Ward 6

Visited on Saturday, June 15th

Ben's Review
For my birthday I was tasked with choosing a place to get dinner with Erin as her mom had offered to watch the kids while we went out. In typical fashion I had a hard time deciding and enlisted the help of my coworkers. I got several awesome suggestions and settled on Ward 6 in Saint Paul.

Ward 6 is on the east side of Saint Paul in an old saloon (apparently the bar is the same one that was installed in 1903) and has a retro feel to it, even though the place has obviously been spiffed up a bit. I could tell it had opened not too long ago since the paint on the trim wasn’t even dirty yet.

Pints of beer are $5, except for Hamm’s which is only $3, and the tap beers are a great collection of local beer: Summit, Fulton, Flat Earth, Steel Toe, Indeed, Pour Decisions, Surly, and Lucid are all represented. They also have a full bar and several cocktail suggestions on the menu. I started with a Lynchburg Lemonade while we were deciding on food and had a Steel Toe Size 7 with my food.

The food menu is not huge, but there are several good looking options. Erin’s reuben even looked good to me, and I’m not a reuben fan. The daily special that day was a pork loin with warm potato salad, which easily sealed the deal for me. The potato salad was just as much of a draw as the pork, I love that stuff!

I had my beer and my German food and I was all set. The portions of food at Ward 6 are refreshingly reasonable, not the gargantuan plates you get at many places these days, and the prices are proportional as well, which I appreciate.

The pork had good flavor, but was not as moist as it could be, but paired with the potato salad, it was excellent and I wolfed it down in no time, leaving me to finish my beer as dessert :) We were done so quickly that we had to figure out something to do, lest we get home to Erin’s mom too early! We went for a walk down Grand Ave where Erin had some ice cream and I got a cigar, great ending to a birthday dinner.

Erin's Review
For once, I left the dinner decision completely up to Ben! We are completely out of the loop on restaurant openings lately, so I wasn't too shocked to hear that his coworkers had recommended several places we hadn't even heard of! I did look at the website for Ward 6 before we went, but wasn't quite sure what to expect.

This is definitely an awesome place that I WISH was closer to us! It's not like it's that far away, obviously, but it would be nice if it was even within a few miles, or not on the other side of downtown St. Paul. We went to downtown St. Paul for a drink at Barrio prior to heading over to Ward 6, which is pretty close to The Strip Club. It's one of those places that is casual but feels nice, serves really great food, and is affordable. Definitely kid friendly, too, I'd like to go back for breakfast with the kids sometime.

I saw that the bar had some ties to Hamm's (apparently the actual bar itself used to be in the brewery which was next door or something) so felt it was my mission to have a Hamm's while we were there. Also it was $2 cheaper than everything else, and I think we ALL know that I don't care what kind of beer I'm drinking, and in fact the closer it tastes to water, the better.

The Reuben was calling my name - to think of my younger self, never even trying a Reuben because it sounded gross to me. Now I love them! They are pretty rich for me, so I actually only ate half but the other half reheated well for another meal. The fries were delicious as well.

Really loved this place - excellent service, friendly atmosphere and good food. Worth the few extra miles from Minneapolis even!!

Deets

Ward 6

858 Payne Avenue

St. Paul

The Bachelor Farmer

Visited on Sunday, April 29th

Erin's Review
If it isn't completely obvious, we are definitely losing steam on keeping up this blog.  We have long since given up any charade of updating regularly, obviously, and if it were up to Ben, we'd be done with the blog completely. With the last several posts (probably since we had kids), it feels like a burden to him, which isn't worth it.

I have been trying to remember what I originally loved about starting this blog - and for me, it really is just about remembering the experience of going to a new restaurant, and taking photos. I find food absolutely beautiful, and I love taking photos of it, regardless of if it is food that is supposed to be pretty. A delicious hamburger is just as beautiful to me as a 9 course meal at La Belle Vie (and sometimes a lot more appealing), so it doesn't always need to be fancy food for me to enjoy photographing it. I also love sharing photos. Maybe it's my inherent extroversion coming out, but a photo to me is worth nothing if it's not shared and enjoyed by many people. I don't pretend to be an amazing photographer, but with many of the photos on this blog, I have enjoyed taking them and I want people to enjoy seeing them as well.

