him if he knows what he loves anymore. He keeps accidentally touching me. There is an intimacy in these communal tables that breaks past the barrier of him scrolling through Slack on his phone. I want to lean over to him again, to say, “Look. The woman you love is right in front of you.” At one point, during dinner, he FaceTimes his mother. Her voice blasts through the communal table like a tinny ghost.

I do not let her voice, and his gauche restaurant rudeness, steal the night from me. I order the pasta tasting menu. I eat my meal with my phone mostly down, save for photos and a few short texts to a man. I brought a book, but I don’t read it. I have wanted to eat here for so long. I just want to be present. I do not take notes. No one knows my name, or my face, or my work. I do not think about how to describe these dishes to you. I spend my night absorbed in flavor and texture and butter and tomato water, in my own head, anonymous, like I used to spend my nights before this column.

This is where I feel most alive, most myself: eating alone on the road. When my server asks me how my meal was, I do not answer directly. I say, “I am so happy.” It is, so far, the best meal of my year. At the end of the night, I ask something I never ask. I ask for the menu. I know in a restaurant like this, even though I am anonymous, they will say, “Of course, yes.”

Sunday, 8:00pm

At night, in my hotel room, I consider leaving the light on to deter the roaches before I remember that I saw one in daylight. I lay in bed with the soft glow of a television and Guy Fieri on the television, AC blasting at 65. For so long, I have dreamed of coming to San Francisco. I planned two trips I had to cancel, both because I became sick, like my body was warning me away.

Now that I am here, I fear that it is so far removed from the rest of the world that it might as well be its own country. Do the three women who sat to my right at dinner know that most of us go our entire days without talking about AI? Does the man at the hotel bar in Meta glasses know that in my hometown, we would boo you if we discovered you were wearing them? Do the locals realize that I have never seen an AI billboard, not once, not even ever? Do they know that in my town, a bill is going up to our city council that might mandate real, live drivers in Waymos? Does anyone here, anyone at all, dream of a less technocapitalist world?

I am thinking of home, not Minneapolis, but the greater expanse of Minnesota. So often, people talk of the rural heartland as if, maybe, it is behind. Am I getting older in the way I used to resent in my mother, where I cannot see “progress” as progress, the kind of getting older that means you wish the way things once were, with no reason at all? Is my hesitation towards “progress” something to be questioned, to be fought? I find myself thinking of Grand Marais, of Winona, of St. Cloud. I cannot help it. I hope their roads never see a Waymo.

Monday, 3:00am

Before chemo, I had not dreamed in close to a decade. My dreams were stolen by bad sleep. During chemo, I slept through the night for the first time in close to a decade. With it came dreams, mostly nightmares. The sleep has continued. I feel rested for the first time in my life. The nightmares have continued, too.

It is not true that you can’t die in your dreams. I have died in my nightmares so many times. In the middle of the night I wake up drenched in sweat. I am unsure if this is because of a nightmare I had or because of medical menopause. In my dream, the cancer has come back, and I am dying. The doctor says, “You will not make it to 35.” I say, “That is a bummer.” In my dream, I am at peace with this. I ask myself if I am at peace with this in the waking world too. I am.

When I was diagnosed with cancer and thought I might die, I wondered to myself if I regretted not traveling the world. I did not. I was born in the heartland, lived in the heartland, will die in the heartland, and will be buried in a cemetery plot one block from my house—in the heartland.

I do not go back to sleep. It is 5:00am in the heartland, early enough for me to start my day. I feel connected to the people in my home as I tinker in the morning. While it is dark here in San Francisco, the sun has just risen over the chain of lakes.

Monday, 6:00am

Earlier in the week, I asked a friend where she goes to eat before running in Golden Gate Park at dawn. She hesitated. “It’s not like the best,” she said. This is the mistake people often make. They make recommendations based on what they think they should tell a critic, that I am always seeking the best, when what I really want is to eat my way through your storyline. Life happens at restaurants, and sometimes, I want to step into a restaurant simply because it is a part of your life. “You go there like three times a week,” I said to her. “You love it.”

She hesitantly told me, “Benny’s.” She meant Uncle Benny’s Bagel and Donut. It opens at 3:00am. Then she apologized, “They aren’t good bagels,” she said. “They just open early.”

Uncle Benny’s is my kind of place. At 6:00am, techno blasts through the speakers, leaking out into the street. There’s a US pride section near where you pick up your order and Chinese lanterns hanging from the ceiling. The food options are displayed in pictures, like at many Asian restaurants. There is a gurgling fountain and a little corner of houseplants.

I get my standard Bagel order from when I’m in New York City: plain bagel with sun-dried tomato cream cheese. I add a Vietnamese iced coffee. The bagel, which is not whole wheat, has the texture of a whole wheat bagel. It is over-baked. It is dry. Is it a bad bagel? Yes. It does not matter. It is the first place I walk into that feels like it has a little bit of soul. I am sure these places are all over San Francisco. I am sure that underneath the technocapitalism, life happens here. Cardboard-esque bagel be damned, I would go back.

Monday, 7:00am

I run in Golden Gate Park with my friend who loves Benny’s. Everyone told me to run here, and now that I am here, I am perplexed. I run on sand that feels like it was artificially poured onto the trails. It is soft and puffy, and moves around on my feet. “It feels like running in the country, doesn’t it?” she said to me. “It’s like you’re not in the city at all.”

I think of a trail I ran on the week before, actually in the country, in the prairie, how I saw no one for miles and miles and miles. A bird flew over me, following my path, keeping pace with me. I saw deer, chipmunks, rabbits. Here, even though I am “in nature,” I never lose sight of cars. I tell her what I used to tell people who said this about Central Park. I say, “Not really.” If we believe that everything, even wilderness, can be found in the city, we have lost touch with the wider world. I ask, “When is the last time you went to the country?” She cannot remember.

I wonder if this is why everyone here has founded an AI company, with data centers they aim to build in towns far enough away that they cannot hear the screaming of the machines. Do they think about adding these data centers without any hesitation because they do not have enough lived experience with wide-open spaces to know how a piercing screech might ruin real wilderness? Do they not realize there are places you can go and lie in a field and hear nothing but the rustling of leaves?

Monday, 8:00am

We finish our run and walk through a neighborhood nearby. I tell her that I think I hate San Francisco. “But isn’t it beautiful, at least,” she asks me. “Like, look at the gates.” My gaze shifts from her face to just over her shoulder. I stare at all of the tall gates on the doors of standalone houses. They are a part of San Francisco’s architectural history. They guard the city’s signature “tunnel entrances,” where stairs are sheltered from the elements with a roof, with houses built on top of doorways. The gates are mapped on so many blogs and art projects. They are beautiful, yes. They are beautiful, hostile architecture.

I tell her, “Everything that is beautiful here is like… the uncanny valley. You see these gates as a part of your city’s architectural history. As a visitor, I see these gates for what they are. They’re security gates, babe. They are designed to keep homeless people from sleeping on covered doorsteps in the rain.”

Monday, 8:30am

A man from San Francisco, attempting to flirt with me in line at a coffee shop, makes fun of me. He says, “Small town girly goes to the city.” Instantly, any chance he had of going on a date with me dissipates into the air like mist. “Oh, ew,” I say, reflexively. Then, “Your coastal elitism is showing.” I am unsure why he thinks that being from the heartland means from a small town. “Maybe it is culture shock,” he tells me, after I correct him. I only think later of a response worthy of the statement: “May a culture like this never not shock me.”

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But when it comes down to it, I don’t actually hate dating. I kind of… like it.

Most of my dates are actually fun now, but they weren’t when I first started dating after the end of my engagement.

I have curated these good dates with time-honed skills like making my profile absolutely bulletproof for people who are not seriously looking for love. I’ve kept them away with the equivalent of FUCK BOY/GIRL/PERSON DEET TM with…

Prompts like:

Photos with:

No make-up and zero sex appeal.

And phrases like:

Slow-burn and secure attachment in my profile.

I block, delete, and unmatch people who display bad or borderline bad behavior. And I normally tell people before we meet that I have no breasts, which ends up with many people (of all genders, mind you) unmatching me. And… I do not hate this. I love it. It’s a Time Waster Garbage Chute where all the people who would waste my time are ground up and put down the drain.

