So when one of my readers, Britt, asked me about matcha, I added it to my list.

I’m a matcha lover. I love to drink matcha straight up, in hot water, and try a bunch of different varieties at home. A matcha tonic is my go-to order at my favorite coffee shops: Mosaic and Moona Moono. I chase down rat:o, which has, in my opinion, the best matcha in the Twin Cities, and when I’m in Northeast, I love to head on over to Northeast Tea House for hand-milled matcha (my favorite is their Mill City Blend). I love both fruity matcha lattes (like the unmatched strawberry matcha from Moona Moono) and straight-up, challenging varieties. I love a seaweed-forward matcha, but I’m also not a matcha snob. As long as it’s a pure green, I’ll drink baking-grade matcha happily. So I figured there has to be something at the fair that’s fine to drink!

I started by searching the word “matcha” on the state fair site to see if I could find anywhere that had it and came up with a sad reality that only two places had matcha: Java Jive and French Meadow. After I ate my way through all the new foods on day one of the fair, I came back early in the morning on day two to sample all four of the matchas on offer from these spots, and I left… disappointed.

To start, I triple-fisted three different matchas at Java Jive. I had a matcha latte ($8.25 for a small), then I DIY added raspberry syrup to the matcha latte ($9.25 for a small), then I ordered a blended matcha ($7.75 for a small, which was cheaper than my other options, confusingly). The matchas came out pale enough that I knew it was just going to taste like milk, and I was right. The matcha latte tasted like straight-up milk, not even a wisp of matcha. I felt like I was at the all-you-can-drink milk booth on St. Patty’s Day! The matcha latte with raspberry just tasted like raspberry milk, and it was the color of end-of-winter sludge. And… the matcha blender was, well, it looked like this.

It was unevenly blended, melting by the time it came to my hand, and the sips were a mix of what seemed like straight ice and milk. After tip, I spent about $30 on shit matcha—or, about the price of a decent entry-level tin (the Jingshan Yabukita tin at Northeast Tea House is $30 and a great first purchase for folks who are new to making matcha at home).

French Meadow fared slightly better. They had a $10 Strawberry Matcha on the menu that I ordered from a young woman who was exceptionally stressed. “I’m wishing you only nice interactions with fair goers today,” I said to her. Her eyes brightened up, and she said, “These people are jerks. I just hope I make good money today.” Say less, girl. I tipped 40%.

I waited about 20 minutes for this drink to come out. The team was in the absolute weeds. It was before 9:00am and French Meadow is one of the only vendors before then, so everyone was there in line to get coffee. Patrons kept asking about their drinks, which I’m sure slowed the line even more. The kids working here were getting their asses kicked. When my drink came out, shockingly, the woman calling my name said it right and I ran up to get my strawberry matcha. The first thing I noticed is that all the syrup sat at the bottom of the drink.

I absolutely hate drinks that are not mixed. It drives me BANANAS, to the point that I’m probably going to write a think piece on how Instagram and virality have changed the landscape (and flavors) of drinks at coffee shops. Aside from the syrup being at the bottom, the matcha is lighter than I would want it to be, which means it’s not as strong as I would like it to be. And I mean that by a long shot.

Is $10 for a strawberry matcha steep? Yes. Do they ask for a tip, too? Yes. Should you tip? Yes. They work really hard at the fair. So it’s $12 for a strawberry matcha. Now, here’s the thing. I would pay $12 for a strawberry matcha if it blew me away. Does this one? It doesn’t. But… it is the best matcha at the fair. So if you are in need of getting your matcha fix, unfortunately, this is the place.

But I’m begging someone, anyone, to debut a better matcha next year.

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Want to read more of my state fair content? Here are a few of the pieces I’ve worked on for the fair linked below!

I tried every single Loon Lake Iced Tea and ranked them from my least favorite to my favorite. Here’s the thing, though, I think ALL of these teas are good, so you really can’t go wrong, but if you just have the budget for one (or two), this list might help you narrow it down. After tasting them, I also have suggested pairings for what to enjoy with these teas, so that you can have the perfect state fair tea experience.

Plan to use this piece to help you figure out what tea to drink? The best way to say thank you is by becoming a paid subscriber at $50/year or $7/ month.

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8. Blueberry

This is one of the more fruit-forward drinks on Loon Lake’s menu. It’s also the sweetest option on the menu (yes, sweeter than cotton candy). If you’re not an iced tea person this is a good bet for you, and because it uses butterfly pea, it’s caffeine-free. It’s tea-light, fruit-forward, and served with rock candy on top. I really liked this for the first few sips, but as I kept drinking, it felt kind of one-note. If you’re a super fan of blueberry, your mileage might vary. Pair this drink with a lemon Dole soft serve cup from Tasti Whip for a great dessert mash up.

7. Dill

Not everything belongs in tea and I used to believe that was true of pickles. But as a pickle doubter, I don’t hate this tea! Did I want a full glass of it? No. But if you’re obsessed with pickles, you probably will. The salty rim adds depth to the tea, and unlike the caramel apple foam, doesn’t feel like a gimmick. “I mostly want to lick the salt rim,” my friend Delaney said. My friend Kelsey, however, said, “Quote me saying I hated this.” It’s divisive, setting the pickle lovers apart from the rest and there’s nothing more a pickle lover wants than to be seen as a true Pickle Lover. Pickles belong on burgers, of course, and so I’m pairing this tea with the burger at the Midway Men’s Club.

6. Caramel Apple

So many people adore this new tea from the fair, but I found it to be a bit too sweet, thought the foam on top was more of a trendy gimmick than anything else, and just felt like the apple flavor overpowered the tea. The best part is the caramel apple sucker that comes with it, and that’s not what you want to hear about a drink. Still, I know sometimes you just have to try the new drink. So if that’s you, here’s how to pair it. Right across the street at Taulelle’s Jurassic Corn Dogs, you can get the new pumpkin funnel cake. Pair these two together for a fun take on fall (it IS September) at the Minnesota State Fair.

5. Unsweetened

True tea lovers, this is for you. It has a strong tea flavor and lots of tannin to reset your palate after a day of eating fried food. It’s not a bitter black tea, meaning it still will quench your thirst (though it will dehydrate you so drink some water, too!). If it’s up to me, I’m pairing this with the grilled peach and goat cheese at The Produce Exchange.

4. Blood Orange

I thought this was going to be my number one tea. I’ve been saying for years how much I love it, but this is why we do things head-to-head: sometimes, you’ll be surprised. Still, I love this tea! It has a big kick of orange in it, with blood orange as the dominant flavor over the tea. My top three choices have more balance between the tea and flavoring. If you’re a big fan of all things orange and less interested in the tea, this is the drink for you. I was hoping I could tell you to pair this with the hot and fresh brownies for a blood orange and gooey chocolate combo, but man, those brownies were not good! So, instead, pair it with the death by chocolate mini donuts from The Donut Family.

3. Strawberry

I judged this head-to-head with all the Loon Lake iced teas and the strawberry iced tea from Strawberries ‘N Creme and this came in head and shoulders above that one. This one is less sweet and has a bit more of a tea flavor, so depending on what you’re interested in, something sweeter or something less sweet, you can pick your tea. I liked this one better. I think the strawberry tea is one of their more balanced, tannin-forward teas, and there’s something about strawberries at the state fair that just always hits right. For this pairing, we’re going same for same. Pair this with a Strawberries ‘N Creme cup from the booth that’s just up the street for a perfect bite.

2. White Peach

This tea reminds me of my favorite Snapple tea, but just slightly less sweet. My friends and I tried four teas one morning and unanimously ranked this as our number one among those four, fighting over the cup. This tea is one of the more summery feeling options and the peach doesn’t overpower the tea. Where the strawberry tea reads like strawberry then tea on the palate, this reads like peach first. Peach pairs really well with soft cheeses like feta, so pair this with Athena’s whipped feta from Dino’s Gyros.

1. Cotton Candy

Did I think I would like this tea? I did not. It’s the only tea I’ve never had before from Loon Lake, aside from the new Caramel Apple. But let me tell you, this tea ROCKS. This is the tea that put Loon Lake on the map and I’m so sorry I doubted it until now. It tastes like cotton candy. It sparkles in the sun. Holding it made me feel a little bit like a fairy. It’s one of the most unique drinks at the fair. Where you can get some of the flavors of teas elsewhere at the fair. Where else can you get this drink?!? It’s sweet, so don’t get this if you hate sweet drinks (it’s literally called cotton candy tea so don’t blame me if you get it expecting something else), but as someone who is usually not a lover of sweet drinks, I was obsessed. Pair this tea with cheese curds for a perfect sweet and salty combo.

GLORIOUS, isn’t it? Because I’m such an early morning fairgoer, I’ve worked my way through almost every single breakfast option, and I have to say that the best breakfast options at the state fair are often the unexpected, not the viral. So here are five darn good options for breakfast at the Minnesota State Fair, with only one of them being a classic.

My “Everyone Already Knows That Pick:” Hamline Church Dining Hall

Okay, I know if you’re a fairgoer you already know about this pick, but the reason I’m including it is because not everyone is a fair aficionado! If you are going to pick one dining hall, this is the one. And if you’ve never had breakfast at the fair before, this is the first place to start. This is the oldest running food hall at the fair, and for good reason: it slaps. My go-to order here is the Holey Hamloaf Breakfast Sandwich ($13.50), which is a sandwich packed with hamloaf (exactly what it sounds like), caramelized onions, and topped with a fried egg like a toad in the hole. Then I get a kid’s blueberry pancake, which is the same pancake they have at Al’s ($5). This year, there’s two new options at breakfast that most food writers fawned over: pie and a mini donut espresso shake up. I loved one, and I hated the other. Want to know what I think about those options? That, my friends, is just for paid subscribers.

