Here is the catch-up Twin Cities metro restaurant report for the week. It covers not a restaurant per se but a food court, at Hmongtown Marketplace in St. Paul. This meal was eaten on a weekend in early February, during ICE’s depredations in the state. Living almost an hour south of the Twin Cities, we were not affected by ICE’s actions in the way that people in Minneapolis or St. Paul were. But that’s not to say that ICE was not active in our town as well or that we were completely unaffected. We are, of course, fairly privileged people in terms of class but we are also visible minorities. While all four of us are citizens—the two of us naturalized, the boys born in Minnesota—it’s not like details like these were keeping people from being harassed or abducted or worse by agents of the federal government. We were operating therefore with a low to medium hum of worry at all times, especially for our boys as they made their way across town and back for school and other activities. We also weren’t sure if it was a good idea to keep going out for our usual weekly meals in the Cities. In the end, we chose to keep doing it—both to exercise our privilege and support immigrant restaurants and businesses that were still open, and to assert our own autonomy as citizens of colour. Continue reading
Sushi no Musashi (Kyoto, July 2025)
Here, finally, is my last report from our trip to Japan last summer. It’s also my last report from Kyoto and features our last meal eaten on the trip. Fittingly (?), it features not just sushi but kaitenzushi or conveyor belt sushi. This was a genre of eating the boys wanted to be sure we did before we left and we left it for the last night. I will admit that I was secretly looking forward to it as well. While conveyor belt sushi in the US is usually an iffy proposition, the baseline of quality in Japan for any kind of sushi is much higher and so the thought of going out with an excessive sushi meal was very appealing. And that is exactly what this turned out to be. Continue reading
Dear Naga (Delhi, December 2025)
Alas, I completely whiffed on my posting plans for the weekend. I’d said I would post the last report from our Japan trip last summer and one more from Los Angeles at the end of December but I didn’t get around to either. Like I said, the World Cup has done a real number on my ability to get most things done. I will try my best to catch up with those posts this week but in the meantime I’m going to stick with the regular rotation for the summer which has reports from Delhi or Bombay going up on Mondays. The two previous weeks began with reports on two coastal meals from Bombay in April: at Pradeep Gomantak and Sarangaa; this week I go back a few more months to my first visit to Delhi in December. The cuisine featured here is one from a completely different part of the country: Nagaland. No surprise: the meal was eaten in one of Delhi’s most prominent Northeastern enclaves, Humayunpur, at a restaurant I had not previously eaten at: Dear Naga. Here’s a quick look at it. Continue reading
Grand Szechuan, January/June 2026
God, the World Cup is doing a number on my mission to get four restaurants reports off my backlog every week. My report from Bombay was posted in the evening on Monday and my Twin Cities report for the week is now being posted almost two days late. The good news is it is in fact two reports for the price of one—so if you do the conversion you actually come out ahead. You’re welcome.
The two reports in question are of two meals eaten at Grand Szechuan in Bloomington. By any measure, the best Chinese restaurant in Minnesota, Grand Szechuan is our family’s favourite restaurant in the state and so it’s no surprise that one of our first meals of the year was eaten there in January and that it was also the first place went out to eat at after returning from our travels in June. Continue reading
Sarangaa (Bombay, April 2026)
Alright we’re back in Bombay. When last seen, I was at Pradeep Gomantak in Fort eating a Goan seafood thali. This week’s report also involves a seafood thali but this report comes to you from Prabhadevi, from a less-storied restaurant than Pradeep. Indeed, until we ate there, neither I nor my dining companion—a long-time resident of the city—had ever heard of it. We had set out to eat Malvani dinner at Chaitanya but had arrived to find a projected wait of 90 minutes or longer. Chaitanya’s food is outstanding but we weren’t about to stand around for 90 minutes. So we checked Google Maps to see what else was around and found another Malvani restaurant, Sarangaa just a few minutes walk away. There was no wait at Sarangaa and so we quickly got down to business. Continue reading
Toshi Sushi (Gardena, CA, December 2025)
I said I would post a restaurant report from Los Angeles in December today and by gum, there’s still a few minutes left in the day!