So, now, I end up on dates with mostly nice people who also have their own horror stories and battle scars and yearning. The problem is that most of those dates are not going to end with marriage because two lovely people aren’t always meant to be together.

And somehow, through all the lovely people you meet who are not your person, you just have to keep hoping.

Maybe someone else would tell you not to take dating advice from a woman who has been single for so damn long, but I think that you shouldn’t take dating advice from people who are married or partnered, because babe, they do not know what kind of war zone it is like out here right now.

They don’t understand that asking for more than a coffee date is a radical act. They don’t know what it’s like to realize you are number two on a woman’s roster and that she thinks you should feel good about that!!!!! They don’t know what it’s like to cry in your car on the way home from a 10th date with someone where you thought could maybe they could be your person and they told you that you were so close, but someone was just a hair in front of you, a hair more loved than you, one up on the roster.

Partnered people don’t know how the apps have gotten worse since they got off of them and how the older you get, the more divorcees you meet, and the more bitterness gets poured onto the battlefield like oil for you to slip on while you’re shouting, “I’m not the person who divorced you!!! I’m not the woman who broke your heart!!!!!!!!”

Somehow, after all this time, I still have hope for love, and I think that makes me a good person to ask for dating advice.

3.5 years in, I am not bitter, somehow. I don’t know what god added into the potion bottle that got poured into my soul to make me feel like after hundreds of first dates, I will still meet the love of my life, but I somehow still have hope! Maybe my future spouse is getting divorced or hasn’t moved here yet, or maybe they’re also going on bad date after bad date alongside me. Who knows? But are they out there? I know they are. My soul card is “The Lovers.” If there’s fate, it’s fated. And if it’s not fated, well, I still believe it’s coming for me.

And so, my first piece of advice? Babe, you aren’t going to fall in love with someone on that date if you do not have hope.

“Soulmates” aren’t real, but hope sure is. And I think that any good relationship starts with meeting someone at a restaurant, coffee shop, or bar full of hope. And on the days you have no hope, you have to call in back-up hope. For me, that back-up hope is a playlist of love songs that I listen to before every first date.

A couple weeks ago, I turned on that playlist while I showered at 6:00am to get ready for an 8:00am date with a single dad in his late twenties. When he told me the name of his daughter, I couldn’t help but laugh, because he named her after something in the sky–and the last man I dated who had a daughter named his after a constellation. Life is funny like that. Sometimes, themes boomerang back around.

I worked at 10:00am and this 8:00am date was the only 90-minute window we had that overlapped all week, because when he didn’t have his daughter, he worked 10-12 hour days.

Earlier in the week, we stayed up all night on the phone, talking to each other about art. He was shocked, like truly stunned, when I told him I hadn’t dated “a creative” since my early twenties. That was his phrase. A creative. When I told him that not only did I not date creatives but that no person I dated in the last 3.5 years regularly read my writing, I could hear the hurt in his voice when he asked, “Why not?” For him, creativity was something he wanted to be witnessed. For me, that wasn’t a requirement. I spill my guts on the internet for you, whoever you are, and the things I share with my friends and people I love are a different level of depth, more jagged.

“How can someone know you if they do not read you?” he asked.

I didn’t know how to tell him that so many people who read my work think they know me and that sometimes the greatest intimacies I have with people are with people who don’t read my work every week, because I get to share things like you might with a friend, not like a writer trying to curate a feeling. But I also felt this sensation inside of me, a blooming inside of me, that said, “If this man falls in love with you, he will also fall in love with your work.” And oh my god that is so romantic.

A couple of days later, I was blow-drying my hair in the bathroom, feeling really excited for the date. I could lie to you and tell you that I never feel excited for first dates. I think I’m supposed to lie to you and tell you this, to not admit that I love dating. But I almost always feel excited for first dates. It has never been lost on me that the first date is the moment that I might be meeting my spouse, and I try to pump myself up to feel accordingly. After 3.5 years mostly single, I am not bitter. I do not withhold. I do not lean away from love. I am not tired of dating. I am simply in the sea of modern dating, on a raft, afloat, actively looking for another person, and then, shore.

The single dad showed up in a Canadian tuxedo and a purple floral shirt, with a bouquet of yellow flowers to match the yellow dress I told him I was wearing. Even though I have this prompt on my profile about bringing flowers, most people don’t bring flowers, and those that do are not fathers meeting me at 8:00am.

I decided in this moment that I would never take excuses from someone for not bringing me flowers ever again. If he can bring me flowers at 8:00am, you sure can, whoever the hell you are, at 6:00pm.

I was so touched by this gesture that I wanted to ignore the little knot inside of me that said, “This is a lovely man, and he is promised by the gods to someone else.” But the reality is, he was. Someone else will love him. And I know I can’t. We talked with less gusto than on the phone, interview style, like you do when there’s less chemistry than you hope there is. And at the end of the date, we both knew, “You’re not my person.” The chemistry wasn’t there. Part of love is wanting to make out with someone at 9:30 in the morning, and neither of us wanted that.

So, instead of kissing before noon, I went to work, and he went to go buy a book at a bookstore. On my way home, I turned on my first date playlist. On the five block walk home, I danced a little at the stop signs to this highly curated list of songs, and when I got home, I turned on my computer and got to work while listening to the playlist again, not deflated, but full of hope for another date I had that following week.

I’m writing this from a coffee shop a few days later, before that first date* at a new tapas restaurant with another man. So, right now, I’m writing this at The Briar, listening to my playlist, and I don’t know, maybe this date will be disaster, or maybe he will be the love of my life. The playlist helps me get ready for a date and get pumped up, and maybe it might help you, too?

So, here’s my first date playlist. You should have one. If not this one, another one. Be warned: there are country songs on this, but if the hip bands wanted to be included on my playlist, they should write better love songs.

*PS: that date, there was enough chemistry that I took him to Aubergine for dessert after dinner, and he brought dahlias and zinnias that matched the colors of photos I showed him of my house, because romance isn’t dead, and hope springs eternal, and dating is fun.

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One of the things I’ve had to remind myself as a restaurant critic is that while many of my colleagues and the people who follow me closely know the hacks or the best things to order at certain restaurants, many people follow me because they don’t and they want a guide.

So while Al’s is an institution, I’ve run into enough people who have been too intimidated by the line to go that I feel like it’s still worth telling you what I know! There’s no gatekeeping at BBB, no matter how iconic the restaurant.

When to go and what to bring

First things first, bring cash or do like me and bring your checkbook! Do I always forget my checkbook in the car? Sure do. I end up having to go back and get it, but I leave it in there for one reason and one reason only: paying by check at Al’s.

Second things second, you’re not going to go on a weekend. The lines are insane, the feeling of being rushed is palpable, you’re crushed like a sardine, and enough people go there on a weekend anyway that they don’t need your business then. If you really want to support this Dinkytown institution, you should fill a seat on a weekday.

One time when I said this to a friend, her response was, “Kirstie, I work a 9-to-5.” And my response to that is that Al’s opens at 6 AM. That gives you three luxurious hours to go and get breakfast before you have to go to work. You’re normally going to find me at Al’s on a Thursday. Thursdays are the days that I typically go out and eat breakfast for BBB, so I wind up here a lot. And besides, if you, like me, hate paying for parking, going at seven in the morning means that parking is free and there’s lots of it. Plus, at 7am on a Thursday, I’ve never, ever, ever, ever, ever (I could go on) had to wait.

Smoked cheddar and ham (optional) omelette

I was ordering a cheddar and ham omelette for a long time when one day, Mo who works at Al’s told me it’s better with smoked cheddar. They were right, and now that’s what I order. These omelettes are set apart from other diners because they’re crisped up and lacy on the outside, light and puffy on the inside. You can get any of the seemingly endless choices of hot sauce (and chili crisp!) to go with it, but you should always ask for their housemade hot sauce. It’s the best in the game.

Waffle

CONTROVERSIAL ORDER ALERT: I get the waffles at Al’s, not the blueberry pancakes. The waffles at Al’s are nice and puffy, not sharp and crispy like a Belgian. I love these pancakes for lazy Thursday mornings where I want a sweet treat and I get them straight up mostly, but sometimes Suzette style, with sour cream and strawberries. I order it with a half order of maple syrup. It’ll cover the normal amount of syrup needed for two people—or one person and one coffee. If you want to order what everyone else is ordering, get the blueberry pancakes. They’re great! But this is my order and my order is waffles.