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Still, I’m at the fair multiple times a year stuffing my face with carby goodness, and sometimes in the middle of the day, even I need a break for produce. We all know about the corn roast, but some of the other deep cuts aren’t as well known and they’re not easy to find by searching the food vendor lists. So this year, I ate a bunch of fresh produce at the fair and rounded up some of my favorites, no fryer oil required.

Why is this piece behind a paywall?

I don’t have a company credit card or full-time writer’s salary. I just have people like you powering my work. State fair content is expensive to make! I literalllllyyyyy just took $800 out of a cash machine. I have to take off work at my day job to write pieces like this (yes!! I have a day job). And while most of my work is outside of the paywall, paywalling pieces like this literally pays for my groceries, my cell phone bill, and my cats’ dentals.

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If you’re looking for coffee, click here!

Why is this piece behind a paywall?

I don’t have a company credit card or full-time writer’s salary. I just have people like you powering my work. State Fair content is expensive to make! I literalllllyyyyy just took $800 out of a cash machine. I have to take off work at my day job to write pieces like this (yes!! I have a day job). And while most of my work is outside of the paywall, paywalling pieces like this literally pays for my groceries, my cell phone bill, and my cats’ dentals.

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5th Worst: Dubai Whoopie Pie

Dino’s Gyros, $13

I’m going to start off by saying that most other food writers loved this whoopie pie. I’m the odd girl out. The fair is subjective and writers never fully align on the foods we love, but this one? I went back and tried it again after the rave reviews and I stand by it. The “cookie” in this is the consistency of a raw brownie and sticks to the top of your mouth and the pistachio is a weird sticky consistency. The crumble on top tastes stale. This doesn’t particularly taste like anything, not chocolate, not pistachio. For $13, it’s a total rip off. It just plain is not good.

4th Worst: Korean Bao Buns

Rooted & Wild by Snack House, $9

Gonna be honest, anything that defines itself as “chunk” doesn’t sound good to me and that’s how the meat inside of these was defined. But I was vegan for a decade and feel like I’m well positioned to judge vegan food. The bao on this is hard, not fluffy. It’s the consistency of cardboard and feels decidedly stale. The slaw on top is completely unseasoned, not even a whisper of salt or sauce graces it. The meat is acidic in a way that is not pleasant. All around, this is a textural nightmare.

3rd Worst: Pickle Pie

Lulu’s Public House, $12

I’m not sure which part of this I dreaded more: the pickle pie itself or the ranch and Cholula frosting. None of my friends were excited to eat this. The crust itself just tastes like flour. It’s gritty and super pale. Then it’s just like… a bunch of pickles underneath an equal amount of bad savory frosting, so that ratio is off. “No,” my friend Sophie said. I agree. It feels like eating plain cream cheese that someone put pickles on top of. But to Lulu’s credit, it’s really pickle-y. “There’s so many ways to eat a pickle. Why this way?” Sophie asked.

2nd Worst: The Fried and the Furious: Cubano Drift

Herbivorous Butcher, $18

Yes. I would rather eat pickle pie than this giant monster, which is sad! Because for $18 this is a great amount of food. There was too much dough, even though it was well fried. At the edges, I had multiple bites that were just dough. The filling was pretty… gloopy? I think it was because of the vegan swiss, but it kept getting stuck to the front of my teeth and I couldn’t get it off until I fully brushed my teeth. And the cuban pork just tasted like unseasoned seitan. The dipping sauce was fine, but it couldn’t overcome the gloop.

Actual Worst: Two Toned Bloody Mary

Urban Glow Mocktails, $9

This drink has one of my big drink pet peeves: it’s unmixed. If you put your straw right into the drink and take a sip, you’re going to get a sip of straight salsa that is NOT BLENDED. Here’s a live reaction of my friend Isa trying this drink.

I’m SHOCKED that some food writers and influencers are directing you towards this drink. It is truly nasty. It was the first thing we consumed all day and it held the title of worst food for the entire day. The tomato portion also tastes like tomato water. Mixed, it’s not better. If you want this drink, bring a side of chips. It’s essentially just really loose salsa or horrible gazpacho.

Want to see my full rankings of all the new foods I tried? Click below bestie!

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Yesterday I sort of struck out on dessert with the official new foods. People kept DMing me asking me about my dessert recommendation and I honestly didn’t have one. So I went out this morning to try five more new desserts and decided to rank all the desserts I tried in one place so you can track sweet treats!

The main question I got was: is the apple fries line worth it?

I’m going to be honest, I really didn’t want to find out. I’m skeptical of this new food and it’s giant line. But every other food writer said to get it and who am I not to listen to the bandwagon?

I entered the line at 10:03am, dreading the wait to the top. The line moved at a snail’s pace and one of the little girl’s behind me said, halfway to the top, “My tummy just rumbled.” Same, girl, same. By 10:13, it felt like I hadn’t moved an inch and I was watching my battery on my phone slowly disappear with dread (I forgot my charger at home). People kept exiting the line. I didn’t blame them. I was just glad that at this hour, most of the line was in the shade.

One of my readers was behind me with a gaggle of kiddos so I decided to ask her if they wanted to share with me. So you’re not just getting my review, but reviews of all the ages! Want to know what we thought of this and 16 other new sweet foods at the fair? Read on below!

Why is this piece behind a paywall?

I don’t have a company credit card or full-time writer’s salary. I just have people like you powering my work. State fair content is expensive to make! I literalllllyyyyy just took $800 out of a cash machine. I have to take off work at my day job to write pieces like this (yes!! I have a day job). And while most of my work is outside of the paywall, paywalling pieces like this literally pays for my groceries, my cell phone bill, and my cats’ dentals.

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It was hot. It was sweaty. It was… mostly okay and sometimes downright disgusting. Tomorrow, I’ll walk you through the biggest misses at the fair (if you want a sneak preview of that or to read my full rankings of every food I ate from my favorite to least favorite, you can click here).

Today, I'm writing to tell you the only foods I think you should add to list your year and it includes one new drink I tried yesterday that I didn’t put in my rankings.

Why is this piece behind a paywall?

I don’t have a company credit card or full-time writer’s salary. I just have people like you powering my work. State fair content is expensive to make! I literalllllyyyyy just took $800 out of a cash machine. I have to take off work at my day job to write pieces like this (yes!! I have a day job). And while most of my work is outside of the paywall, paywalling pieces like this literally pays for my groceries, my cell phone bill, and my cats’ dentals.

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This is my first year eating all of the official new foods (along with a select handful of unofficial ones) at the Minnesota State Fair in one day—and I’m doing it with my ragtag group of friends. We’re not just eating live from the state fair, we’re ranking live. I brought my laptop and back-up chargers and throughout the day, this piece will be updated as I eat the new foods. That means if you’re at the fair tonight, you’ll know what to get and what to skip.

This list will be ordered from my favorite to least favorite, with undoubtably funny commentary from my friends Sophie, Isa, Nayda, and Kelsey.

And… we’ve already started.

We started with an item that caused significant online controversy when one food writer did a whole bit about thinking the cookie was going to be horrible before even trying it: the Dill with it, Cookie at Urban Glow Mocktails. Which, okay, I get the uproar. I think that food writers shouldn’t really comment on food before they’ve tried it. We have a lot of influence. And also, I mean… just read the below and tell me if you’re excited to eat this.

Did I have my doubts about a cookie with dill and white chocolate? I sure did. Don’t you? That’s part of the fun of the fair!

Alongside the above controversial cookie, I tried the new NA Two-Toned Bloody Mary. Have I absolutely hated every single drink I’ve ever had from Urban Glow? Sure have! But I went in with an open mind for both of these foods. Maybe pickle and white chocolate is a power combo no one has discovered yet. Maybe salsa in a drink is, in fact, delicious, and not a textural nightmare on par with drinking vomit. And look, I’m not mad at one of my first bites being a bit of protein in the form of a Cheweenie.

Want to know what I think about these two new food items and… all the rest of them? JOIN THE PARTY BESTIE!

Oh and if you see me out there, say hi! We will give you a bite of whatever we’re noshing on and give you a sweet little cameo below. (Just don’t be weird, ok?)

Why is this piece behind a paywall?

I don’t have a company credit card or full-time writer’s salary. I just have people like you powering my work. State fair content is expensive to make! I literalllllyyyyy just took $800 out of a cash machine. I have to take off work at my day job to write pieces like this (yes!! I have a day job). And while most of my work is outside of the paywall, paywalling pieces like this literally pays for my groceries, my cell phone bill, and my cats’ dentals.

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The problem is… even if a food is really good, even if it’s somehow memorable after eating all the new foods, even if you’re excited to eat it again after the passage of a whole calendar year, the local news media just doesn’t cover it. It gets one shot, in the year it is new, and then it goes into oblivion as people are ready for the next crop of new foods.

I call this the “hype cycle” and I’ve written about it at length. As I’m prepping to go to the state fair tomorrow to eat all the new foods (Imodium: check, portable charger: check, giant wad of cash: check), I’m thinking about the ghost of new foods past. I went through my camera roll and looked at my notes from last year and there’s one single item from the 2025 new foods list that I’ll be eating again this year. And I think you should eat it, too.

Why is this piece behind a paywall?

I don’t have a company credit card or full-time writer’s salary. I just have people like you powering my work. State fair content is expensive to make! I literalllllyyyyy just took $800 out of a cash machine. I have to take off work at my day job to write pieces like this (yes!! I have a day job). And while most of my work is outside of the paywall, paywalling pieces like this literally pays for my groceries, my cell phone bill, and my cats’ dentals.

Behind the paywall, I also update you on what the run of show is gonna look like tomorrow, so you can get PUMPED for an all day live update at the fair.

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*After I released my list in 2025, The Star Tribune also released a list.

After I spent a few days drinking coffee at fair last year, I was over-caffeinated, under-slept, and ready to tell you what to drink.

I have four stellar options for you: one black coffee, two sweet coffees, and one off-menu affogato.

Why is this piece behind a paywall?