As I’ve noted before, a few years ago my mother-in-law upped and moved from her home in Koreatown to a retirement community in Seal Beach. This means—horrors!—that our base of operations in southern California is now in Orange County. On the other hand, we are now much more apt to eat in the South Bay cities of Torrance and Gardena, where some of the best Japanese food in the greater LA area can be found. I’ve previously reported on a number of sushi, ramen, yakitori etc. meals eaten in these cities. Here now is a quick look at another meal in Gardena: a very nice lunch at Toshi Sushi. Continue reading
Sumiyaki Unagi Doi Katsuman (Kyoto, July 2025)
If you thought Wednesday’s review of Alma was stretching the definition of belated, coming five months after the meal was eaten, here’s a report on a meal eaten almost one year ago. You’re welcome. This was our penultimate meal on our first trip to Japan (we’ve since been for another week this summer) and was eaten in Kyoto, within walking distance of the place we stayed at for three days. We’d wanted to eat an unagi-centered meal and our hosts recommended Doi Katsuman. Well, they recommended another place in the vicinity more highly but they lived up to their reputation for having unpredictable hours and were closed for lunch even though they were supposed to be open. Doi Katsuman was open, however, and we had a very nice meal there. Here’s a quick look at it. Continue reading
Restaurant Alma XVII, January 2026(Minneapolis)
Alright, so I didn’t post this yesterday after all. Why should I be more reliable after a five-month hiatus than I was for the 13 years before that?
This meal was eaten at Alma, our favourite fine dining restaurant in the Twin Cities, in mid-January. The menu format at the meal was same as it had been on our previous visit in the late summer of 2025: the classic seasonal three course menu for $97 with choices for each course; dessert priced separately. Since then the format has gone through some more evolution but I’ll have more on that in my next report from Alma, which should post in a couple of weeks (we are due to eat there again at the end of next week). As this meal was eaten more than five months ago and the menu is no longer on the go, I’m not going to go into very much detail. I do have my notes from the meal but I’m going to keep it relatively brief. Continue reading
Pradeep Gomantak Bhojanalay + Ideal Corner (Bombay, April 2026)
Call off the celebrations: I’m back.
I was not expecting to be gone this long from the blog when I announced a hiatus in January. My father had just passed away at the end of December and I had come back to Minnesota physically and mentally exhausted. And then the ICE assault on our state began. Even though we were not as badly affected in our town as people were in the Twin Cities, we were not insulated from it. With a low hum of worry at all times—especially for our boys—sitting down to blog in detail about whisky and food was not high on my list of priorities. Especially as I was also teaching and preparing for a 10-week off-campus program in the spring. By the time things eased in Minnesota I was off on that program and that kept me busy (and exhausted) through the first half of June. Through it all I kept meaning to get back to the blog but I couldn’t get the energy together. But I’ve been back now for 10 days and—the World Cup notwithstanding—am trying to get back into my old routines. And so, I’m back. Continue reading
Ardbeg 10, 2008 Release
The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that this is the first post on the blog in almost three weeks. I’m sorry to say that I had a death in the family. This meant a return to Delhi at the end of the month to join my family in the mourning period. And since getting back to Minnesota last week I have been submerged in both jet lag and work, not having been able to get anything done for quite some time. It will probably take some time to return to the normal blog posting schedule but I did have this review done a while ago and so here it is. This is a review of a standard release, a classic: the Ardbeg 10. But it’s not a recent release. This is from 2008 (the L8 bottle code), which was from the first release of the 10 yo made from spirit distilled under the Glenmorangie ownership which had begun in 1997. The “Very Young”, the “Still Young”, the “Almost There” and the “Renaissance” were the special releases that had led up to this first regular release of the new 10 yo. Despite having consumed a few bottles of this over the years, I’ve never reviewed it. I guess I must have assumed I already had. Anyway, I’m glad to have caught the omission now that I’ve opened my last bottle. This review will slot in between my reviews of the 2007 and 2009 releases. Continue reading
My Top Twin Cities Restaurant Dishes of 2025
I’ve already published two Twin Cities lists this month: the second edition of my Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation; and a new list called The Twin Cities 52, which covers more than just “fine dining restaurants”. Here now is one last list to close the month and year. This one lists my favourite dishes eaten in restaurants in the Twin Cities this year. Not my favourite Twin Cities restaurant meals but my favourite dishes across all the meals I wrote about this year. Like the Twin Cities 52 list, this one is not segregated by price point: it includes dishes eaten at restaurants nominated for Beard awards as well as dishes from far more casual restaurants. These are all dishes which made me particularly happy this year and which I would happily eat again and recommend without reservations to other people. Though as I say that last, I realize that in the case of some of the fancier restaurants these dishes may not always be available on their menus. You take your chances. Continue reading
Sushi Komatsu (Kyoto, July 2025)