When we started this blog, I had absolutely no clue of the food scene that exists in this town, despite growing up here. Because of starting this blog, I grew to love blogging and photography even more, which in turn led to a love of cooking and baking. Typically, I am very much a creature of habit, so I have loved having this blog as a reason to try new foods and restaurants.  I also used to love the community that existed in the comments, but that has died off since we do not update regularly - while the blog exists purely for us, part of the joy for me is interacting with people, and hearing back from readers. I love getting emails from readers asking for restaurant suggestions, and knowing that people tried a new place because of our posts.

On that note, we'll still share something when I do remember to bring the nice camera to a new restaurant, but it won't be anything as formal as it has been. We've enjoyed the ride, and hope you've liked reading as well!

Onto our actual dining experience... we haven't had a real date since our last post, about Saffron. It's been awhile! We've been out individually, and for group events - but date nights with just Ben and I haven't been a priority lately. Thanks to the children getting to an easier phase and being pretty good with babysitters, it's easier to leave sometimes now! Because of the beautiful weather this weekend, we initially planned to find a patio - neither of us have been to W.A. Frost, so that seemed like an obvious choice. However, basically the moment we got there, it started sprinkling a bit - it looked short lived, but I wasn't sure - so I told Ben to call The Bachelor Farmer and see if they had any tables open, which they did! We headed over in that direction and got the last open table.

Neither of us knew anything about The Bachelor Farmer other than it was a pretty hot reservation to get - I'd tried before, weeks in advance, and not been able to get a table ever. Little did we know that they actually don't even take reservations on Sunday nights, and that it's a set Sunday Supper. Kind of a cool situation to happen upon! I also had no clue even of the type of food served - just that it was organic and fancy-ish. Only learned later from my sister that this is actually a Scandinavian restaurant. Kind of a cool story behind this restaurant, but I'm glad I went into it with very few expectations. I loved the ambiance of the restaurant - very casual, and comfortable. The whole place seems almost unfinished, but in an interesting way instead of seeming lazy.

The menu that night looked appealing, but I don't typically enjoy prime rib so I wanted one of the other options. I'm sure the prime rib here would have been a bit different than what I'm used to so I probably should have tried it, but the vegetarian option sounded delicious. I am a sucker for poached eggs on anything! Since there were also eggs on the salad, it was a lot of eggs, but that's fine with me!

The salad was delicious due in large part to the eggs. They offset the bitterness of the dandelion greens nicely. I was starving and wished they would have brought the biscuits that came with the main course with the salad, but oh well. It paired really well with the Riesling I had. On Sundays, you can get a half bottle of wine, and they open the other half of the bottle to the restaurant, so you can try wines that normally aren't served by the glass. I was interested in the Barolo, but was not willing to pay $23 a glass for that ;)

I loved my main course - the eggs were served on some kind of grain-cake thing, with vegetables. I felt pretty healthy, which was good because we were also getting dessert :) Dessert was also delicious - I love chocolate mousse always. The "white chocolate gel" almost tasted like ice cream to me. I would have enjoyed a decaf coffee with this, as usual, but I elected to have a 2nd glass of wine instead. Good choice.

There are a lot of interesting touches to the decor here, as I mentioned above, including the wall of accolades near the restrooms. The check came in a little book where you could write up a review which then gets put on that wall eventually. I also loved the little almond cakes that were sent home with us - Annie enjoyed one the next night!

It was still a beautiful night, so we took a walk around the Warehouse district in search of a place to have a drink. Pretty dead on a Sunday night, but we ended up going up to Borough and sitting at their bar for a coffee for me and a drink for Ben. That looks like a really fun spot, cool bar in the basement, but it was empty when we were there, but we did run into a friend who had just eaten there and said it was amazing.