I don’t have a company credit card or full-time writer’s salary. I just have people like you powering my work. State fair content is expensive to make! I have to take off work at my day job to write pieces like this (yes!! I have a day job). And while most of my work is outside of the paywall, paywalling pieces like this literally pays for my groceries, my cell phone bill, and my cats’ dentals.

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Recently, a friend from up north told me she was going to the State Fair for the first time. While I was really excited for her, I was also a bit worried.

Most of the State Fair guides that are written in 2025 and 2026 are written to feature new content, which means they have the “best new” foods.

Often, though, the “best new” foods are nowhere near as good as classic bites. The push to try the most viral and newest thing around means that most people are having a worse fair experience than they otherwise might if they stuck with new foods. This might seem like a weird thing to say as I’m going around eating all the new foods at the fair for the first time this year, but I’m doing it because I want to help you eat the best 2-3 new foods, instead of combing through a bunch of pass or smash style lists that tell you to try 15 new foods. I’m doing it precisely because I want you to eat as many classics as you can and only veer from that trail if it’s really, really, really worth it.

The fair is once a year and I’ve always been surprised at how quickly people will pivot to the new pickle drink over the tried and true drinks that remind us of childhood.

This isn’t to say we should never try new foods, but entire itineraries made of them means that you are eating worse food than if you just stuck with the classics (most of the time).

So, to my friend Katie, and to all the people looking for a guide to the fair from a girl who has been going there since she was under one year old, this is my day of (mostly) classic foods at the State Fair (I’m defining that as over 20 years old).

Why is this piece behind a paywall?

I don’t have a company credit card or full-time writer’s salary. I just have people like you powering my work. State fair content is expensive to make! I have to take off work at my day job to write pieces like this (yes!! I have a day job). And while most of my work is outside of the paywall, paywalling pieces like this literally pays for my groceries, my cell phone bill, and my cats’ dentals.

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My response to that was a quick, “Hell no.”

I am mostly drawn to the classic foods at the Minnesota State Fair, releasing a guide about this last year, and I’ll be re-releasing that guide on Sunday with a couple of updates. I still stand by this being the best way to navigate the fair for the average person. We’re so obsessed with trying every single new restaurant, new coffee shop, and new food at the fair that we often are leaving our favorite places behind. This isn’t how I live my life. I go back to the same places again and again, because I want to see them stand the test of time.

And yet… while I tried a few new foods at the fair last year, I found myself thinking, “Damn, if I had tried this on day one, maybe I could have steered you away from this viral AND VERY BAD snack that everyone else is recommending.” (Looking at you Uncrustaburger.) Throughout the fair, people kept asking me if I was going to release a list of new foods. It’s, to date, the thing people ask me about the most, with someone even asking me in the dead of winter.

I finally had to admit that the people want this list and so… this year, I’ve assembled a group of my friends to run around the fair and bring me the new foods while I crack open my laptop, pack multiple portable chargers, and rank (yes, rank) foods live from the fair. Instead of doing a “smash or pass” style list, I’m going to rank the new foods from my favorite to least favorite, because often the “get this” lists are so long, it’s hard to know where to begin.

There are benefits to having editors, like helping with direction and not having typos and having to tell you when you’ve lost your way. But there are also benefits to not having editors–and this is one of them. During the State Fair, I’ll be writing live on day one with no delay as I eat these foods with my foodie friends. So if you also go on day one, you’ll be able to see updates as I go.

This is going to be one of the most intense and expensive days of food writing that I do in a calendar year. There are 32 new foods, not including new vendors and drinks (which for this first piece, I won’t be eating), and I’m running all of this with a ragtag team of friends, not other writers (everyone say THANK YOU to Sophie, Isa, Kelsey, and Nayda). Plus, this isn’t my full-time job, and I’m literalllllyyyyyyyyyyy taking PTO to be able to do this. Thus, this piece will be behind a paywall. If you want to support your local indie critic in this wild endeavor, become a paid subscriber!

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See you out there. 🫡

Unlike most commercial fishermen, Kutscheid didn’t grow up in a fishing family. He was a teacher for 12 years before starting a job at Coastal Seafoods in 2023. Through that job, he learned about the commercial fishing trade on the Mississippi and was determined to break into the field with no experience. He asked fisherman after fisherman to mentor him, all of them saying no. He was determined and kept asking. One day, someone said yes. He mentored under him and then went out on his own. “It was a lot of trial and error. A lot of failing,” he told me.

“Like not catching fish?” I asked.

“Oh no,” he said, “Much worse.” He had days where the flooded river took 300-400 nets downstream, or those nets got caught in the minefield of branches under the water and got stuck for good, or there was too much of a good thing and too many fish might mean the net is too heavy to bring back onto the boat. The river is dynamic, and eventually, he got the hang of it, fishing for buffalo fish. The goal was never just to fish. It was also to host fish fries, and so he reached out to Modern Times to ask if they might be open to hosting fish fries in the back of their restaurant in 2025. They said yes and he moved in with a pop-up tent and bayou classic fryer.

Once you see Fish Fry, it feels decidedly Powderhorn. The back of Modern Times has natural, aged picnic tables, a bench which has been partially painted green, and a couple of tables with chairs starting to accumulate a tiny bit of rust.

The Fish Food sign is hung with two different gold chains, and behind the sign are two people working on cooking equipment you’re more likely to see camping than in a restaurant. Even the fryer is heated on an open flame.

Everything is carried in what I can only describe as tubs you can get at Home Depot or coolers. The menu leans against coolers and it’s often tiny: three items. On my first visit it was a flathead sandwich ($14), channel catfish fish cheeks on grits ($8), and a fennel slaw ($5). Rounding out the menu was an N/A Heineken or La Croix (I got the Heineken, because $5 for a La Croix is highway robbery, though if it was $3, I would totally order it). Other visits had similar small menus, like a filet o’ fish, smoked fish dip, and salad. The cost of the sandwich, side, and salad stayed the same no matter what they were serving.

*I normally go to restaurants five times for review. For pop-ups like these where my ability to go is more limited, I go three times.

I came to fish late in life, thinking I was allergic to them until July of 2025. After I learned I could eat them, I went all out eating fish. I didn’t just eat filets or center cuts of salmon, but I dove into the fish version of offal, or the parts of the fish that aren’t as sexy. My two favorite parts of the fish are milt (male reproductive organ) and fish cheeks–cuts that most people who have been eating fish all their lives often have not tasted. And so seeing fish cheeks on the menu meant that I put this on my calendar immediately. The texture of fish cheeks is akin to scallops, and so is the look (circular). Unlike fish, which is flaky, these tear more like beef–or a pull-apart loaf. They’re also silky, buttery, and often juicer than standard cuts of fish, which probably isn’t what you think of when you imagine the muscle that chews. Mostly, when muscles are used over and over, they become tougher. Not so here.

In other parts of the world, fish cheeks are considered a delicacy, and they’re sometimes called the filet mignon of fish, but in the US, the word “cheek” turns people away, meaning that most people who claim to be fish lovers haven’t eaten one of the best cuts of fish. The ones at Fish Food are worth ordering. Blackened channel catfish cheeks sat atop actually good grits, which are just as much a delicacy in the Midwest as rare fish cheeks. This was a rustic dish, topped with red pepper, corn, parsley, and green onion. It was hearty, putting a Midwestern spin on this dish that’s normally reserved for finer presentations. It felt perfect to be served in the back of Modern Times.

The other side I ordered had equal appeal: a smoked fish dip served with rippled chips, radish, carrot, and beet for dipping.

Ample chives were mixed in and sprinkled on top, along with tiny bits of smoked fish, but the best part of the dip was the hit of lemon. Most fishermen might hold back on the citrus, wanting the smoked fish they spent so long trying to catch to shine. But the lemon in the dip makes it taste like Not Just Another Fish Dip, but like a summer dip Molly Baz might dream up. Lemon heavy, smoke light, it was perfect for the almost 100-degree day I ate it on. These sides were always exceptional, worth ordering, and signature: things you really can’t find anywhere else.

Salads, on the other hand, needed a bit more oomph. With all of the salads, more like slaws, I wanted a bit more something. One salad advertised a lemon poppyseed dressing, but it didn’t taste like lemon or poppyseed. I wanted more acid, more salt, just… more. The “more” could have been anything: a creamier dressing, a bit more oil, a touch of vinegar, or herbs. I wanted the one non-fish item to shine, and it’s not that it would take all that much to bring it up to snuff. I wanted Kutscheid to be as bold here as he was with the fish-forward parts of his menu, trusting himself to be punchier.

Sandwiches make up for any salad faults, though. All sandwiches are served on a toasted bun, with fish poking out the sides, and the filet o’ fish was no different. My most fish-loving friend joined me to eat this sandwich. There’s no one better qualified to judge this specific sandwich than them. During Lent, they go to McDonald’s to get the two-for-$3 deal in their own words, “More than I’d like to admit.” They housed this one. When we bit into it, the crust shattered in the back of our teeth. When I asked them how it compared, they took their hands and sort of cut the air, “No comparison,” they said. Then, as if apologizing to their beloved McDonald’s sandwich, they said, “But that’s not saying the original isn’t good.”

“Sure,” I said, understanding the need to defend the classic but knowing that McDonald’s wasn’t anywhere close to the oversized cut of fresh-caught fish I had in my hands. These fish are as fresh as they get, caught on Monday, then bled, butchered, and allowed to rest before being served on Friday, letting rigor mortis pass. When fish go through rigor mortis, the enzymes in the meat break down, and they emerge more tender and meatier, meaning that you’re getting fish at its best.

My favorite sandwich I had, though, was a flathead catfish sandwich. Flathead rarely makes its way into commercial markets, because you can’t catch it at high enough volume for selling to make sense. “In order to get it,” Kutscheid told me, “You really have to buy it from someone selling it on the river.” Or, you can get it at Modern Times.

