Eater Twin Cities’ Best Dishes of the Month: June 2024

Welcome to Eater Twin Cities’ Best Dishes column. True, the heatmap is one of the best useful resource for intel on thrilling new restaurant openings round Minneapolis and St. Paul — however right here we’re monitoring standout dishes at eating places outdated and new. Listed here are one of the best dishes an Eater editor ate across the Cities in June, in no explicit order (not ranked).

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In mid-June I met Eater Twin Cities contributing author Ali Elabbady at Qamaria Yemeni Espresso Co., the Dearborn, Michigan-based espresso mini-chain that simply opened its first Minnesota location in Little Canada. I made a mistake by not taking a photograph of our tea, an Adeni chai that got here in a chic glass pot, cardamom and cloves swirling round in a creamy evaporated milk base. I did snag a photograph of the pastries we ate, one of the best of which was a pull-apart honeycomb bread with a chew of cream cheese nestled into each part.

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On Ali’s advice I ate at Tropical Bowl in Roseville, a brand new(ish) Caribbean restaurant within the former La Tapatia house on Larpenteur Avenue. This jerk hen had superbly charred pores and skin, and was really falling off the bone, a lot as I hate to make use of the cliche — however the undersung factor of this dish was the rice and beans, which chef Sanjay Brady makes with immense care, cooking them with freshly strained coconut milk, complete scallions, and some Scotch bonnets tossed in pot. The coleslaw was creamy and delicately candy; we completed the meal with slices of pudding-like rum cake.

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Risotto al salto and rhubarb olive oil cake at Hyacinth

Hyacinth lured me in with an Instagram post of its ricotta and rhubarb olive oil cake — I’m at all times maximizing rhubarb season. I bought this slice to-go on the finish of a meal, and it truthfully appears to be like like a scrumptious smothered burrito in its little cardboard field, however it’s certainly a cake, dense and lemony and completed with sea salt atop its tangy ricotta cap. For dinner, I had white beans and asparagus and a plate of risotto al salto, its crackly golden shell hiding tender mushrooms, walnuts, and morsels of Castelbelbo cheese beneath.

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A wild rice bowl and lemonade at Miijim

Earlier this month I made the trek as much as Wisconsin’s South Shore and took a drizzly ferry experience to Madeline Island. I’ve been which means to go to Miijim, chef Bryce Stevenson’s Ojibwe restaurant “with a touch of French style” for some time, and got here by for a weekend lunch (dinner service begins subsequent week). I’m nonetheless excited about this blueberry cedar lemonade, which I guzzled, and this wild rice bowl of white hominy, smoked whitefish, and actually beautiful complete mushrooms, which soaked up the dish’s chaga mole and blueberry sauce of their pleated caps. Stevenson was a James Beard semifinalist for Rising Chef this yr — regulate Instagram for the forthcoming dinner menu.

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Butternut squash yellow curry at Khâluna

I ate at Khâluna for a good friend’s birthday and tried a brand new dish: a Bengali yellow curry made with butternut squash and topped with puffed rice, pepitas, and some purple candy potato chips. I don’t usually order scorching curry dishes in the summertime, however this was a type of wet early June evenings, and the coconut cream swirled by means of the dish tempered its richness, as did the intense notes of Thai basil. I spooned it over my longan fried rice.

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