Ben's Review
A slight rain kept us away from the W.A Frost patio, so we ended up at The Bachelor Farmer in downtown Minneapolis. They had one booth open, so I snatched it up while Erin took a couple photos outside.

We didn’t realize it, but on Sunday nights The Bachelor Farmer has only a three course set menu available. The main course was prime rib, but they had chicken and vegetarian alternatives. Not being a prime rib fan, I opted for the chicken breast stuffed with duck sausage. The first course was a dandelion green salad with bacon and poached eggs, and for dessert it was chocolate mousse.

I got a sazerac after a few minutes of contemplation as we pondered our meal choices. We made our orders and enjoyed being without kids at a restaurant :)

The salad came out a little while later and we devoured it, as we were both starving. The poached eggs on a salad was a delicious item that I hadn’t tried before and the bacon was obviously great.

Our main course came out not too long after the salad, and included four biscuits cooked in a cast iron skillet with some honey butter. I had been craving a basket of bread so this was a delightful surprise. We had one left, and the server packed it up and even sent the butter home too which was great to find the next day.

My chicken came with fingerling potatoes and roasted brussels sprout. All of it was delicious and perfect in portion size, not grossly indulgent but didn’t leave me hungry. By the time we finished dessert I was indeed full. The chocolate mousse was excellent and I’m not usually too excited by mousse.

Even though we were in the back booth by the kitchen, it was still a pleasant experience. The hosts and servers were all friendly and helpful, a great date night out.

Deets

The Bachelor Farmer

50 North 2nd Avenue

Minneapolis

Saffron

Visited on Saturday, January 26th

Erin's Review
Ben's birthday present to me was tickets to Aida at the Pantages Theater, and dinner out. I'm not in love with any of the dining options immediately near the theater district downtown, so expanded my search to include the warehouse district. Saffron has been on our list since we started this blog, but for some reason has been passed by in favor of other options, but that obviously was a mistake because our meal at Saffron was amazing!

The owners of Saffron are the same people behind the ever beloved World Street Kitchen food truck. Now that I am working on the U of M campus, food trucks are the thing I will miss the most about working downtown (well, it's a tie between that and the skyways, especially right now... although this has caused me to probably already save hundreds of dollars due to not ever wanting to leave my building!). I know that food trucks occasionally come to the U - hopefully WSK makes a visit this summer!!

The few days before our visit to Saffron, I found a few reviews which definitely guided my menu choices. I quickly chose a reasonably priced bottle of red when we got there, and also ordered the hummus royale immediately because we were both ravenous. I really hate the awkward waiting for the server to open the wine right by your head, taking several minutes. This one was particularly bad, but that was the only service annoyance of the whole evening, so it wasn't that big of a deal. I really enjoyed this bottle of wine, but couldn't drink too much or else I would have been sure to fall asleep during the musical (as it was, I almost did anyway - probably more the fault of constant sleep deprivation of young children than the wine!).

The beef ham and manchego cheese croquettes were predictably delicious. As evidenced by all of our reviews, we love deep fried cheese filled things (or I do at least), so it was no surprise these hit the spot. The bastirma was something I read about in one of the reviews, and sounded intriguing. The beef was so tender it almost melted in your mouth, and along with the almonds it was a delicious combination.

After all of these appetizers, I wasn't exactly hungry anymore, but the Morrocan duck kefta tagine was still on it's way. I was very glad the server had advised us to order the smaller size, which was still pretty huge. I love the richness that the egg yolks provided, and this was just enough food to get me to the point of being pleasantly full.

Of course, I had to then put myself over the edge by ordering dessert, but that was a given after I'd seen the salted caramel trifle on the menu. I attempted to make something somewhat similar for Ben recently and failed miserably. It was nice to see how this dessert actually SHOULD taste! I also got decaf coffee, and appreciated them brewing a fresh batch for me.

We both LOVED everything about Saffron - the food, the service and the ambiance of the restaurant. We've been to a few other restaurants in this area, and this was my favorite of the bunch by far.