This sandwich is covered in slaw, onions, a zippy chili mayo, and ice pickles. Unlike refrigerator pickles that are named for where you pickle them, ice pickles are named for how they taste. They’re crisp, icy, crunchy. These sweet-and-sour pickles make this fish sandwich. Yes, the fish itself is excellent, but a sandwich is the sum of its parts. And these pickles took it over the top from great to best fish sandwich I’ve had in the Twin Cities. I had this sandwich twice, and both of my dining companions agreed: there are no better fish sandwiches on order, at least not ones that we’ve had.

On my first visit, we only got one of these sandwiches. But my friend and I ordered a second sandwich immediately after finishing the first one, even though my friend had a friend arriving from the airport. The sandwich was so good, they left their friend to use the door code and walk into their home alone. If that’s not a testament to how good it is, I don’t know what is. We handed the sandwich back and forth bite for bite and scooped up the bits of fish flesh that fell out of the sandwich with the last tiny pieces of bread. On my second visit, I knew better. My friend and I ordered two sandwiches.

Is there any better way to spend a hot summer Friday in Powderhorn? Me thinks not. You have a few more chances to do it: August 21st (tomorrrroooowwww), September 11th, and September 25th from 5:00pm-9:00pm. Get there early. People who follow Fish Food are devoted. You have no one but yourself to blame if you show up late and there’s a line, or worse, they’re sold out.

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★★1/2: Fish Food is excellent and while fish is consistent, the salad is the reason for the ½ star drop from 3 to 2.5.

My three favorite bites: This is less applicable here than with other reviews, but here’s my order: NA beer, side, sandwich.

Where to sit for the best service: Sit in the shade, babe.

Good for: Fish lovers, Powderhorn residents looking for a neighborhood vibe, and people who care about farm-to-table cooking.

My one big tip: Get there early. Like 5:00pm early.

__

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!

I’m writing from a hotel room just outside of Duluth, with a white noise machine blaring. I pack it, usually, for the dogs, but tonight I need it for a different reason. The toilet in my hotel room runs every five minutes or so. The shower drips. The AC has an uneven tone to it, like the sound of a wave, except it’s a metal, mechanical sound. Bzzt, it crescendos, Tzzb, it decrescendos. I asked at the front desk about a different room, and before moving all my things, the front desk attendant offered to let me look in another room. “They’re all the same,” she said with a shrug. “With their own problems.” I did check two others out, and both did, indeed, have their own problems, so I stuck with the one at the end of the hall, far from the pool and the sounds of breakfast.

One of my dogs, the oldest, lies on the floor in front of the white noise machine, like you or I might in front of a window. I wonder if the sound is comforting to him, familiar. It normally runs in my house all day and all night. It’s the sound he hears when he sleeps, the sound he hears echoing in my bedroom when I’m not there. My youngest dog is curled in a ball at my feet, snoring. And my middle dog, who passed a few months ago in the middle of chemo, sits in a picture frame on my bedside table.

I’m thinking of a woman who I recently met at a fancy restaurant bar. “It must be glamorous,” she said of my life on the road. Fulfilling, yes. Glamorous, no. “Does it get lonely?” she asked me as she took a sip of her cocktail that had a single slim ice cube in it.

**

At home, in a house I once thought was my forever home, I feel lonely sometimes. There are three bedrooms, specifically chosen for the idea that one day, maybe, I would have a child. In 2023, I wanted a child badly enough that I thought I might try to have one alone. The problem–and it’s a big problem–is that in order for me to have children who don’t share the gene that gave me cancer at 34, I would need to zap out half the embryos. This in and of itself is a problem, sure, but there are two other problems with this: the cost of the test to determine which of those embryos needed to be tossed and the fact that my egg reserves were lower than other women my age.

In 2023, a doctor laid out a piece of paper in front of me and did the math. At the top, she started with all the eggs. Then she narrowed those eggs down to how many embryos I might have, drawing little lines like you might for a family tree. She X-ed some out because it is unlikely that they would all be viable. Then she X-ed out half the embryos again, assuming 50% carried the gene, and in the end, I was left with 1.5 viable embryos, or as she put it, “One or two shots.”

“Now, you might have more than that,” she said, “Or–”

She didn’t need to finish her sentence, “I might not have any.”

“Right,” she said. “But then we could do another round of egg retrieval.”

When I got home, I sat in an empty room that would eventually become my office and imagined it as a nursery. I was 31, and like all things in my life, I didn’t want to wait for a partner or a spouse to do the things I wanted to do. I wanted the baby.

**

When I weighed the decision of whether I would try or not, I found myself in infertility Facebook groups and talking to infertility organizations. I wanted to hear stories of people who had conceived with low odds and people who hadn’t. The people who had been successful called their babies miracles. When I asked them in direct messages if they would do it all over again, they said, “Yes.” The havoc wreaked on their bodies, the rounds and rounds of IVF that made them feel on the edge of insanity, the cost was all worth it. “‘Do it,” they said, hoping their miracle was contagious and would pass onto me.

The other women, the ones who did not conceive, their stories were ones of counting down the embryos until there were zero. Their stories were about rounds of those same difficult treatments, all the hormones going into their body to prepare for a child and then… nothing. Many of them told me they took out loans or accumulated credit card debt for the chance at a child that did not come. These women didn’t want to tell me, “Don’t do it.” They wanted me to have hope. But when I asked them, “Would you do it all over again if you had a choice?” all of them said, “No.”

How do I weigh these two very disparate things? Do I, like optimists, hope to be in the minority? Or, do I hear my doctor inform me that after multiple rounds of egg retrieval my chances of conception are probably below 30% and say, “I’m going for a VERY EXPENSIVE miracle?” I am sure there are other women who would have tried to have a moonshot baby, but I’m a person who has never stepped foot in a casino. I’ve never bought as much as a pull tab, never bet on a single horse. I don’t play the game when I know the odds.

In the fall of that year, my fallopian tubes came out. I entered a clinical trial to see if fallopian tube removal prevents ovarian cancer in a high-risk population.

For months before the surgery, I traveled the country and stopped into every boutique children’s store I saw. At one, in Portland, there were matching outfits for mothers and daughters. I remember the way it felt to see one where both outfits were covered in teeny, tiny strawberries. I have always dressed a bit like Ms. Frizzle and always hoped to have matching leather jackets with a baby–how twee, how silly, how fun.

With a tiny dress in my hand, the tears pooled in my eyes in the store, and the woman who worked the front asked me, “Has it been hard?” She meant conceiving, and I didn’t know how to tell her that it was a different kind of pain. It wasn’t the pain of trying. It was the pain of, “There’s really no point in trying at all.” How do you grieve something you didn’t even try for?

When my fallopian tubes were removed, my ability to conceive naturally was carved out of my body. And for why? To maybe save my life. I remember when I woke up from the surgery, there was a feeling of loss. I hadn’t been greedy, hoping for four or five children. I had just wanted one. I felt her in the room, hanging out like a ghost.

**

My ovaries were still inside of me, but with each year, the eggs diminished. I found myself in a house I bought for a child I likely would never have, in the school district I wanted my kid to be in, by the playground I used to walk to with kids I nannied because it was my favorite one. It has always felt a little bit like it was haunted by a ghost. I changed my dating profile to be as clear as I could about this, with phrases like, “I can’t have kids, but I’d love to meet yours!” Still, I found myself on dates with so many men who wanted children that it baffled me.

I told each of them the truth. I would try. I would. But under circumstances that felt impossible. They needed to be able to afford IVF, or have a benefit for it at work, and I wanted to stay home for the first few years of the child’s life. In this economy, there aren’t many people who fit that bill, and so we often went our separate ways if someone wanted children.

Then, two things happened at the same time.

The first is that I met someone named Devon* and they said to me, “There’s something I haven’t told you, and I feel bad for not telling you.” Sitting across from each other, they confessed, “I think I want to raise a child.”

*Devon uses he and they pronouns, and so you will see both used here.

I felt like a balloon that had been shot with a dart and instantly burst open. I was living in Groundhog Day. Then, it went from I think I want to, to, I want to. It was something I had heard before. Being face to face with a woman who can’t or likely can’t makes people really think about what they want. I don’t blame them. I have been a conduit for more men than I’d like to admit, finally realizing they want children. It is a painful thing to experience, your supposed inability to have children being the reason another person decides, “Yes, this is the beautiful life I want to live.”

When I told Devon the spiel I had given so many times, it now hurts to say, they did not say, “No.” They said a very sensible, “Let me run the numbers.”

The second thing that happened is that I went into chemo-induced menopause, with my ovaries shut down, maybe to restart again, and maybe not.

These two things happened at the same time. Like maybe I was so close to a dream that was always destined to die.

CHAPTER 2

I kept dating during my cancer treatment. It was a distraction from the hard things going on, but it also just made me feel normal. I changed how I dated during this time. I swiped left and right not on hotness but based on, “Do I think that this person could handle the cancer?”

Before I gave people my phone number, I told them all I had cancer. Most people with cancer wait longer, but I felt like I wanted to know immediately if this was something they could handle. I expected most of them to tell me that they did not want to go out on a date with me. But the only person who ever told me that was the person I was dating at the time I was diagnosed.

Every date I went on with a person who seemed unafraid of my cancer was one I took seriously. In many ways, this was a deeply unsexy time in my life. I was fatigued. I lost over half my hair. I puffed up all over. I was “toxic” much of the time, meaning no one could kiss me. But every single person who said things like, “Fine by me,” or just simply, “I’m sorry that’s going on. Not a dealbreaker,” was someone I felt drawn to. These were people who could do in sickness. People who can do in sickness are spouse material.

I went on dates with a variety of people during this time, like a man who brought flowers to the first date and then told me he missed me two days later, leaving me baffled. There was a librarian who spent the entire date talking about his fancy, vintage jacket from Japan and telling me about low-calorie swaps for Reese’s. There was a bisexual illustrator who worked in weapons. I had to ask them to repeat where they worked, because I was sure I misheard. Finally I had to admit, “I can’t date someone who illustrates manuals for… war criminals.”