Hashbrowns

Ordering hashbrowns at Our Kitchen is required (my go-to order there is forthcoming). Ordering them at Al’s depends on how hungry I am. They’re house shredded and extra thin and crispy. They’re $5 and you can get them straight up or with cheese for an additional buck fifty.

Coffee

My hack for all diner coffee, no matter what diner I’m going to, is to order real maple syrup if they have it, and I ask the syrup to come out with my coffee, not my meal. Often, they give you more maple syrup than you need for your waffles or pancakes, and this is true with a half order of syrup at Al’s. So ask for the syrup to come with your coffee and pour in some of that maple syrup in order to sweeten up that diner coffee.

When to leave

If there’s a line, leave when you’re done eating. Don’t linger when you see a line of people out the door. If there are empty seats next to you, though, you can take a moment to breathe, which is why I personally go on a weekday. It’s the best time to experience Al’s.

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The “tell” is in the dessert menu’s construction. It’s full of things that I call “chef desserts,” often easily executable without much vision or inspiration. Take, for example, the rise in panna cotta. It feels directly correlated to the decline in restaurants hiring pastry chefs as margins grow thinner and thinner every year. Panna cotta, and its cousins, are not too hard to execute. It requires very little skill.

Or, there’s ice cream, either made in-house or not. And it’s often better that it isn’t made in-house, because if it is made in-house, it melts far too fast or bites too hard, with no one in the kitchen really understanding how to get the consistency just right.

And then, on top of those two things, there’s often one dessert item that is baked. It might be a cookie that doesn’t have the right texture, or it might be a cake with a really tight crumb. From time to time, chef/owners who don’t have pastry chefs get creative in ways that might be able to fool casual observers, but that baffle me. Maybe a cinnamon roll is objectively underbaked. Maybe the layers on a multi-layered cake are so different in size that it is obvious they were made by untrained hands. Or maybe they try to get “weird” and do something like donuts with overly sticky glaze.

When a restaurant doesn’t have a pastry chef, I usually feel a deep sense of sadness and regret ordering dessert. In these restaurants, you exit your meal with the worst bite of the night. It is often cloyingly sweet and texturally off in ways that a layperson might not be able to describe, but can feel as they’re chewing it. What’s the point of even having dessert at all if you aren’t going to do it right?

Restaurant Aubergine, a French restaurant owned by industry vets and husband-and-wife team Bjorn and Meg Jacobse, opened in April in St. Paul. Restaurant Aubergine doesn’t have a pastry chef, and Restaurant Aubergine doesn’t have these problems.

The menu reads like a French dinner concept that might be opened by a pastry chef with the chops of Sarah Botcher (Black Walnut Bakery): walleye pithivier, pâte en croûte, beet tarte tatin, maple éclair.

I am hard on restaurants that don’t have pastry chefs, because I love pastry chefs. I am hard on restaurants that don’t have pastry chefs because I love pastry, and I feel like in many corners of the restaurant world, pastry has been thrown to the side for savory dishes in ways that don’t make a full meal experience as beautiful as it could be.

So I was actively looking for errors in the pastry at Aubergine, not because I am a hater, but because that’s the job of a critic. I was looking for poorly laminated puff pastry, or a tight crumb on the bread, or something that was burnt. I was looking to see if the pastry flaked in the way that it should.

I was looking for hands deft enough to warrant not having a pastry chef; I found them.

The pastry on the walleye pithivier had hand-carved scales that Bjorn carved on his knees in the walk-in, because the basement prep space was too hot in the summer to not ruin the lamination. The pastry held its own when submerged in beurre blanc and shattered at the touch of a knife. The short crust style on the pâte en croûte (think charcuterie encapsulated in bread) stood on its own against the house-ground summer sausage, brandied cherries, and pistachio.

I deconstructed each dessert that consisted of choux. I was looking for the signature hollow center of the choux pastry across multiple dishes, and I always found it. I set soft serve on the table and set a timer to see how long it took to melt, and my answer was “long enough that someone probably used a Brix refractometer.”

Even the one error I could technically point out in the pastry, where the pie crust on my foie pie was just a little bit dry, I didn’t care about. The fat of foie gras carried it and balanced it. All things considered, the error was minor.

This type of French cooking, where pastry is the star on the savory menu, is rare in Minnesota, but it feels decidedly like us.

Pastry, meat, and starch: what’s more Minnesotan than that? I think Aubergine has executed Minnesotan French food, effortlessly. When I talked to Bjorn about what kind of food he was trying to do, he didn’t give me a polemic about his restaurant. While most chefs wax on and on about their thesis and their vision, he is, in his words, “Just trying to cook good food.” During my interview with him, I kept hearing the same word over and over. When I asked after a vinaigrette or a dish, he kept saying, “Simple.” A simple vinaigrette. A simple pastry. A simple house-ground meat. But what sets Aubergine apart is construction, which is anything but simple.

Pastry is signature, but there’s also a signature plating at Aubergine. Dishes are often tall, challenging the standard laws of gravity in kitchens. Plates are exceptionally neat. More than once, I saw Bjorn rearranging the fries on the burger plates to make them into a prettier stack or watched as chefs balanced a bunch of those fries against the burger at a specific angle. Dedication to plating is commonplace in restaurants like this. Dedication to plating fries is a rarity.

Still, there are flourishes of rustic touches against all that precision that make Aubergine feel approachable. On multiple dishes, there’s an entire hunk of cheese. Many dishes are undersauced (as in, the sauce is under the food, not as in, poorly sauced) with vinaigrettes, and these are often visually stunning, like a sungold vinaigrette underneath a trout dish that tasted like someone blitzed the best gazpacho up and thinned it out. When our bartender asked us if we wanted a piece of buckwheat sourdough to go with it, the only correct answer was, “Of course.” Dragging the bread through the bottom of the plate reminded me of the best moments of childhood where I used to dip the edges of my crusty grilled cheese into the bottom of a soup bowl, except this was far tastier and far more refined than the Campbell’s I grew up with. This is my favorite dish I had at Aubergine and my favorite tomato dish of the season.

The New York strip is a macro version of this plating: topped with a giant hunk of Stilton, covered in a Tetris of tomato, drenched in a beef fat vinaigrette, it is both visually stunning and far better than steaks at most steakhouses.

So much of eating at Aubergine is deconstructing. It’s tactile. Like how after you play with Legos, the best part is knocking them down. These constructions are anything but simple. They require execution with the same precision night after night. Where most kitchens can’t keep up with that level of perfection, somehow, Restaurant Aubergine does.

One of the most stunning dishes on the menu is a beet tarte tatin.

Normally a flatly constructed dish, this tarte tatin here came out with a homemade sphere of puff pastry that was as big as a cantaloupe. Smashing into it with a fork felt like smashing into a dinosaur egg. The burnt honey vinaigrette at the bottom was speckled with turnip greens, likely leftover from the turnip dish that had just fallen off the menu. On top was a whole hunk of Shepherd’s Way cheese and lightly dressed frisée. This dish played with size, sure, but it also played with flavors like the bitterness of the turnip greens against the brightness of the frisée and the earthiness of the beets, all punctuated with butter. This dish felt otherworldly and so playful, with just one tiny flaw: I wanted more of those mild badger flame beets to add depth to all that delicate puff pastry. There were so few that not every bite was able to include a beet.

Over five visits, I consumed more than 20 dishes, ranging from baked oysters to multiple variations of their appetizer sampler to slabs of meat. Only two of them disappointed me.

The first was a quail dish with creamed corn, lardon, and chanterelles. I ordered this dish when my friends and I ate the whole menu top to bottom and it was the only dish that didn’t “fit.” It felt out of place with the more subdued flavors, reminding us of the southern restaurant, Revival, which used to sit in that space, and not the French one in its place, though all of us loved that it was served feet on. The second was a walleye set where the char was too bitter to hold up against the chicories underneath it. The dish was bitter all the way through, too bitter for the soft flesh of the fish, it needed a hit of acid to save it.