Back to Kyoto, back to eating sushi in Japan. We’d had reservations at Sanmikouan for lunch on our second day in Kyoto and we also had reservations for dinner. These reservations we had not made ourselves and, frankly, I can’t remember why I’d bothered to make them anyway. Maybe I was worried about hanging around in a line in the heat/humidity outside a good sushi place or not being able to get into one at all? At any rate, we managed to get a reservation at Sushi Komatsu, which was in the general area we were going to be in at the end of that day, not by calling them ourselves but by asking a Japanese colleague who happened to be finishing up a year’s teaching in Kyoto if he would kindly make it for us. He was happy to oblige and so we showed up knowing it was not going to be a hassle. Well, it wasn’t a hassle but it wasn’t exactly the most pleasant meal either. Read on to find out why. Continue reading
Littlemill 24, 1989 (Archives for the CasQueteers)
Last week I reviewed a 30 yo single malt (the 2017 release of the Talisker 30). Here now is one slightly younger. This Littlemill was distilled in 1989 and bottled in 2014 by Whiskybase for their Archives label on behalf of a Dutch whisky enthusiast group named the CasQueteers. It was one of several older Littlemills from the 1988-92 era that were bottled in the early-mid 2010s, many of the others also by Whiskybase (one of whose founders, Menno Bachess is a well-known Littlemill collector). I’ve reviewed a few of these Littlemills before, including some others distilled in 1989. Such were this 22 yo also bottled by Whiskybase, this 22 yo bottled by Glen Fahrn, and this 24 yo bottled by the Whisky Agency. And I’ve reviewed a bunch of others from 1990 too, as well as a few from 1988. What all of them have in common are the qualities that made Littlemill celebrated not when the distillery was on the go but when these accidentally aged single casks were released long after it had been demolished and the ground it had stood on plowed with sand (well, it was turned into a block of flats). Those qualities could perhaps be summed up by my description of this 24 yo on Instagram a couple of days ago: a cocktail of tropical fruit and diesel. I’ve had this bottle open for a few days now; it’s time to expand on that note. Continue reading
The Twin Cities 52
Two weeks ago, I posted the second edition of my Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation. At the end of that post—and also at the end of my most recent review of Oro, posted a week earlier—I referred to another upcoming Twin Cities restaurant list, one whose purview would not be limited only to “fine dining” restaurants. Here now is that list. I call it the Twin Cities 52. The title might put you in mind of the long-running Eater 38 but, unlike that list, mine does not seek to provide a “heat map”. Indeed, many of the Twin Cities’ hottest restaurants are not on this list (just as they’re not on either edition of the Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation). I wouldn’t know what was hot if I were sitting on it. Instead, this is simply my current list of the 52 Twin Cities restaurants that I would go out to eat at in the Twin Cities over the next year if I were here all year and wanted to eat at a different restaurant each week (we very rarely eat out more than once a week when not traveling) with an eye on variety and our budget. As such, it will give you a better sense of my/our family’s preferences than the Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation might. Continue reading
Sanmikouan (Kyoto, July 2025)
Back to Kyoto. I’d hoped to get this and another report from the city out late last week but things were a bit chaotic in Delhi. Among all the other mayhem, I also managed to screw up the site design and broke everything and had a panicked half day wondering whether I’d lost most of my images from the last 13 years. Thankfully, the folks at WordPress.com support got me back and running again without much hassle once I managed to get in touch with them. Anyway, here I am now with a report on the best meal we had in Kyoto in July, at Sanmikouan, a soba specialist. Continue reading
Talisker 30, 2017 Release
My first whisky release of the month was of a 3 yo American craft malt whiskey, the Zeppelin Bend from New Holland Distillers in Michigan. For the second, let’s go across the Atlantic to Skye for a much older single malt whisky. This is the Talisker 30 that was released in 2017. It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed a Talisker 30. The last was a bottle from the 2015 release, which I quite liked. Before that I’d reviewed the 2006 and 2012 releases. Of those three only the 2006 was at cask strength. The last of the cask strength releases of the Talisker 30 came out in 2010, I think (I have a bottle of that in reserve). After that, all the releases have been at Talisker’s standard 45.8%. Despite the lowered strength, I had quite enjoyed my bottle of the 2015 release and I’d hoped this will be in a similar vein. Early pours were promising and now that the bottle has been open for a week or so, here are my notes. Continue reading
Holiday Gift Guide, 2025
This is what happens when you’re out of town for a few weeks and aren’t able to post your regular content. Last week, in lieu of the usual Wednesday Twin Cities restaurant report, I posted the second edition of my Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation. This week, I have for you something else entirely: a gift guide for the holidays. Every idiot on the internet writes one so why not me as well? You’re welcome. Because I am a person of great integrity, I am only listing things that I purchased with my own money this year and used frequently, and which which genuinely improved my life. Let’s face it, your life can use improvement too. Because I also a person of compromised integrity, some of the links here go to Amazon (because that is where those things are available). If you can find them elsewhere, by all means buy them there. But if you do follow the Amazon links and purchase from them, please know that I will get a tiny cut. And if you don’t like these things after you buy them, then don’t tell me about it. Continue reading