There was a man seven years my junior who I took for pizza in the suburbs. While we waited for it, he wrapped his arms around me and put his chin on my head. He joked that if I lost my hair, he would call me Cailou, and while most people might think this crass, I found it endearing. He didn’t give a shit if I was going to lose my hair. The problem was that our lives were so different, there was no way to join them.

There was a real, actual shaman who I went on seven dates with until I finally said, “Oh my god, why don’t you touch me?” He sent a multiple-page long worded document about why he did not touch me. SEVEN PAGES. I did not read past the first paragraph, which told me all I needed to know to confirm this man was not my husband.

Then, there was a man who was seemingly written into the universe for me. He was a blue-collar communist who managed all aspects of a building at a retirement home. He wanted to move to the country, found the city overwhelming, read constantly, and he drove a truck. He wore flannel and rock t-shirts to every date. He sent me selfies from the roof he was fixing or a thumbs-up next to a boiler or photos of the meals he cooked every single night in a tiny, crappy kitchen. He was sober, but he smoked like a chimney. When I told people about him, they laughed. More than one person said, “That’s your husband.” One friend said, “Is this a fantasy? Did you make this guy up?” I didn’t. He was real. And being beside him felt good.

There was just one problem. On every date I was on with him, I thought about Devon.

**

Devon and I met outside on a patio when it was still technically winter. It was a patio that was open, mostly, year-round at Hai Hai. The patio butted up against the bar on one side, with windows that would open, so I felt safe dining there without a mask during the early days of treatment. The day we met, we weren’t the only people on the patio. It was forty degrees out, and people around town knew that Hai Hai was the place to go. The patio was covered, so there was no snow, while most other patios were waiting to “dry out.”

I was less than a week out of my second chemo, in a precious window where I tried to protect my mouth from things like heavily fried foods (they could cut open my cheeks) or spicy food (it could cause mouth sores). When Devon ordered, he wanted a spiiiicy dish of cauliflower and fried chicken. I didn’t tell them about my mouth, I just said yes. Sitting across from him felt like both a mix of being with someone familiar and someone altogether foreign to me. I couldn’t read them, but conversation flowed. We talked about his father who had cancer–and then my cancer. We were both bisexual, so we talked about that. Operation Metro Surge had just ended, and for both of us, we had given so much of our time to fighting it, we were navigating how to live our lives again. He still had a whistle around his neck, that’s how fresh it was.

At the end of the date, we hugged and went our separate ways. I was composing a text message to them about how I wasn’t sure if they were interested, but if they were, I would like to go on another date. Before I could send it, he had texted me. He said he had forgotten the plant he wanted to give me in his car. He said that he would give it to me next time. That was clear enough for me. I deleted my text.

**

Devon and I didn’t really date the way I was used to. We kind of meshed lives. On our third date, we went to trivia with my friends. On our sixth date, I went over to their friend’s Easter party and participated in the most competitive egg hunt I ever experienced. I took him bowling with my best friend, who usually had harsh things to say about my dates. Instead, here, there were only glowing reviews. I cooked for him and invited his friends over for brunch when the first ramps of the season poked up from the ground. I made them quiche, a crisp of last season’s peaches and blueberries, and bacon from my favorite farmer.

Before we had been dating for a month, my dog died. They came over with flowers, saying goodbye by kissing his forehead. And then he came with me to a wedding seven weeks into dating. I didn’t know how to refer to him, so I just called him “Devon.” The next day, my cat died. I felt like all around me, my life was falling apart. In a hard year, they were a bright spot. I always looked forward to seeing them, always left feeling better than when I arrived.

When it was just us, we watched Married at First Sight Australia, which we started like a prayer on our fifth date. The prayer? Maybe we can stay together long enough to finish this together. I took them with me on restaurant review visits. We watched television in his basement while he bench pressed and squatted multiple hundreds of pounds. In some ways, we moved at a glacial pace, not kissing for many dates–and in others, we moved fast enough that it might throw someone who is afraid of commitment into a panic attack. Our relationship bloomed around things other than the physical. It bloomed around both of us trying to figure out what a life might look like together.

Normally, I dated people with a lot more distance, in bite-sized timestamps, at distinct locations. 90 minutes in a restaurant. Two hours in a coffee shop. An hour at a market. It took a long time for me to let someone into my home. It had been almost two years since someone stayed the night at my house. To date this way was foreign to me, and I was doing it as my life fell apart. It was vulnerable and tender, for this to happen at such a hard time in my life.

I was falling for Devon–and I was worried that the failure of my body would doom it from the outset. Sitting across from them at A Bar of Their Own, tears in both of our eyes as we discussed the potential of breaking up over this whole mess about kids, I felt the pull to be a mother again. It was one of the things I kept feeling since I was diagnosed. All around me, my life was breaking, and still I yearned for a child. Cancer made me want that more. Made me hunger for it more. It was so early for these conversations, but that’s dating in your thirties. Sometimes, you have to get down to brass tax and figure these things out before anyone gets too attached.

After meeting Devon, that desire to be a mom came out of the place I buried it like it was a zombie. I called friends in tears, telling them about how haunted I felt by motherhood. Two offered to give me their embryos after they went through IVF. Another said, “Look, if you want it this badly, you should try.” Someone else said, “Okay, let it out, you have to cry about this.” And a very dear friend said, “You made that decision because you knew how hard the road was.” It was true, but aren’t all hard roads easier to walk with someone else than alone?

In the end, Devon and I broke up for reasons unrelated to children before we finished that season of Married at First Sight. There wasn’t really a question about what was next: we decided to be friends. Dating them during my cancer was one of my biggest bright spots–and getting to deepen my relationship with them as a friend has been a bright spot, too. It wasn’t meant to be like this, but in infertility there is sometimes a window where you realize someone was your last shot to have children. Usually, it’s age, but in this case, it was ability. I left the relationship feeling sure about the death of this dream, with a clock counting down: the clock for when my doctors wanted my ovaries out. “A year,” my doctor said, “Max.” Then, like an afterthought, “The sooner the better.”

Another, different doctor said, “It would probably be best for the uterus to go, too, so we can be done with this cancer nonsense.” The way he said it, “Cancer nonsense,” was so deeply unserious and deathly serious at the same time. The one thing I ever waited for a partner for was delaying my preventative double mastectomy in the hopes that I would be able to find my life partner before cutting off my breasts and reducing my desirability in the dating pool. And now I had cancer. Why? Because of a decision I made based on some imaginary person. I didn’t want to wait on unpromised hopes of having a child with someone I loved and get cancer I could have prevented… again.

There are women who would risk death for their unborn children. There are women who delay cancer treatment for their unborn children. There are women who go into debt for their unborn children. There are women who wreak known havoc on their bodies for a slim-to-none chance at unborn children. This is what we are taught to do as women: put unborn children before yourself.

In June, I decided to do the most unmotherly thing a woman can do. While hooked up to my last chemo drip on June 10th, I made the decision to rip everything out as soon as I could. I didn’t want to do it again. I didn’t want to be here again, with nurses in hazmat suits prepping drugs to kill the cancer cells inside of me. My doctor was right. I was cursed with a bad hand in the genetic lottery. Every day with my reproductive organs is another day in which I could get a different, harder to treat cancer.

I was single. There wasn’t a plan for a “few years for now” where I could hold on. I had to live the way I always do. I had to make a choice on how to live without a partner, instead of waiting for one. It was too high a risk. Everything had to come out.

It was, again, the death of the dream. Like deja vu. Except the first time, I had a list of requirements where maybe I would try, like I left the door open a crack. And this time, the wind–or a ghost–blew the door shut.

My surgery will happen in the winter. When I wake up from surgery, the hope of being a mother will end. They will take it all: the ovaries, the uterus, the cervix. I won’t save my eggs.

CHAPTER 3

I am in a shitty hotel room outside Duluth, with a white noise machine blaring. I am thinking of selling my house, of getting rid of the ghost that haunts it, of selling the house to someone with children. I am thinking of my grief about all of this, about how I thought I laid it to rest and it came back one more time like the roar of a lion. I am thinking of the woman who called my life glamorous, who asked me if I ever feel lonely on the road.

In this hotel room, with my two dogs, I do not feel lonely. Something only those who wanted children and could not have them, or did not have them, know is that one of the best salves for being childfree-not-by-choice is doing things you could not do with a baby in your arms. It’s what I do whenever I feel the grief.

In this hotel room, shivering with an AC I cannot turn off or turn down, I am thinking about the other life I could have lived if I had tried to have children younger or had I gone ahead and tried to birth a moonshot baby. Before I start to cry about it, I pick up my keys, and I drive to a dive bar that no baby should ever enter. Sitting in a bar stool at Kom-on-Inn, drinking Diet Coke, I feel content without a partner, without a child, because the freedom of the road is something you can only do without anything to tether you. And do I hope one day to have a partner to tether me? I do. But where are they? Not here. This is my life that I am living alone, and it’s a good life to live alone.

A man next to me says a little too loudly, “Are you really drinking Diet Coke?” I nod. He drunkenly asks, “Why?” And I tell him the truth, “There’s no one around to tell me what to do.” He laughs, like drunk men do, and I smile a tight-lipped smile and turn my back to him.

With no one to check in on me, with no one to call and say goodnight to, with no family waiting back home, the world cracks open in a beautiful way because of–no, really, because of–my inability to have the thing I once wanted the most. In another life, maybe I’m rocking a baby or reading a picture book and smoothing my daughter’s hair or maybe I’m standing in the kitchen finally eating a snack after a day that was nonstop parenting. And in this world, I am here in this bar with a drunk man yelling questions about Diet Coke at me while I am full of grief.