It’s a shame about the bitterness in that dish, because it’s one of the flavors I think Bjorn does best. All the salads I had leaned into a bitterness that requires deep trust of your guests. There was a market greens salad with peppercorn vinaigrette that I described, affectionately, as challenging. It was a greens-lover’s greens salad, where the kitchen leaned into the bitterness and not away from it. As a lover of green juice with no fruit, not even lemon or lime, it was one of my favorite bites on the menu. Similarly, the duck confit “lyonnaise” had a sharp sherry vinaigrette that cut through the bitterness of the greens, and the duck confit had a skin so crispy, I wanted a whole bowl of skins to munch on. On the opposite end of a salad, the pork chop was covered in aggressively seared spring onions and garlic scapes, where the bitterness was a tool to cut through the fat.

The use of bitterness across the menu gives relief to a menu constructed around glutinous breads, meat, and butter. It makes the menu feel balanced. The bitterness is almost always a delight. Do not skip the bitter dish on the menu.

While I only found two dishes with large faults at Aubergine, I can’t say the same for service. Service at Aubergine is a bit of a mixed bag, with a hands-off style that is rare in high-end restaurants in Minnesota. I get what Aubergine is trying to do with their service model. They are trying to let you have dinner, uninterrupted, similar to many restaurants in New York. In New York, I often felt like I was chasing down servers to get my check compared to Minnesota, but that’s what New Yorkers want, and I got used to it when I lived there. Minnesota service is so hands-on that New Yorkers think our service model is rude, overbearing, and intrusive. Aubergine is leaning into a less curated service experience, but to have that kind of service in a town that isn’t used to it requires a deftness (and directness) that isn’t quite executed at Aubergine.

Most of the time, in the dining room, dishes were dropped with no discussion of where the ingredients came from, which isn’t what I would expect from a restaurant that has such a laser-sharp focus on sourcing. Servers often couldn’t answer my questions about which farms the meat or vegetables came from, or about basic things like dressing ingredients in a dish, without checking in the kitchen. At restaurants of similar caliber across the Twin Cities, servers can. Here’s an example of what I felt was missing. When I ordered a maple éclair at a table, this was the description I got, word for word when it was brought to me: “This is a maple éclair with chocolate ganache and black walnut.” Then, my server was gone.

But at the bar? It’s an entirely different universe. My bartender described the same dish like this: “This dish starts with maple sugar that is whipped into pastry cream. Chef bakes black walnuts into the choux pastry and places them on top. Then it’s topped with maple syrup from Québec, which is a bit more woodsy and thinner than what you find here, so it has a great mouthfeel. And there’s chocolate on top, but not so much that it overpowers that maple.”

One description is factual. Another is experiential. This dish is gorgeous, swimming in a lake of maple syrup, and the description of woodsy means you’re hunting for that flavor in what you are eating, engaging with subtleties of flavor and texture in a way you wouldn’t with just a basic description. Descriptions like this were rare at tables, but plentiful at the bar. My warmest and most personal interactions were at the bar, with both bartenders providing higher-quality service than I received at tables, which is rare in a restaurant at this price point. At the bar, I received detail after detail about drinks, the farms, the ingredients, the creative direction of Aubergine, and how dishes were brought from concept into the kitchen. These details were often stunning, and they informed a good amount of my review.

But if you sit at a table, you’re missing that. And so my recommendation, for more than one reason, is: sit at the bar.

In its short tenure, St. Paul’s new French restaurant, Restaurant Aubergine, has two dishes that have gone viral. The first is a burger, with a limited run of eight per night, and is only available at the bar. The second is a swirled short serve that has made the influencer rounds as well as being mentioned by seemingly every single food writer in town. “We don’t want to be a burger restaurant,” Bjorn said when I asked him why there was a limited run. His hopes? That the burger brings people in who might not normally consider going into a restaurant like his.

Aubergine’s burger is fat, which is how I like my burgers, and mine came out at the top edge of rare with an inside that was the color of red, red roses. The meat is ground in-house: two parts chuck, one part brisket, coming from Cannon Valley Ranch outside of Rochester. The bun is made in-house, like everything else on the burger, except the camembert fermier. There’s house-cured bacon, house-made pickles, fries that would be the envy of any burger joint, and charred garlic mayo served in a little paper cup–the same kind of paper cup you might find at McDonald’s. It’s not on the menu, but in the same way that speakeasies are often not all that well hidden, it’s not a secret. Most of the reason for it is that it is photogenic, destined to go viral. When I joked with Bjorn about how much I loved the cup for the mayo, he said, “I like to sneak those cups into other dishes in the dining room, too. It’s just food. It’s meant to be fun.” This is something I felt intimately at Aubergine.

While many chefs I talk to wax on and on and on about the food as something more than food (a mission, a story, a thesis), Bjorn really just wants to cook for you. I left my call with him feeling a humility that is rare.

Like the viral burger, the viral soft serve at Aubergine is exceptionally pretty, with two-tone swirled peaks and bits of crunchy morsels gripping the edges. Similar to many dishes at Aubergine, its recognizability comes from its signature shape. Flavors of that soft serve and sorbet rotate like sorrel and strawberry or sweet cream and white peach.

These viral dishes are indeed both beautiful and delicious. An early dinner at Aubergine with this burger and soft serve is a great way to spend a Friday. I wouldn’t fault you for it.

I was, in fact, intending to come one night and order the burger, not for a review visit but just because. Still, I think these dishes have gone viral because they are the most familiar dishes that Aubergine has on offer, not because they are the dishes that define the restaurant or the dishes that are most special. Like that night I intended to get the burger, I sat at the bar next to a man who is a regular and asked my bartender, “What do you think about the foie pie?” The man next to me, as good of a guide as you can get, pointed at his empty plate, with a red stain of plum juice, and said, “Get this, not the burger.”

The hype cycle is frustrating to me for a reason. If all you see are these two viral dishes, you’ll order them and miss out on the dreamiest stretches of Aubergine: the decidedly, unapologetically French.

The man didn’t have to press me too hard to get me to order the foie. On every visit, I ordered foie with abandon. Every time I came, the set had changed. As I continue to go to Aubergine post-review, I will continue this tradition. There was the foie pie, where foie gras was whipped with egg and cream and topped with a black cherry gelée so shiny, you can see your face reflected in it like lake water at night. It’s garnished with a good helping of sea salt, set in a not-too-buttery crust, and plums and prunes are placed on the side for you to run slices of foie custard through. When Bjorn came up to check in about my meal at the end of it, I told him what I want to tell you: most of the foie dishes around the Twin Cities feel so deathly serious, most are borderline boring, and his feel playful, like ones you might find in Michelin-starred restaurants in Chicago.

On a visit where my friends and I ordered the entire menu top to bottom, I also had a foie gras torchon, served atop a bed of tomato, onion, and raspberry. Is it a foie dish? Sure. But it was also the first days of tomatoes and raspberries, so my group felt like the foie was an accent to the brightness of fruits. Each one of my three friends, when taking a bite, exclaimed something. “Oh my god, what?” said one. “Fuck,” said another. “Bro,” said the last one. We took big bites and slathered the foie on brioche. Foie is a dish that’s hard to make feel fresh not like new but like bright. And this set did.

Eating at Aubergine feels like stepping into a restaurant where, even early on, there is a clear identity.

You can feel Bjorn in every single dish, with a unique style unlike any other restaurant in the Twin Cities. There is playfulness and fun infused in the food, but also the intentionality you need to pull that kind of whimsy off. So yes, you can go with a burger and soft serve, but you’ll miss out on some of the more playful, complex, and special dishes that Aubergine has to offer. You can order soft serve at so many places, but where else can you get a goddamn slice of foie pie?

This is what I hope for you at Aubergine. I hope you order the dishes that feel unfamiliar, so you too can sit at a table with your friends and say with a mouth full of foie, “Fuck.”

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★★★1/2

My top 3 dishes: I’m gonna do this differently, babes. Here’s how you’re going to order. You are going to order your app(s), then your main(s), then you are going to do pre-dessert of beet tarte tatin and the foie dish (unless your server is adamant that the foie, this time, is not sweet and savory), then you are going to order dessert. Also, the NA negroni has quickly become my favorite NA drink about town.

Where to sit: Hands down, no contest: the bar.

Good for: Anniversaries, solo girl dinner of foie and salad at the bar, ordering the whole menu with five of your bougie friends, and stick-to-your-ribs meals during snowstorms.

