Weekend Getaway: Bridging Cultures in Minneapolis
From Hmong cuisine to Korean small plates, modern Indigenous dishes to traditional smoked fish, the Minnesota metropolis is a thrilling place to eat.
Welcome to the weekend! Here’s what you’ll find in this week’s newsletter:
Featured Destination: Fall is a beautiful time to visit Minneapolis, where the food and drink scene stands out for its wide range of exceptional experiences.
Featured Field Guide: Download our Field Guide to Minneapolis, a 22-page dining guide featuring all our restaurant and bar recommendations. (It’s free for paid subscribers!)
Weekend Reading List: The 100 best restaurants in Houston, travel tips for viewing next year’s total solar eclipse, plus a deep dive into the Campari-spiked Cosmopolitan served at Room for Improvement in Portland, Maine.
MINNEAPOLIS, MINN. — It was chicken fantastic that put Minneapolis on my culinary map. The traditional Somali dish — a chicken stew with bell peppers, carrots, and zucchini in a garlicky cream sauce that’s topped with Parmesan and served over rice — is on the menu at Afro Deli, a fast-casual African fusion restaurant with four locations around Minneapolis and St. Paul. I first had chicken fantastic (which pulls influences from the Italian colonists who occupied the country from 1889 to 1936), when working on Plate magazine’s Culinary Diaspora issue. I loved the dish and wanted to head to Minnesota to try it at the restaurant.
Minneapolis has the largest Somali population in the U.S., and you’ll find a number of restaurants offering the country’s cuisine. At Afro Deli, owner Abdirahman Kahin and executive chef Moussa Doualeh serve Somali steak sandwiches and sambusas with chutney hot sauce, along with burgers and quesadillas. It’s a restaurant that appeals to both Somali immigrants and University of Minnesota students, who head to the location near campus for veggie curries and falafel.
While chicken fantastic spurred the initial trip to Minneapolis, every place we ate showcased great flavors and refined techniques. There were tasty bites everywhere, from the black truffle arancini at Spoon & Stable, Gavin Kaysen’s downtown staple, to the coconut fried shrimp toast at Christina Nguyen’s Hai Hai, a hopping Southeast Asian eatery. Minneapolis’ food scene has a vibrant energy, which comes from the marriage of internationally focused spots like Yia Vang’s Union Hmong Kitchen and Jorge Guzmán’s Petite León, as well as restaurants that speak to Minnesota traditions, like Sean Sherman and Dana Thompson’s groundbreaking Owamni, which serves modern Indigenous cuisine.
In fact, make Owamni the first restaurant you book when making your Minneapolis plans. The restaurant is open for lunch as well as dinner, and you can likely snag a daytime reservation. Owamni won the James Beard award for Best New Restaurant in 2022, and it was a deserved honor — the food here is both thought-provoking (the menu avoids colonial ingredients like beef, pork, chicken, dairy, wheat flour, and cane sugar and instead looks to Great Lakes fish, game meats, and local beans and vegetables) and delicious. Try plates like fish cakes made with Lake Superior whitefish, venison spoon bread, and paw paw custard; get a side of maple chile crisp for a little heat.
Seeking out places that showcase local ingredients and traditions is always on our agenda when we travel. At Rise Bagel, we ordered flaky smoked hot-smoked salmon from Duluth’s Northern Waters Smokehaus on bagels that straddle the line between New York and Montreal styles. At Spoon & Stable, we posted up at the bar for Old Pals made with local Gamle Ode aquavit from bar manager Jessi Pollak. We also snacked on oysters and fries dusted with Parmesan, fines herbes, and béarnaise powder before heading to dinner at Petite León.
Jorge Guzmán’s neighborhood restaurant melds the Yucatán-raised chef’s background with Minnesota flavors, and it was our favorite dinner of the trip. We ordered roasted peppers stuffed with goat cheese, whitefish escabeche, roasted squash with chile butter and hazelnuts, and steak with black garlic adobo. Next time, I need to try the cult favorite Le Petite Cheeseburger with two patties, shaved caramelized onions, pickles, and queso blanco, served on a toasted milk bun with Duke’s Mayo.
Our other can’t-miss dinner spot: Ann Kim’s Young Joni. The chef, who won the James Beard award for Best Chef: Midwest in 2019, has a handful of restaurants around town, including this spot, where she serves stellar pizza alongside dishes that reflect her Korean heritage. Definitely make a reservation (or try to snag with bar seats), since this spot fills up with diners ordering fantastic wood-fired pizzas like the Basque, loaded with chorizo, piquillo peppers, and castelvetrano olives, and pork spare ribs with gochujang barbecue sauce. After dinner, we headed behind the restaurant for a nightcap at Back Bar, Kim’s cocktail bar. The menu features super well-balanced cocktails that riff on the classics, like a Rosita with sotol and St. Agrestis Paradiso Aperitivo and a Rusty Nail with Japanese whisky and matcha.
Don’t leave town without hitting Union Hmong Kitchen for lunch. The Twin Cities are home to the largest population of Hmong people in America, and you can try Yia Vang’s thoughtful exploration of Hmong food at two locations of his restaurant. The Zoo Siab meal is a good way to sample a range of dishes, like coarse Hmong sausage with chile and fried Brussels sprouts with maple nam prik. Like so many other restaurants we visited, Union speaks to a chef’s personal experiences and identity while also clearly reflecting life in Minneapolis. This intersection is where we find some of the country’s most exciting places to eat.
The Trip to Minneapolis, Minnesota
✈️ 3 hour flight from New York City
🚘 4 hour drive from Madison, Wisconsin
🚘 5 hour and 30 minute drive from Omaha, Nebraska
🚘 6 hour drive from Chicago, Illinois
🚘 6 hour drive from Kansas City, Missouri
You can find all of our picks for the city in our Field Guide to Minneapolis, a 22-page digital dining guide, formatted for your phone. During the month of November, paid subscribers can snag a complimentary download on our website — just use the code JUICYLUCY at checkout.
Remixing the Cosmo: You may remember we wrote about Portland’s Room For Improvement a few weeks back. Amy followed up our report with a deep dive into the bar’s house version of the Cosmopolitan. “We looked at what it is that people like about it: It’s pink, it’s served up, it’s citrusy, it’s refreshing and it’s got a little tartness,” says Arvid Brown. “We tried to reengineer those flavors with more craft ingredients.” Read more about the Room for Improvement Cosmo — punched up with St. George citrus vodka, Clément Créole Shrubb, and a housemade “cranpari” over at Punch.
I’m One Day Closer To You: As a kid I developed a strong affinity for Texas and particularly Houston, where my grandparents lived. I’ve only had the chance to get back there a couple of times as an adult, but each time I go I’ve found someplace new to fall in love with. For our next visit to the Lone Star State, I’ll be scouring the Houston Chronicle’s list of the city’s top 100 restaurants. Places like Truth BBQ, Better Luck Tomorrow, and Squable were already at the top of my “want to go” list. But now I’ll have to add Golfstrommen, Urbe, and top-ranked Little’s Oyster Bar.
Every Now And Then: If you want to chase next year’s total eclipse, you better start planning. “The eclipse, on April 8, will begin in Mazatlán, Mexico, and sweep across 13 U.S. states, from Texas to Maine,” writes Steven Moity in The New York Times. “In some places, total darkness could last up to four and a half minutes.” Hotels are already filling up in places like Bloomington, Indiana, so book your stay now. Otherwise, you may find yourself paying astronomical rates.
— Compiled by Kenney Marlatt
We’ll be back next week. Want more? Follow us on Instagram @americanweekender.