Appetites: City Pages' top spots to eat, drink
Every year City Pages releases its annual Best Of issue. The paper's editors and readers choose all sorts of favorites — including musicians, parks, bars and everything else that make the Twin Cities unique.
The 2016 issue hit newsstands Wednesday.
City Pages food writer Mecca Bos joined All Things Considered host Tom Crann to talk about some of the best restaurants, dishes, drinks, and other highlights of the current Twin Cities food scene.
Use the audio player above to hear their conversation, or read it below.
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What are some of the biggest, most anticipated categories in the issue this year?
Well, of course there are always the biggies: Best restaurant, best chef, best new restaurant and best new bar, to name a few.
Let's go through a few of those then. Let's start with best new restaurant...
This year we gave best new restaurant to St. Genevieve, which is the second restaurant by chef Steven Brown, who also owns Tilia in Linden Hills.
Steven Brown has long been considered one of the top chefs in the Twin Cities, and Tilia is beloved for its excellent cuisine with a neighborhood feel. They have one of the best Reubens you'll ever eat, and fantastic French fries, but also things like soft-shell crab and grilled lamb shoulder with smoked raisins.
But St. Genevieve is kind of a complete departure from all of that. While it still retains a neighborhood feel, it's modeled after sort of an elegant Parisian bar — something that Brown calls a buvette, or a drinking and snacking place — a place you go to drink champagne maybe starting in the afternoon and lingering into the evening, nibbling on little toasts called "tartines" with elegant toppings like escargot with roasted oyster mushrooms or foie gras and pickled strawberry, and then order another glass of champagne, and then maybe stretch the evening out into a proper dinner or just continue snacking and sipping the night away.
They have an onsite sommelier who really makes choosing wine and bubbles accessible and easy, and the space is so transporting you won't believe you're still in south Minneapolis and not somewhere in France. It's so dramatic but still friendly and casual. It's just a really beautiful restaurant in every way.
You also have a category for best restaurant overall. What did you choose for that?
This year we chose Alma, because after 17 years in business, it still tops so many people's list as a favorite spot for just about any occasion. Again, this place is elegant, yet casual — the kind of place you can go to for a wedding anniversary or just a regular old Tuesday night dinner and it somehow seems appropriate for both.
The cooking by chef Alex Roberts is always mindbogglingly good, and the service is the sort that goes the extra mile, just always making you feel so welcome.
On top of all of that, they're planning some great new additions, which include a casual daytime cafe with excellent coffee, baked goods, sandwiches and the like, and then upstairs there will be a handful of sleeping rooms, like a small hotel, so you can actually check in and stay above the restaurant. Very cool.
What about a more unusual category — it's called best-looking bar?
Yeah, sometimes we have to throw in a category just because we love a place so much, and this year I called Mancini's best-looking bar, because it is!
Mancini's is of course the long-standing West Seventh Street Italian steakhouse, and lately I've so been enjoying rediscovering this time-capsule of a place that's changed very little since it opened in 1968.
Their Vegas-style lounge is all shades of red, plush swivel chairs, cabaret lights and a dance floor where live bands play every weekend. It's got stadium-style dining tables, it's carpeted throughout, and what I like best is the diversity of the crowd — every kind of person, every age, coming together to dance the night away and just have a great time. The place is a real treasure.
How about one of those categories that you simply can't do without — the one that gets anticipated by almost everyone?
Well naturally that has to be best burger, vegetarians notwithstanding, of course.
We're currently living in a town with so many best burgers, you could probably have a different one every day of the month and never repeat. It seems like every good chef has his or her own version, and they're constantly one-upping each other.
But my very favorite has to be the Il Foro burger. Il Foro is of course the former Forum Cafeteria, the art deco restaurant in the City Center that Josh Thoma (who is also in the process of re-opening The Lexington) reopened about a year ago.
This burger is a double-patty smash burger, which is kind of the of-the-moment way to cook a burger, served on one of those comforting squishy white buns. The meat is equal parts brisket, chuck and short rib, which is delicious in it self, but then they incorporate a bunch of butter into the meat. The bun is buttered, top and bottom, too, but the really special part about all of it is the cheese.
Chef Joe Rolle said it took him eight years to find the perfect Wisconsin American cheese to use on this burger, and here's the kicker: They apply it with an ice cream scoop.
So, by the time the burger hits the table, a full ice cream scoop of melted American cheese is dripping down the edges of this burger. It's truly a thing to behold.