My one big tip: Do! Not! Skip! Dessert!

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What the stars mean:

★★★★: Best in Class

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

★★★: Excellent and Consistent

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

★★: Good or Inconsistent

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

★: Skip it

Self-explanatory!

It’s not love bombing. They just haven’t yet uncoupled their body from the acts of marriage. People who have been single for a while hesitate to touch. They move more time appropriately. Hand holding takes multiple dates. A forehead kiss, which they know means something, takes months.

There are different rules on a date with someone who has been single for two years versus someone who has been single for two months. The people who have been single for two years are wiser with your heart, take things slower with their mouths, and are acutely aware of the potential of your hurt and their hurt.

Men who haven’t yet signed their divorce decrees are not aware of your heart, because they are so lost in their own hurt and searching for warmth like infrared cameras.

They only see you as a potential to heal, not a potential marriage. They see your mouth as something to discover and find. At the end of most marriages, people are touch-starved, and you can feel years of waves of desire pent up inside of them. I don’t know why, but I find myself drawn to those bomb waves, wanting to surf them. It’s electric and exciting, and it’s dangerous. It’s a rush, a thrill.

It’s the closest feeling to a romcom as you can get. But it doesn’t end like one. It never ends like one.

That’s what it felt like with Joshua.

Before we went on a date, I asked him how long since his marriage was over. It was less than six months, and he was brand new to online dating, having been on the apps for two weeks. I told him why I don’t date married men, how they kiss your forehead and then disappear with an, “I’m not ready.” He promised he wasn’t like that, and I decided to go on a date with him, even though I knew he was like that.

On our first date, he traced my tattoos while sitting at a table at Hai Hai. He held my hand. He asked me questions. I hadn’t kissed a man on a first date since 2024, but we made out on the sidewalk while cars honked at us. It was full-body kissing, him pulling my hips into his. He kissed me like he was starving. I felt consumed, eaten alive, laid bare. I knew what I was in for. I knew it would bloom and contract just as fast.

He sent me message after message after we parted, full of a hope like a high that I knew was about to crash down. I had felt the way I felt in his presence exactly four other times on a first date. Once, it ended with my first love. Then, it ended in an engagement. A third time, it was the first kiss I had after the end of my engagement. And then, there was New Year’s Eve of this year, where a man and I fell deeply and swiftly into mutual adoration of each other until I told him I had cancer. It was a deal breaker for him, something he couldn’t see me through. And then, there was Joshua.

He kissed me with fury in the street; cars honked at us as we made out on the pavement. He kissed me with ravenous, unencumbered abandon, biting at my bottom lip and moving his hands all over my body.

As he kissed me, I felt the ghost of his wife banging around in my ribcage.

I felt the way you might feel at the start of a great love story, but at the end of the night, I sent a voice memo to my two best friends. It’s a podcast I call Kirstie Goes on a Date, and in it I said, “This man is going to break my heart. I am going to do it anyway.”

Our second date was charcuterie at the beach. He brought a cooler of drinks, including my favorite NA beer that he remembered from the night before. He called me sweetie pie. It sent a jolt through me, like I touched a live wire. I felt his wife on the blanket with us, her pet name running around the park like a tumbleweed. We watched the sun set and the clouds move above us. We never stopped touching.

At the end of the date, I told him that I loved living in a timeline where I got to make out like this in public without being executed, and he said, “Two unmarried people making out in public, scandalous.”

I had to remind him that he was married. It floored me.

One day, someone will meet me and think to themselves, “I am never letting her go. That is my wife.” How could I expect him to think that way if he still has one?

He had no idea how to date, having not dated in over a decade. He was clumsy, telling me when he went on dates with other women, thinking this was proper. Instead, when he told me he was going on a date with someone else, I went for a long run. I hit PR after PR with my feet on the pavement, sick to my stomach, because I actually liked him, and I knew that I was just part of his healing process. I knew he didn’t actually like me. He just liked that I liked him.

I knew that I would be sacrificed to the god of divorce with little fanfare.

I was just a plot point in his healing, a static character in a movie where he evolved and changed. I was paid actress, a character, not a woman full of the same capacity to break that he has. I sometimes wonder, did he think about my feelings at all? Did they matter to him at all?

He was hungry for me. He wanted to swallow me whole. In the dying days of summer, I let him. Three months out from the end of my chemo, seven months out from my double mastectomy, I hadn’t felt desired in so long that I was going to take the hurt in order to feel it. I felt hot, sexy, so desperately wanted. It was something I was yearning to feel, no matter how fleeting.

After our second date, two other women he was seeing rejected him, and this rejection sobered him and made him realize he wasn’t ready to date. I was sacrificed twice: first at the altar of his marriage and second at the altar of new women he wanted more than he wanted me. I was flummoxed. I could never, would never, kiss someone like that unless I wanted them the most. I do not know how men have this capacity, to use your body like a mirror for something inside of themselves.

Dating men in the death knells of their marriages is like dancing in a room with someone you’re falling in love with, and you are completely unaware that there’s a trap door cut into the floor and that they hold the button to it in their hand, which they could hit at any minute. When I first started dating these kinds of men, I was always surprised when the door opened up below me.

But this time, dancing with him, I knew the button to the trap door was in his hand. This time, when I fell through the floor, instead of my stomach giving out, instead of being surprised, I was ready for it.

Every time we danced, I put my feet firmly on the door, daring him to open it. When he did, instead of looking up at him from the darkness into the light with something like surprise, instead of my stomach dropping, all I felt was relief that I was let go before I wanted him more than I did now.

There’s a joke in AA that your addiction is doing push-ups in the parking lot, always waiting for you. But my heartbreak has been doing pull-ups. This time I was ready, so when the door opened up from under me, I grabbed the ledge and pulled myself up.

Because yes, I wanted him to fall in love with me, but I knew from the beginning that he wouldn’t. From the beginning, I knew that every time he wrapped his arms around me, and every time he kissed me, he was thinking about how he wished the person who he was doing those things with was his wife.

This time, I knew that the mirage of his wife was stuffed inside of me like a ghost, that the only thing about me he fell in love with was the shadow of her haunting my body.

This time, as I was plunged through the trap door into darkness, I wasn’t the only person representing a mirage. Hanging on the door, looking up at him in the light, he was, too. Because here’s the thing: any man who threatens to open the trap door underneath me isn’t my husband. It had just been so long since someone had desired me like that. I let him swallow me whole, because I needed to be reminded it was possible. And if it’s possible with him, it’s possible with someone else.

This time, when I looked up at him from the darkness, he was haunted by the ghost of my future spouse, someone who will dance with me in the light, who puts the trap door button down on the floor before asking, “Will you dance with me?”

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Just one, singular burger. I did this because I feel like almost every burger sits on a “best burger” menu in the Twin Cities. It drives me bananas and it means that you actually don’t ever hear from writers about what their actual, legitimate favorite burger is. I get why outlets do this. It makes money. If my singular burger piece was one of my highest grossing of the year, I’m sure that those multiple lists a year rake in the cash. Still, I cannot and will not become the kind of writer who releases multiple burger lists a year to make a buck. I just want to tell you my one, singular favorite burger.

I found mine and then… I went back in August and they CHANGED THE BURGER.

Here’s a live shot of me when I ate it (Sean McPherson can vouch for this. He was there.).

The toppings on my favorite burger went from signature to basic. There is too much bun to burger now. The meat is still the same great fat patty, but other than that, I was so, so, so, so disappointed. Now, I’m turning to you.

I want to know your favorite burger in the comments, but with a caveat: I do not want to eat a smash burger.

My favorite burger is always going to be a thick patty with integrity, because, well, that’s what I like! And I’m looking for your favorite version of that burger. I’m hoping to release it again for Christmas, but before I do, I want to try as many burgers as I can. I have a frontrunner, but who knows? Maybe your favorite burger will be my favorite burger, too.

Help a girl out and drop your favorite burger in the comments.

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This restaurant, in particular, gets food out fast. The kitchen is a well-oiled machine. While this person focused on their own order and why it was moving slower, as a critic, I was curious about something else: what was happening at the restaurant. It was a Wednesday night, and the entire restaurant was full. The open kitchen, normally calm even in the weediest of weeds, had a tinge of panic. The ticket rail was full. The person running expo was double-checking that everyone knew what was coming up. Someone was taken off the line to live butcher fish to order, meaning they were down one cook on the line. My bartender was sweating, and drink tickets kept coming out of the receipt printer faster than he could make drinks.