If it were up to me, I would choose the life with the baby. But the cards were dealt a different way. The drunk man starts yelling questions at someone else. I take out a book at the bar and start to read as the band starts up again. It’s not glamorous, no, but how can you be lonely when there are so many new places and new people on the road?

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Shots are often close-up, with hands holding onto bowls, chopsticks, or in some cases, tweezers. Photos of the team are often serious. It’s a classic shot: chefs with their arms crossed or standing side by side, frowning. The vibe of the videos is another thing entirely, with chef/owner Antony Gor smiling and speaking warmly to the camera.

The social media presence isn’t the only glimmer of how Gor’s concept mirrors the restaurant culture across the country. The founding of SoL is similar, too, to how many young chefs are getting their start nowadays: pop-ups. Exclusive SoL supper clubs were (and still are) held at places like distilleries, coffee shops, or open fields. The restaurant came from the pop-up, but it diverges in significant ways, leaving behind the tasting menu for casual fare.

One look at that casual menu featuring congee, French toast soaked in tea syrup, peanut chili noodles where the peanut butter and the chili crisp are made in house, and most items ending in .88 (a number that symbolizes good fortune in China) and you might imagine that SoL Hong Kong Café lives in a trendy neighborhood in Chicago or is about to be blown up by a viral video in LA. Except, SoL Café is somehow about as opposite of LA as you can get, in a city with under 90,000 residents, sitting at the edge of Lake Superior, in the neighborhood of Lakeside, Duluth.

As soon as Gor was old enough to reach the stove, his parents taught him how to make eggs and fried rice, but unlike many chefs, he doesn’t have core memories of being inspired by food in his youth. He worked in restaurants that family members owned in the summers and started cooking in college in St. Paul. “I had a long way to go,” he said to me in an interview. When he graduated from college in 2020, he left the food industry. He thought it was permanent. He became a software engineer, moving to New York with friends. Then he found himself couchsurfing in Duluth. Tired of New York, he decided to make it his home. He moved to Duluth in 2023, having fallen in love with the lake and the slower pace of life.

In late 2024, he was tired of his job in software and started to plan hosting pop-ups. That’s where SoL Supper Club was born. In February 2025, he hosted his first pop-up at now-closed Palestinian restaurant Falastin, having no idea that in less than a year, he would open a restaurant in the exact spot he got his start. In September of 2025, he quit his job with nothing lined up on the other side, not being able to stand another day of the corporate grind.

He planned to pinch pennies and get by doing a pop-ups a month when the opportunity to move into the building he had his first pop-up fell in front of him. It was his dream. It was also a huge leap. Nothing in his life moved as quickly as the opening of his restaurant. Shedding the tasting menu format of his pop-ups, he settled on serving breakfast and lunch. The spot used to be a diner and he wanted to honor its history. But he wanted to do it his way, honoring his heritage and the styles of cafes that his father loved so much, too.

Turning away from the fine dining elements of his well-styled pop-ups, 28-year-old Gor envisioned a casual restaurant serving breakfast and lunch inspired by Cha Chaan Tengs, or Hong Kong diners that blend Cantonese food with Western fare. Growing up in Houston, Gor went to a couple of these restaurants with his dad, who loved them.

The vibe of SoL Café is intimate, with soft indie music playing over a single bluetooth speaker and Chinese lanterns hanging up along the ceiling. People often ask me about restaurants that are quieter, where you can hear your dining companion without shouting. This is one of them. In the main dining room, the music is soft enough that you can talk to each other, but in the back room, the music is but a faint whisper. It feels more like a home than the average restaurant, likely due to the large amount of light, the plants, and the decorations, but also because that’s part of the intention: a soft, warm place you can come at any time of day.

Asian restaurants that serve breakfast on weekdays are rare in Minnesota. Often, finer dining Asian restaurants or bakeries serve brunch on select weekend days, with a handful serving breakfast on weekdays, most notably, nationally acclaimed Diane’s Place.

So when I saw a Cha Chaan Teng in Duluth, I knew I had to go. On my most recent trip, I went to SoL Café for breakfast every single day. It was the reason for my trip. I wanted to spend a week eating Gor’s food, stepping into his Hong Kong-style diner, and devouring Chinese sausage and congee.

“Breakfast is hard for us,” Gor told me. “We have a bunch of regulars who love the congee, but people don’t come through the doors as much as you would think. I keep doing it because it’s something that we believe in.”

To entice people in the door, Gor nicknames congee “Cantonese Grits,” an apt comparison, though of course the dish uses rice instead of corn and the consistency leans silky and smooth instead of thick and creamy. This dish comes out to the table soaked with tare, a Japanese sauce made with a base of their house-seasoned soy sauce. The porridge itself tastes like rich, deep housemade chicken broth punctuated with furikake. I mixed everything together: the tare, the porridge, the furikake, and with each bite, I found myself making audible, “Mmms,” thankfully in the back room as the only diner so as not to creep out the other guests.

The congee is served with a corkscrew-shaped Chinese donut that is perfect for dipping. I ordered my congee with pork belly, an extreme indulgence at 9:00am, but I figured, “It’s close enough to bacon.” Every bite was layered, nuanced, and deep, making it one of the most complex (and delicious) bowls of congee I’ve ever had.

For lovers of more traditional breakfast plates, there’s the breakfast platter, which has two eggs, rice, Spam, and Chinese sausage. This sausage bursts with the flavor of soy sauce and a subtle sweetness, making it perfect for lovers of maple sausage, or as Gor says, “Think of it like a teriyaki pork belly sausage.”

Or there’s a Hong Kong breakfast sandwich served on croissant bread and filled with eggs, house Kewpie, and Spam. I dipped mine in the housemade chili crisp, which has the classic floral flavor of Szechuan peppercorns and is chunky with large bits of chiles, garlic chips, shallots, and peanuts running through it. Over 15 spices go into this crisp, which can (and should) be added on to almost every dish on the menu.

One of the dishes that was most memorable on my visits was the Okonomiyaki… with a twist. Okonomiyaki is a Japanese cabbage pancake that normally has rough edges from the cabbage. Visually, the cabbage runs through the pancake batter like veins. It leans cabbage heavy, and not like an American pancake at all. But at SoL Café, the dish comes out looking like a traditional diner pancake, except it’s drizzled with Kewpie and tonkatsu sauce. It crosses between sweet and savory and would be perfectly at home doused in sugar or those savory sauces.

That same combination of Kewpie and tonkatsu is found on the lunch menu, on a katsu sandwich which is served on pillow-y bread that dents as you pick it up in your hands. The inside of the bread is toasted, while the outside stays untouched, and the disparate crunches of cabbage and fried chicken play well with the softness of the bread. These two dishes showcase the Japanese influences that Gor brings into his restaurant, which is a common theme in similar restaurants in Hong Kong.

On the fully sweet side of breakfast is the Hong Kong French toast. When the French toast came out, the first thing I smelled was a swirl of housemade peanut butter. This French toast is exceptionally soft due to the use of the croissant bread that serves as the base of sandwiches. It fell apart without a need for a knife. This dish is finished with a dusting of cookie crumbles, making it more akin to a breakfast dessert than a basic French toast. Like its savory breakfast counterparts, the magic in this dish is the layering: assam black tea-infused syrup cuts through the richness of the peanut butter and the cookie crumbles to make a dish that reads sweet without being cloying.

Cha Chaan Teng translates to “tea restaurant,” and so going into SoL Café for breakfast without ordering milk tea is like going to a steakhouse and not ordering steak: a major faux pas. My recommendation is the oolong milk tea, which was sweetened with the perfect amount of palm sugar.

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When people talk to me about why they read my writing and why they like my work, one of the things that people bring up is that I’m independent, and the other thing people bring up is that I cover the entire state of Minnesota. Being independent means that I don’t have a company credit card or a salary. I’m funded entirely by my subscribers (that’s you!)!

Reviews themselves are expensive and part of the reason that I’m the only critic that covers the entire state of Minnesota is that it’s even more expensive to do so. If I split the cost of my hotel between the two pieces I worked on while I was up here, lodging alone cost $334.50. Food for this review cost over $250.

Factoring in gas means that this review cost over $700 to write.

Restaurants like SoL Hong Kong Café deserve to be reviewed, and it’s my mission to go out to all the corners of the state to review them. If you read my work and you want to support independent restaurant criticism across the state of Minnesota, becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to do that. It’s $50 a year or seven dollars a month to sign up, and signing up gets you access to some of my most-read pieces like: my favorite cake donut in the state of Minnesota, my guide to Duluth, and a list of my favorite Twin Cities steaks, and my favorite fries in the Twin Cities.

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While breakfast is bangers all the way up and down, lunch and dinner had a couple misses. Take, for instance, the crispy rice with salmon. The rice was fried a bit too long, making it more hard than crispy, though I liked how the salmon salad on top read like a take on tuna salad versus most salmon crispy rice dishes, which are served with spicy salmon à la the sushi rolls. Another item that had consistency issues was the 5-spice gingersnap cookie. While the flavor of this cookie delivered on its promise of warming spices and Szechuan, the consistency was slightly too hard, meaning that I had to break it into small pieces with my hands because I couldn’t break into it with my teeth. These are easy fixes and didn’t dampen the rest of my experience with the lunch and dinner menu.

The dumplings up and down the menu make up for these errors–and if I were visiting again, would be the heart of what I’d order.

The house dumplings are one of the signature dishes at SoL Hong Kong Café. The hand-pleated crescents are stuffed with an extra meaty mix of hand-ground pork belly and pork shoulder, along with thin bits of cabbage, scallion, garlic, and ginger. The use of a more fatty cut of meat acts like a binder, meaning the dumpling filling holds its shape, not falling apart and scattering on the plate when you bite into it. They’re suspended in a glistening mixture of dumpling sauce and scallion oil that was the perfect mix of salty and grassy. After I housed the entire plate of dumplings, I went back in to scoop up some of the sauce with my spoon, desperately wishing I had ordered another round of the delightfully cabbage-heavy katsu sandwich to dip into what was left.