It was one of those nights where you can palpably feel that a restaurant team is working really hard, and even though they’re working harder than they might on a usual night, the average guest might not realize it.

When the bartender brought me my drink, I asked, “How are you doing?”

We have a good rapport, and he didn’t need to say anything to tell me the answer was, “REALLY BAD.” He just opened his eyes really wide. For 45 minutes, everything was gangbusters. The bar team never seemed to get an order of wine. It was all cocktails. The tickets on the kitchen rail got longer and longer, with no end in sight, and the man next to me, not paying attention to any of it, asked to speak to the manager. The manager was gracious, comping a drink, and not letting on to the fact that the team was absolutely working their asses off. When he left without a tip (he left his receipt face up), I made a mental note to tip on the cost of his bill. The entire team, front and back of house, was trying to accommodate him. That night, they just got slammed.

There was a moment of reprieve, when everything calmed down. The bartender came and stood in front of me, exhaling for just a moment before diving back in. “Let me guess,” I said, “Everyone came at 6:00pm and ordered the salmon and cocktails.”

“I haven’t poured a beer in 30 minutes,” he said, looking at me with the slightly frazzled look of someone who wasn’t prepared to get slammed like this. “It’s Wednesday,” he said, looking at the line for bar seats. We chatted for a few minutes and then another ticket came through on the printer, so I saluted him, and back he went. He held it up, like he won the lottery, and said, “It’s wine!”

This night isn’t novel. It’s something that happens in every restaurant. Maybe you’ve been the guy sitting next to me at the bar, wondering where the heck your salmon is. We’ve all been at a restaurant where we are starving and waiting for food we’re just willing to come. This happens to me a lot as I’m in restaurants more than the average person, and while many people look down at the empty place below them where a plate should be, I normally respond by looking up.

I decided to write this piece because I want the average guest to understand more than just, “My food is late.” I want you to know why. For me at least, when I learned why, it made me far more patient and understanding. More than that, it made me realize that most nights when my food is running behind, it’s because kitchen teams are working really hard–not because they’re slacking off.

Writer’s Note: I conducted these interviews in 2025 and 2026. I had originally planned to release this piece in January of 2026, but delayed it due to Operation Metro Surge and further delayed it due to my cancer diagnosis.

They just got a review–or an award

When Khue’s Kitchen won the Minnesota Star Tribune’s Best New Restaurant award in 2025, the restaurant’s reservations exploded overnight. Eric Pham, speaking to me in an interview in early summer of 2026, said, “I remember this vividly. We were closed Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. It was the weekend after Christmas, and we were open Friday, Saturday, Sunday.” He thought those days would be slower, easy. “Then I saw the books,” he said. Khue’s Kitchen normally had 90 covers on a Friday or Saturday. Overnight, volume almost tripled. “Over 260 people were coming into our small restaurant,” he said, with a laugh. “We got pushed to the brink.”

Speaking to Karyn Tomlinson, chef/owner of Myriel, after her James Beard win in the summer of 2025, she told me, “Right after the James Beard award, I reminded our staff that we still have 28 seats in the dining room. But we weren’t used to having as many walk-ins, and the type of diner who comes in after awards can be different.” Diners who come in due to an award have sky-high expectations, putting pressure on teams that most restaurants don’t face day-in, day-out.

“Winning the award is the easy part,” Pham said. “When you win something like that, it sets the expectation so high that now every guest that comes in is expecting you to walk on water.” And unlike many businesses that face an influx in sales or new people finding them, there’s no time to pause.

“You have to figure that out in real time,” Tomlinson said. “You can’t close and regroup. You have reservations happening.”

It’s an exciting time to be at a restaurant, but if you go, remember that they’re learning a lot of lessons on the fly. “How can you execute at a level that you’ve never experienced before until it happens?” Pham asked.

Khue’s Kitchen is about to get pushed to the brink again, having landed on the New York Times America’s Best Restaurants List 2026. But this time, they have practice.

There’s a bottleneck

Abraham Gessesse, chef/owner at Hyacinth, told me in early summer of 2026, “Honestly, it’s a miracle that food gets out on time every night in a restaurant in the first place. There are so many places where you can have a bottleneck.” He talked to me about how the night before, their fryer needed to get fixed. Instead of cutting items that guests loved from the menu, like fried olives, they figured out a way to make it work. “It was slower,” he said, “But we got it done.”

Kait Ziemer-Davis, co-owner of Sea Salt, told me in an interview in 2025, “In the middle of the day, we dump the oil in our fryers to get a fresh start, and that’s also at the same time we do shift change. Between 3-4pm on Sunday, we have a line out the door and we’re doing so many things at once.” That time every Sunday, the wait is a little bit longer than normal. “You might look around and see people standing around but it’s because we’re waiting for go time,” she said.

Bottlenecks can also be logistical. Tomlinson switched their POS system around the time of their award, “It took getting used to,” she said. “We were figuring out gift cards, and so getting checks back to guests sometimes took longer.”

There’s so many ways that bottlenecks can happen: everyone orders the most complicated cocktails all at once, most of the dining room orders items that one cook is responsible for leaving one person working really hard while it might seem like other people are standing around, someone is new and in training, or the bar team runs out of ice and someone has to run to the basement to get more. The list goes on and on.

Jo Seddon, co-owner of Gia, told me in 2026, “We’re a human industry. If we’re not busy, we can have your food out in 4 minutes, but the alchemy of a restaurant is you cannot get it correct every single time.”

Everyone is ordering the same thing

Margaret Zimmerman, General Manager at Marty’s Deli, told me, “Dave’s Fave is more akin to a plated dish than a sandwich. We can put sandwiches up fast. Dave’s Fave takes longer because there’s a lot of intentionality in making sure it looks pretty.” She’s speaking of the sandwich everyone waits for all year: a housemade ricotta open-faced sandwich using Nistler Farm tomatoes and herbs and flowers grown on the patio at Marty’s. “The first day we serve it every year, we don’t have the muscle memory down yet, and it takes longer.” The wait for a sandwich balloons from 12-15 minutes to 20 minutes during peak hours.

“It’s a palpable difference to guests,” she says. The sandwich takes up a lot of space, having its own station, and requiring one entire staff person to dedicate their time to it during tomato season. “It’s a bit of a rush,” Zimmerman says of the first week of serving it. “Last year, we made 1,100 Dave’s Faves total. This year, the first week we had it, we made 500. Honestly, we were scrambling.” That first week every year, the lines are longer, but Marty’s Deli staff didn’t want to cut corners in order to get sandwiches out faster. When I asked her how she handles things when the line gets long, Zimmerman told me, “We balance speed with quality. I put my hands on my chest, take a deep breath, and keep working.”

While that bump in business happens every year at Marty’s, Saturday Dumpling Company experienced an unexpected bump when their Caesar sandwich went viral. The sandwich wasn’t ever intended to be a permanent menu item. It was dreamed up by Chandra Walbolt, Director of Culinary at Saturday Dumpling Company. “We were never trying to chase a viral moment,” co-owner Peter Bian said to me. “We just had a bunch of white sesame seeds and didn’t know what to do with them.” They made their own tahini, breaded chicken in panko and white sesame seeds, threw szechuan peppercorns in a Caesar dressing, and served it up on their own focaccia. “It was meant to be a limited-time item,” Bian said.

But then, an influencer posted a video of the sandwich that racked up hundreds of thousands of views when the restaurant was closed on Monday and Tuesday. “We thought it was a normal Wednesday,” owner Peter Bian said to me. “We got as much breaded chicken prepped as we normally need for 2-3 days. We sold out of everything on Wednesday.” He laughed as he told me, “We got run over. Everyone was like, ‘Holy shit.’ That first rush, we had no idea how to plan for it.” Everyone on the team rallied, pushing to get through that first day, and then it was all hands on deck to prep for the weekend. But there was a line out the door–and a wait.

“When we go viral, we get a rash of bad reviews,” Zimmerman said. “A lot of them mention the wait.”

Ziemar-Davis experiences something similar with Reddit reviews, where people complain about the long lines at Sea Salt. “Regulars will come to your defense and say it’s part of the culture. If you drink beer, go grab a beer and come back in line, then chat with people around you.”

Bian, who is no stranger to waiting in lines himself for food said, “If there’s a line, remember it’s probably worth the wait.”

Everyone gets sat at the same time

In 2025, Ben Moenster, who served as Executive Chef at Herbst and Chef de Cuisine at Spoon and Stable before moving back to his native Denmark, told me, “Sometimes everyone with a 5:45, 6:00, and 6:15 reservation comes in right at 6:00pm. Then everyone puts in their order at the same time. It’s a perfect storm from a kitchen standpoint.” He said that in that case, you try as hard as you can to get dishes to table quickly, but when the tickets line up, you only have so many hands. “You can’t do anything different when it happens that way, but it doesn’t feel good for us to send out dishes that slow.”

Pham told me, “Everyone likes to eat at the same time. 6:00pm, 6:30pm, 7:00pm. That’s prime-time.” Unlike many restaurants, Khue’s Kitchen doesn’t stagger their reservations. “I want to serve as many people as I can.” So sometimes everyone gets sat at the exact same time. “All our servers might get quadruple sat,” he said (that’s industry speak for four tables sitting down at the same time). “If everyone comes in all at once and there’s a line at the host stand, it might take a little bit longer for food to come out.”

Seddon handles that peak time a bit differently at Gia. “We specifically don’t book tables between 6-630pm so that we can accept walk-ins during that peak time.” That openness for walk-ins also means that Gia is a place where you can show up for dinner without a reservation and likely get sat, but it also means unpredictability. “You can’t predict the number of people at the bar or the walk-ins. It can impact the smoothness of service from a guest experience if everyone comes in at the same time.”

Sometimes, it comes down to staffing

Gessesse, like many chef/owners, runs Hyacinth on a shoestring staff. “I want to give everyone the hours that they want, and almost everyone wants full-time hours. I don’t want to give someone less than that, so it means I have 2-4 cooks. If someone calls out for a funeral, we don’t have cooks to backfill.”

Seddon has a similar challenge. “There’s no flex in our system,” she said. When someone calls out, someone else ends up doing double duty. One thing that anyone who has spent any time around the industry knows is that sometimes when your meal is taking longer than usual, it’s because the team is working harder. “You have one person working two stations, and the tickets really build up, and the chefs are working their asses off.”

Gessesse, like all chefs and owners I talked to, wanted to make sure that if something felt amiss or that it was taking too long, that you talked to the team. “You’re guests in our house. Talk to your servers if you have any issues or feel like you’re waiting too long. We’ll send you some fried olives to help bridge the gap or a little bit of wine.”

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Someone recently told me that the restaurant property at the Beach Club residences is cursed, but it’s not like the Old Chicago property in Uptown where restaurant after restaurant has moved through. Urban Eatery held down that spot for 12 years, a long run for a restaurant in a tricky-to-get-to spot that really is only visited by people who live nearby.

Back in my late teens, I worked at a yoga studio right down the road and went often to Urban Eatery, which at the time was dubbed as “edgy,” to eat their bleeding vegetarian burger. The “blood” came from beets before Impossible and Beyond were born. The restaurant was packed with people who lived in the Named-After-a-Slave-Owner Beach Club (waspy types) and people who lived around the lake (young professionals with a mix of ladies who lunch).

It was my stomping grounds for patio nights after teaching yoga in a 100-degree room. I was there craving salt like a goat in a barn with a salt lick–and salt I got. On the rims of my martini glasses, in the fries, and in the burger. It had a good run of 12 years, closing in 2023 looking nothing like the restaurant I went to in the 2010s. And then there was Chilango, which opened in its place and got mixed reviews from both Jon Cheng and Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl. In Moskowitz Grumdahl’s review, owner Jorge Guzman appealed for more time before guests judged it too harshly, and so I decided to give that time to him. A year, he had told her. So at a year, I walked back in the door.

My review of Chilango was slated to be published just two short weeks after they announced their closure. It was, like Cheng and Moskowitz Grumdahl’s reviews, mixed. Meals there on different nights felt like going to two different restaurants, sometimes executed with sharp precision or… not. Once, I had chips so salty, I had to send them back. It was the only dish I sent back in all of 2025, with so much salt that when I picked up the chips, salt crystals fell all over the table. I felt embarrassed sending chips back, but they were, in fact, inedible.

I have a fondness for this location, even if visits to it start with going into a parking garage that requires you to go down and then up flights of stairs, walking in a hallway that looks more like a scene for a Dateline episode than an evening on the town with a view of the lake. When Asher’s Bar & Grill announced they were going to open, I thought, “Hey, that could work.” A modern sports bar with housemade chicken tenders, homemade ranch, and a happy hour “girl dinner” of fries and caesar salad feels like it might be right for the neighborhood–and there are few things I love more than bar food done right.

The first time I walked in on a Thursday at 7:00pm, the patio was completely full, something I hadn’t seen in that location in a long time. The restaurant was also full with a mix of people at the bar and large groups at tables. Thinking walking in right at open might yield an empty restaurant, at 4:10pm on a Friday, there were already multiple tables full with drinks and a half dozen people at the bar. The clientele is different from the people who went to Urban Eatery and Chilango, with many of them actually there to watch sports. Where single women were seated at the bar with chic drinks when I went to eat at Chilango, here it was men in pairs or solo with pints of beer while Wheel in the Sky blasted on the speakers. I felt less like I was on the outskirts of Uptown and more like I was sitting in the suburbs.

Some of the build-out from Chilango remains, like the beautiful lamps and plants in the back dining room, but the rest of it has been stripped down to a blue-hued color palette with big TVs that you can see from every single angle.

It feels incongruent, like Chilango is haunting Asher’s.

Still, they tried to wipe out the ghost with the color blue. The blue is cohesive throughout the space, with even the food served on blue checkered paper. The staff all don matching t-shirts, too, with some of the women cropping them up above the navel with hair ties. Depending on where you sit, and what night you visit on, those bartenders and servers will either leave you to flag them down for every drink or get close enough to you that at the end of the night, they ask your name and remember it next time you come in.

Sober restaurant critics are often given flak for not being able to drink at restaurants and therefore not being restaurant critics but rather food critics–and I don’t think this is an unfair comment about a sober woman going to review a sports bar. But I will say, if it were me when I was drinking, I wouldn’t be drinking the creative cocktails. I’d be doing what almost everyone at Asher’s does: drinking beer. If what you want is reviews of their housemade cocktails, you’ll have to look elsewhere, and I have to be honest that the cocktail menu was intriguing. There were drinks with charred leek and grilled scallion vermouth, carrot ash, or habanero bitters that seemed promising. As for the NA drinks on the menu? They taste like, “Oops, all bitters,” with one of the drinks coming out with a distinct taste of old limes.

But, in truth, I wasn’t at Asher’s for the drinks at all–I was intrigued by the concept because of the food, and I was rooting for them as soon as I saw the word “house” all over the menu. Bear with me. I’m going to use this word a lot in short order: house-made chicken tenders, house-smoked and pulled chicken, house-brined and smoked pastrami, and house stout-braised brisket, all feature on the menu. Above their salads and soups section, the words made in house are prominent, too. They do overuse the word sometimes, like with “house seasoned fries,” which, every fry is house seasoned. The point is: they’re trying to build an identity around scratch-made food.

The portions of the meat are generous, like Asher’s is trying to court people who normally rely on boy kibble for their calories. The housemade pastrami sandwich was packed to the gills with an ultra peppery pastrami and a sharpness from a generous spread of whole grain mustard. Bread is a huge part of a sandwich, though, and here, the bread was unevenly toasted and lacking in any specialness, but my friend who ordered this sandwich genuinely enjoyed eating it and said they would order it again. We both agreed: it was fine.

I thought if that housemade pastrami was solid, maybe some of the other housemade or smoked meats might be, too. The house smoked chicken sandwich, however, was a letdown, with dry chicken that didn’t taste smoked at all on an equally dry French hoagie. The pair of them were lacking so much moisture that even a thick slathering of mayo couldn’t save the sandwich. The pulled pork tacos were so salty that my friend and I didn’t even eat a full one between us. And just like Chilango, the chips served alongside it were so salty, they also bordered on inedible.