There’s also a wonton soup where chicken stock glistens with fat and the mouthfeel on the broth reads hearty versus thin. Handfolded shrimp and pork wontons have ribbons of cabbage running through them. The shrimp isn’t ground to a paste, but rather, tiny bite-sized pieces are worked into the pork, meaning the dumpling has a texture and a nice bite to it. Bok choy adds earthiness, and a large smattering of green onion means you can get some in every bite. This is the kind of dish I might want when the wind whips off the lake in the dead of north country winter, cozying up in the blue booth at the back of the restaurant with a dear friend or date as cars stir up snow as they drive on the busy road past the restaurant.

Even cream cheese wontons were noteworthy, perfectly fried, seasoned with sugar, onion powder, and garlic powder, then served with hot honey.

SoL Hong Kong Café is a restaurant unlike any other in Minnesota, worth a trip for foodies in the Twin Cities, and worth being a regular stop for residents of Duluth. The opening of SoL Café demonstrates not just that Gor is a talent worth watching, but that Duluth’s food landscape is evolving so much that creative young talent like Gor can open restaurants that are deeply personal, innovative, and novel not just for the region but for the state. “This style of restaurant is narratively and philosophically so much of my story,” Gor said. “It’s East meets West. I have these deep roots to American culture, but my parents are straight up from another country. I was between two worlds most of my life. This style of restaurant represented that perfectly.”

★★1/2

My three favorite bites: Congee, house dumplings, French toast

Where to sit: The back patio is REALLY cute and has great light

Good for: Weekday breakfast, early dinners with friends, and caffeine cravings

My one big tip: Order the chili crisp!

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!

This piece features my top spot for breakfast, my favorite veggie burger in the entire state, potato donuts, dinner at a longstanding icon with one of the cutest interiors around, and a coffee shop serving up not-too-sweet specialty coffee, along with a few farms to stop at on your way there and back!

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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This piece goes beyond food. I cover where to stop on the drive up to Grand Marais from the Twin Cities, two of my favorite park pitstops, where to stay when you’re on the shore, my favorite shops, and a list of fun activities. Of course, I also tell you where I’m eating (that’s the best part).

My trip guides are behind a paywall. Why? Because they cost a lot to make. Travel costs alone for my 2026 trips were about $650, not including food. By becoming a paid subscriber, you help me cover the entire state of Minnesota.

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I had a trip planned to Grand Marais a couple weeks after the fires started raging. Friends who knew I had a trip planned to the North Shore asked me if I was going to cancel; I wasn’t going to. Grand Marais is a special place to me, and even if I had to stay inside the entire time, I was going to go up there and support the local businesses.

Another person deadset on keeping her trip was Cally Prairie. She had a trip planned to Poplar Haus up the Gunflint Trail from July 15-19th. She went to a cabin while air quality was still, literally, off the charts. “We decided that we wanted to support the community during such a challenging time for them financially,” she said. “We sort of treated it like a cozy winter cabin trip.” For the few days she was up in Grand Marais, the air quality was so bad her group wore masks outside. Understandably, not everyone made the decision to make the trip during that time.

When Prairie’s group went into town, it was empty. “It was the slowest I have ever seen it there,” she said.

I talked with John & Mindy Fredrikson, owners of Gunflint Lodge, the biggest outfitter on the Gunflint Trail. They’ve seen a huge dropoff in reservations. “50-70%,” John said. The lodge has been here for 101 years, sitting near the west end of the Gunflint Trail, close to the Boundary Waters. The pair bought the lodge in 2016 after having corporate careers. “We were looking for a change,” John said. They took the leap and never looked back.

At one point during the fires, Mindy said to John, “‘I feel like I am living in Pompei.’” But that was just for a few hours. She continued, “All of that terrible stuff that you’re seeing in the media that looks horrible that was a couple of hours at the end of the worst day. The next day, it was smoky and hazy, but it started cooling down, we started getting rain, and then they started sending firefighters in.” John is one of them, working as a volunteer firefighter for the Gunflint Trail Volunteer Fire Department because, as he says, “Up here, we take care of our neighbors.”

The Fredriksons had an easy way of talking, going back and forth on the phone, almost finishing each other’s sentences. John said, “The day after that hazy day, Duluth and the Twin Cities had bad air quality and there were reports that being up here is like smoking packs and packs of cigarettes. It generated a tremendous amount of cancellations for us well into the fall.”

Katie Slanga, who owns The Fisherman’s Daughter in town with her husband, Parker, told me about that time in an interview, “All of a sudden, we were really busy with people leaving the trail. And then it got quiet and kind of eerie.”

Long before my trip came around on July 26th, the ash had stopped falling and the smoke cleared. I spoke with Slanga at The Fisherman’s Daughter as the sun beamed through the windows on a Tuesday, looking nothing like the photo she took and posted on The Fisherman Daughter’s social media a few weeks prior. When I spoke with the Fredriksons, the air quality was better in Grand Marais than it was in the Twin Cities.

The problem is, if you look at mainstream media, you would have no idea.

On my way up, one of my friends texted me, “Stay safe with the smoke up there!” But there was none. The only haze in the air on my drive up was a beautiful, dense fog.

Alex Beebe-Giudice, owner of Superior Creamery, said, “The smoke was bad for 4, 5, 6 days.” He has a personal soft spot for the Boundary Waters, having worked there in the early 2000s. On a drive from Alaska to the East Coast with his family during COVID, he stopped in Grand Marais and pondered moving back to the area. “We started thinking about what the region needed and we thought Grand Marais needed a really good ice cream shop.” In 2022, his family moved down to Grand Marais to open Superior Creamery, even though they had never made ice cream before.

You’d never guess they have been making ice cream for just a few short years. The salted honeycomb is one of my favorite flavors in the state, with big chunks of honeycomb swirled into the base. Normally, when I go, there’s a line out the door, but when I popped in on Monday, things were slower than usual. “This month, we’re down a bit,” Beebe-Giudice said. He’s not alone.

“For a few days, it felt apocalyptic,” Slanga said. “It was 6:00pm midweek and it was weirdly silent. I kept thinking, ‘There should be people everywhere.’”

Kristen Lease was up the same weekend as I was. Lease runs the social media account kristeninmn. She’s amassed over 80,000 followers, focusing on local happenings in the Twin Cities and greater Minnesota. She and I both travel here regularly, so I decided to reach out to her to ask her if she noticed the dip in tourism, too.

Lease said, “A lot of people and legacy media are using old imagery when the smoke was heavy and the sky was yellow and people are cancelling their trips based on that.”

The Star Tribune, for example, posted this old photograph on the same day that I was up at the North Shore (July 26th), when the skies were blue and when Boundary Waters air quality was listed as moderate.

They weren’t alone in using old photos. MPR published a piece on July 23rd and used a photo of the fires from July 14th as the header. The Washington Post published an article on July 26th that had a photo from July 15th. While journalists might think that they’re using the best, most compelling photos available to them, locals were clear: it’s impacting tourism.

The Fredriksons met in college as mass communication majors, so they’re no strangers to the media. “It feels unethical to me,” Mindy said. “My journalism professor would have told me that I can’t run these photos, because it’s no longer factual. It feels like people are trying to profit or get clicks or likes at the expense of the truth and of people up here.” She started her own, quiet media campaign, posting dated photos of the blue skies every day on their Instagram account. Still, tourism is down.

When Lease arrived in Grand Marais, her first hint that tourism was slower was the lack of lines. “It was definitely less busy than it typically is. Typically if we want to get a donut from World’s Best Donuts and a coffee from Java Moose we need to be downtown by at least 7:00 a.m. to not have to wait in line. On Sunday, we slept in later and didn’t get downtown until 9:00 a.m. and didn’t have lines at either spot.”

When I went to World’s Best Donuts at 7:30 a.m., like Lease, I also didn’t have to wait in line. The woman working the counter said, “Eventually, there will be a line out the door again.” It was like she summoned people into existence, because just then a family of eight walked in, with kids bouncing up and down ready to order donuts. It was quieter than usual, yes, but everyone in town was hopeful it would be back to normal soon. Malorie Brazell, who took over ownership last year, said, “We were really down the first week. This week, we’re still down, but better. We’re hoping things get back to normal next weekend.”

When I talked to Sarah Jorgenson-Hallberg, owner of Java Moose, she said, “Business has picked up again; not to true summer levels, but it is good to see people returning.”

Businesses up at the North Shore are mostly family owned Java Moose and World’s Best Donuts are no exception. Brazell was talking to her mother-in-law and long-time owner, Dee Brazell, last year when she made the decision to take over the business. “No one was lined up to take over the shop when she wanted to retire, so I said, ‘I’ll do it.’” She started working one season before they opened. She told me, “This is the fourth generation that World’s Best Donuts has been in my family.” She pointed to the sign on the side of the building that said the business had been open for 57 years. “I wanted to keep it in the family,” she said. When she looks at the kids in the fifth generation running around, she wonders, Which one will own the shop next?

But this year, many businesses are keeping an eye on a shorter vision: getting through the year. Unlike large businesses, or spots with multiple locations, restaurants and shops in Grand Marais are small, relying on the summer tourism boom to get through the winter.

“This is the time of year that we move into the black and start preparing for the winter. We live off of it for the rest of the year.” John said. “Like squirrels or bears,” Mindy chimed in.

“A drop like this during a week in July is a much bigger deal than a week in May,” John said, settling into their back-and-forth style of communication. “It’s our business. It’s our families. It’s our livelihood. If you know Grand Marais, you know there are no corporations here,” Mindy said. Then, John again, “We’re mom and pop shops.”