I thought to myself, “Okay, swing and a miss, but at a sports bar, the burger has to be good, right?” The burger was simple, served on a toasted bun with American cheese, three pickles (I counted), and no ketchup, mayo, or mustard in sight. The meat itself lacked juiciness and there were just three pickles on top, so most bites were just like the burger on a kid’s menu: bun, American cheese, and meat.

Okay, so the burger is out, but the housemade chicken tendies have to be solid, right? They were… confusing. The order was far too small for $14, overfried, and breaded with a batter more suited for fish than chicken.

What about the nachos? They were overambitious. The chips were overfried (there’s a theme here) and greasy. And then, they were covered in a mountain of beef large enough for a roid-addled lifter to devour after a workout, but the teeniest amount of bland salsa. It felt off-kilter, uneven, unfinished. It felt so close to good.

What about the “girl dinner” of caesar salad and a pile of fries? Unlike the nachos, it was underambitious, a trendy disappointment. My caesar had, like with the pickles, exactly three croutons. The salad was unevenly dressed with big globs of dressing in the middle, and none of the briny flavor you want from anchovies. Like many things at Asher’s, I wanted more boldness from it. The fries that came with it were unremarkable: cold, blonde, flaccid, and served with a housemade ranch that is featured all over the menu.

The ranch has far too much buttermilk and should have never gotten past R&D. Where you want it tangy, this reads sour. Where you want herbaceous, this reads soapy. Somehow, it’s floral.

Every friend who tried it made a face after trying it, recoiling from it.

Sometimes, like with the three croutons on the salad and three pickles on the burger, I felt like I was living in a restaurant working on austerity. Other times, like with meat on the nachos, I felt like I was in a restaurant run by a glutton–and I prefer that to the austere. I kept going. I kept trying, really trying, to find other things worth ordering at Asher’s, going outside of standard bar fare hoping it might be better.

Were the szechuan green beans a secret hit? No. The beans themselves were unsalted, with a sauce so bland my friend asked, “Szechuan where?” What about the pot roast? Could that be the star? Again, alas, no. The pot roast itself was cooked well but lacked flavor and the grits were thick, stodgy, and covered in unfried sage. The whole thing was topped with carrots and big chunks of seemingly raw celery, which perplexed me. What about the walleye fish and chips, a perfect meal for dinner by the lake? All of the people I had try this dish were fish and chips lovers and we didn’t finish the dish due to the amount of oil that coated the beer batter and consequently, our mouths. Even the more surprising items on the menu let me down, where I hoped they were there because someone in the kitchen was confident that the green beans were so good, it didn’t matter that they didn’t fit the concept.

What about dessert? Sadly, bland across the board, with the brownie tasting like the cocoa powder was replaced with just the color brown, without any richness or depth. I found myself wishing for fudginess and just getting density. That brownie was removed (honestly, good call) and replaced with a cookie that had similar problems. I wanted ooey-gooey and got overbaked, bone-dry, and flavorless. And on the other side of the dry-to-wet binary, the pistachio tres leches that is homage to Chilango tastes simply like milk and cream, not pistachio and rosewater.

I kept going, hoping for better, trying as much of the menu as I could to find items I could recommend for you to order. I wanted to love Asher’s, because I believe in the concept in theory.

Housemade bar food served by the lake is my kind of place. Time and again I was hit with these facts: I could tell that they were really trying, and they didn’t live up to their promise. Will I go back to try it again? Yes. Later. With a lot of hope that their ambition matches their execution once they have more time underneath them. Right now, after six visits, the only thing I can really recommend is the tater tots, which aren’t special, but are fine. Should you go? I don’t know. I think it depends on how much you like pull tabs and how badly you want free parking.

★: Skip it.

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What the stars mean:

★★★★: Best in Class

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

★★★: Excellent and Consistent

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

★★: Good or Inconsistent

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

★: Skip it

Self-explanatory!

That means that A LOT of you are new here! Bestie, I’m so glad you’re here.

But that probably means a lot of you don’t know who I am! So, hi, I’m Kirstie, and I’m Minnesota’s indie, reader-funded critic.

I wanted to introduce myself and tell you about myself and my writing. So here are some facts about me!

• I’m a 34-year-old restaurant critic based in Minneapolis.

• I’m a long-form writer, which means you’re getting longer pieces than you get in most legacy media.

• I aim to be the place you go to in Minnesota to figure out where to eat. I write 6-10 pieces a month to tell you where to go to eat. (PS: This is my top 50 list from 2025.)

• I still have a day job, meaning that I work mornings, nights, and weekends on my writing. I love my day job! I’m a nonprofit fundraiser by trade. But I do like to remind people that I’m not a full-time writer and that I work really hard to push these pieces out around my job. Like right now, I’m writing this at a coffee shop in the morning before a full 8 hours of work.

• I am completely independent and funded by people like you. No collabs ever. No payoffs. No free meals. No bosses. No editors (except my great copy editor, Phoebe).

• I am sober and cover a lot of NA content, like my favorite places to get NA drinks in the Twin Cities.

• I publish a mix of reviews, lists (like my favorite steak and favorite french fry), culture pieces (like one of my most read pieces, Can the Indies Save Food Writing?), and memoir pieces (like a piece about my double mastectomy, REALLY GOOD TITS).

• I bring my favorite Labubu, Ted, to every single dinner (he lives on my keys) and he often appears in photos, because we need more whimsy in food writing.

• I’m the only critic reviewing restaurants across the entire state of Minnesota. Two of my favorite greater Minnesota pieces are my review of Sol Hong Kong Café in Duluth and my review of The Pines in Grand Rapids, so check that out if you’re interested in greater Minnesota coverage! I also have guides to places across the state, like my day guide to Grand Marais.

• I’m a breast cancer survivor, single, and infertile (man, that sounds MUCH sadder than it actually is), and I write about my experience with all of these topics at length. I release at least one memoir piece a month. Some people are only here for those pieces, and some of you really won’t care about them and are just here for the food (no hard feelings).

So, hi! I’m so glad you’re here. We have a ton of fun in this Substack. beyond beurre blanc isn’t just a place for me to write about food. It’s a place for you. I eat good food so you can find the best in the city, consume bad food so you don’t have to, and I want to be the place you go to figure out where to eat on Friday night.

I legitimately want to hear what kind of coverage you want from me, so drop anything you’re interested in reading about below!

Upcoming pieces I’m working on include my favorite vegetarian sandwiches, a profile of a rural Minnesota tasting menu duo, my go-to order at Al’s and Our Kitchen, my favorite restaurants in Rochester, my favorite bakeries across the state, and a whole host of reviewssss.

If you want to fund my independent coverage of Minnesota’s restaurant scene, consider becoming a paid subscriber! It’s $50/year or $7/month.

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I also hit a huge milestone last week.

All of you, together, propelled me to being the top ranking critic on the food & drink bestsellers chart, topping journalists with decades of experience, including my favorite restaurant critic, Ruth Reichl.

“It’s not a competition,” someone DMed me. And sure, it’s not, except that a young, new, divisive critic topping the charts is a big fucking deal. I have no legacy media experience. I write long-form, which means I’m bucking the idea that No OnE rEaDs AnYmOrE. I’m from a mid-sized city in the Midwest, showing that Minnesota is serious about food. And I don’t cover bad actors like union busters, which is something most legacy media outlets will require critics to do (you can read my whole code of ethics here).

To be the top restaurant critic on the bestsellers charts shows that people want long-form criticism rooted in strong ethics. And that’s why I founded beyond beurre blanc.

It’s validation of my work, but more than that, I hope it encourages legacy media to re-invest in this kind of work on their own teams. I got into this field because I care about it and I wasn’t going to sit on my ass and watch it die. I was going to do something about it. Sometimes, I piss other writers off, but no one can say that I’m all talk, no action. I got into this work because I wanted to see something different, so I did something different.

What I realized over the past two and a half years is that I wasn’t alone in wanting something different. Many of you wanted something different, too. That’s why you’re here.

I don’t just want beyond beurre blanc to be successful; I want it to be a very small part of slowing, preventing, or reversing the decline of hard-hitting, honest, and gutsy local food media. You help me do that. I can’t say thank you enough.

XOXOXO,

KK <3

PS: Want to read my favorite piece I’ve ever written? It’s this one.