“This is our season to survive the rest of the year,” Slanga concurred. When I talked to her on Tuesday, air quality was listed as good. “Air quality is in the green, as good as it gets, but it’s not what people are seeing down in the cities. The sky is not yellow and orange anymore. It has changed.”

Beebe-Giudice said, “The larger media have sensationalized things.” When scrolling online, he found a photo of Broadway in Grand Marais, “It was captioned something like, ‘Deserted street midsummer.’ It was nighttime and featured businesses that operated during daytime hours.” Anyone who knows Grand Marais would expect that photo to be quiet, because Grand Marais is busy during specific times of days, and at night, people go back to their cabins or hotels.

“It’s frustrating,” Kjersti Vick, Marketing & PR Director for Visit Cook County told me. “I know that the pictures look so apocalyptic. I get it. You want awareness and clicks but it’s not the reality that’s happening. Even if the headline says, ‘Reopened for business,’ if the air quality looks terrible in the visual picture, people aren’t going to want to come.” I looked at the photos circulating online while I was sitting on the porch at my cabin. They were so contrary to the bright blue sky and the temperatures in the mid-sixties.

“The messaging being reshared is that our air quality is terrible,” Vick said, “But we’re back to normal, regular air quality.”

While the media keeps posting old photographs of orange skies, I looked at the air quality index to see how things were, noting that my trip would have similar or better air quality than back home during my entire stay. The upcoming week is similar, with air quality in the moderate range for both Minneapolis and Grand Marais.

Cook County has a way to see what the sky actually looks like on any given day, with no orange in sight. “Look at our webcams that are showing what is happening in real time and you can see what the sky looks like,” Vick said. “Today, it’s a blue sky day.”

The Gunflint Lodge has webcams, too. “They don’t lie,” John said. I watched them while I talked to the Fredriksons. Kids were splashing each other in the lake while parents watched the sunset on the beach. “People who come up here tell us they were debating and considering if they were going to cancel or not. They always say, ‘We are so glad that we decided to come.’ These are fantastic July conditions, the type of summer days that we all put up with winter to enjoy,” John said. I agree. While my friends were sweating in the Twin Cities, I was doing early morning runs with temperatures falling below 60 degrees.

“It’s so nice here right now,” Slanga said. “People should know that.”

At most new buzzy restaurants, the lighting is so dark that at 34 even I consider taking out my phone light to read the menu. Most of the materials are literally cold like steel, marble, or wire. If they’re soft, like velvet, it’s often not industrial grade, meaning just like modern dating, restaurateurs are sometimes not building restaurants meant to last.

The music that pulses through many new restaurants feels more like a club than a dinner experience, sometimes at such a loud volume that tables are nearly shouting. I’ve been on more than one first date at one of these spots, staring at the person across from me wondering how either of us looks sexy as we continually scream, “What?” into the void. At some of these restaurants, there’s the continuous flash from influencers taking photos or taking out their ring lights and it can feel like they’re built for what has been dubbed “content-driven dining” and not, you know, actual dining.

I am romantic, a lover of pomp and circumstance in people and in restaurants. I mourn the end of romance in our society: the giving of flowers, the candlelit tables, the getting pulled out of the car to kiss in the rain, the love notes left on pillows after nights spent together, the dropping of croissants at the door on hard days, the effort. So when I walked into Tatin with its soft lighting, soft music, and soft service, I felt immediately at home. At Tatin, a pop-up currently housed at Gardens of Salonica, romance feels like the goal.

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Chef Brooke Faudree, the muscle behind Tatin, never intended to become a chef. She was the second of six kids and food, celebrating, and gathering were a part of her upbringing, but she was focused on studying fine arts, not fine dining. In 2013, her sister, Danielle Bjorling, came to Faudree and asked if she might help her and her husband Chris open The Copper Hen. “I’ll give it a year,” she said. Her sister focused on sweets and Faudree set her sights on the bread and the savory side of the menu. She was working 18-20 hour days and at the end of the year, she decided to keep going. “I fell in love with it,” she said to me in an interview.

Through that job, she met a family who asked her to be their private chef and she founded her catering company Quince Catering in 2016. She was self taught, but she desperately wanted to go to culinary school. In 2019, she found the perfect program: Institut Paul Bocuse in Écully, France. Then COVID happened. She deferred enrollment twice and then finally set off to learn how to cook French Food in the French language. After she graduated, she took on another grueling job. She did an externship in a restaurant in Lyon, with two prix fixe options options: a five or seven course menu. “It was the most rigorous, hardest I’ve worked in my life. I started at 8am-2pm, got two hours off, and then worked from 4pm-midnight,” she said.

It was grueling, yes, but it also honed her skills and set her up to do the challenging work of running a full service restaurant with a prix fixe menu once a month in Minneapolis with the help of industry vets. Just like her sister brought her into the mix, Faudree enlisted the help of her sister, Kendra Martin, in the front of house. “Gathering is in our DNA,” Faudree said.

Before I go any further, it’s important for me to note that this monthly pop-up is a French prix fixe menu–and it’s not cheap. My first meal was $200 for food for two, $70 for two NA pairings, and $70 for an upgrade of mackerel en croute. After tax and tip, I walked out having spent around $375. My second meal was more expensive, as the price bumped up to $280 on food alone for two people. It is, to date, my most expensive meal of 2026. This means that Tatin isn’t competing with Bar la Grassa or even Meritage.

Tatin is competing with Demi, Myriel, and Kado no Mise. Tatin is competing for your anniversary, your birthday, or your engagement night. Not everyone can afford it. It’s what an editor called aspirational dining in an interview I had last year for a critic position. While I hate that term, I used to save actual coins in a jar to afford a place like this once a year. Restaurants and pop-ups this expensive should be, but often are not, darn near perfect. For some people, this is a once-in-a-lifetime dinner. Restaurants should act like it.

These are the kinds of experiences people save for and because of that, they’re the most likely to let people down. When I complain about my meals Per Se or Alinea, people often call me a spoilsport, but those restaurants cost well over $300 per person, and sometimes it feels like they’re performing service and not magic, going for stars and not memory. Sometimes, it feels like they’ve forgotten how expensive they are. I know what it feels like to be let down by these restaurants intimately, because I used to save literal coins in a jar until I had enough to go to a menu like this one–and I haven’t forgotten what it feels like when the food lets you down. The question I ask at meals like this is, “Would a broke 27-year-old me feel like this was worth my coins?”

At most restaurants, my answer to this is, “No.” At Tatin, it is a resounding, “Yes.”

The first course at these meals is a work of layering. There was a chevre terrine with a teeny, tiny first-of-spring radish with the greens left on. Then, an oeuf en gelee, encapsulated in beef aspic with a cracker-like sliver of brioche and one, single ramp leaf. Upon cracking into the mold of gel, the yolk tumbled onto the plate. During my most recent meal, the opening bite featured a plate with a generous glug of olive oil topped with a checker pattern of compressed melon squares and raw tuna. Miniature scoops of melon sat atop the bright pink tuna flesh and in the circular holes that were scooped out sat pools of mulberry balsamic. These early courses set the stage for the rest of the meal.

Faudree is a master of architecture in these plates, but also with the progression of the meal itself. There is something structural about these meals. The courses build on each other, yes, but the dishes all require multiple elements that have to be perfectly assembled in order for the dish to land.

Like a mackerel en croute with scales carved into the puff pastry. It came out to our table in two pieces: head and tail. The fish was thick and because puff pastry and mackerel are both high in oil, they’re both high in fat. They needed a bold sauce to cut through them, and Faudree had one: a sauce ravigote so heavy on the mustard, it made the dish feel balanced, not overly buttery. Our server told us the table behind us named the fish and dared my table to do it, too. The dish was so good, we forgot to name the fish while eating it, naming them Mackerelamore only after the fish was eaten. Both of the other mains I had at Tatin included a dish encapsulated in puff pastry, a rare event in Twin Cities dining.

Based on Faudree’s history in savory cooking and bread, it was surprising to me that she had such a deft hand with pastry. And yet, desserts are some of the strongest courses on the menu. In the early days of summer, a rhubarb flan Parisien was a layered delight. Pistachio frangipane was stacked with vanilla bean and custard and a thin layer of rhubarb, then dressed with a ribbon of rhubarb candy that had a perfect snap when split in half. There was a Crêpes Suzette where the tartness of the triple berry sorbet cut through all the butter, making guests want to go back for bite after bite.

Meals end with tiny gifts of pastry called mignardise. Butter cookies dipped in chocolate. Hazelnut chocolate shortbread. Matcha macarons. Passionfruit marshmallows. Earl gray madeleines. Apricot or guava pâte de fruit. Marzipan shaped into a cherry. A kitschly named chocolate salami, which is simply telling you what the dish looks like, not what it tastes like. These miniature bites at the end of the meal are a callback to the days when restaurants aimed to do more than feed you, they aimed to delight you.

Tatin is the kind of place where you could get engaged, fall in love, or rekindle a romance that feels like it’s make or break. In a world of influencer-driven restaurant design, I want more of this: soft, warm restaurants with execution that’s so darn near perfect, it’s worth saving pennies for. At Tatin, I always left full both physically and emotionally, thinking “This is fine dining.”

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★★★ 1/2: Tatin is excellent and consistent, producing some of the best French food in the Twin Cities.

My three favorite bites: The menu here is a tasting menu, so there’s no “best bites” to order.

Where to sit for the best service: This is all table service!

Good for: Anniversaries, engagements, and special occasion meals.

My one big tip: Pop-ups like this one often have at least one kink during the night. That’s because the team works together once a month, not every single night. One meal, the dishes came out far slower than I’m sure the kitchen would have liked, with 90 minutes passing before my companion and I reached a true first course. At my most recent meal, service had lagged on the first turn a little too long and there was a line of patrons waiting to take their seats pushed up against the bar. As a critic, these kinds of errors are expected in meals like this one, where teams assemble only for one night to put on a little bit of romance. Is it worth the wait? For me, it always was.

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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