Ben's Review
For Erin’s birthday I got her tickets to see Aida and dinner at a place of her choosing. Not a bad gift, since I get to enjoy it as well :) I arranged for my sister to babysit the kids and we left around 5:30 to Saffron in downtown Minneapolis.

I dropped Erin off at the door and found a parking spot around the corner by Sex World, glad to have found a meter so we didn’t have to pay at a ramp twice in one night. I walked back to the restaurant and Erin was already seated at a table in the middle of the room in front of the bar.

Saffron is not very large, but they don’t squeeze the tables together so you don’t feel like sardines, which I appreciated. The server came out soon to take our drink orders. Erin is the one who orders the wine, so she dealt with that while I also ordered a Manhattan. The server seemed a little confused, “Oh, so you’re going to have a cocktail first, and then have wine?”. To which Erin sarcastically replied, “Oh, no, the entire bottle of wine is for me!”. I think the server was judging me, though she claimed not to be :)

She left to get our drink orders in, as well as the Royale hummus that we ordered as we were starving. A few minutes later we had an awkward experience with the sommelier who spent an inordinate amount of time opening and pouring our wine. Erin tasted it, and it was fine, so we relieved him of duty.

My Manhattan came out a few minutes later with the hummus. Their cocktail glasses are small and curvy, but they give you the leftovers in a small glass on the side which I love. It just feels like you’re getting the full value of your cocktail. The Manhattan was delicious too.

The Royale hummus comes with spiced beef bits and it was excellent, especially given how hungry we were. We decided on a few more appetizers, the ham and manchego cheese croquettes and the bastirma, and one of the tagines, the Moroccan Duck Kefta, to share.

The croquettes and bastirma came out sooner than the tagine which made for a nice progression of food as we enjoyed each other’s company sans kids. I actually realized halfway through the meal that we hadn’t talked about our kids at all yet, which is rather impressive.

The croquettes were little balls of dough with ham and cheese inside and were freshly made and delicious. The bastirma is thin slices of cured beef with whole almonds. This was surprisingly good and lighter than I would have expected from a meat dish.

We saw a few tagines get served while we were waiting on ours, and it looked cool. They bring out the large tagine dish that comes with a heavy conical top. They set the whole thing down in front of you and then remove the top to a large waft of steam that comes out of the dish, it shows very nicely in a restaurant.

Our tagine was the Moroccan duck kefta, which had duck meatballs in a tomato sauce with two runny egg yolks dropped in the middle. We were told to break up the yolks and stir them into the dish to give it a little more richness.

Even though I was getting full, this was some awesome comfort food for a winter evening. We had wisely ordered the smaller size of the dish and we took the whole thing down. The meatballs were tender and the sauce was rich and flavorful.

Obviously we were getting dessert as well and Erin had already scoped that menu out before we arrived. I recently had a trifle for the first time when a coworker brought some into work one day and I fell in love with it. Erin noticed they had a salted caramel trifle on their current dessert menu and knew that we’d love it.

The trifle came out in a small glass that doesn’t appear to be much, but after you’ve had a full dinner, you don’t really need much dessert, especially one this sweet. It had caramel pudding with a cashew brittle, and a cookie layer towards the bottom. You really can’t go wrong with that list of ingredients, regardless of how you put it together.

We had to rush out to make it to Aida, but we absolutely loved going to Saffron, it lived up to it’s reputation. We got pretty tired during the show as well, likely due to the excessive amount of delicious food we had just ingested :)

Deets
Saffron
123 N 3rd St
Minneapolis

Tilia

Visited on Tuesday, January 1st

Ben's Review

To fully utilize the time my parents were watching Annie and Luke, we wanted to go out to breakfast on New Years Day after our sushi dinner the night before. We struggled for a bit deciding where to go, knowing we wanted a place that was NOT close by, since we didn’t mind the drive with nothing else going on in the morning. Also, we struck out on a couple places that didn’t appear to be open on the holiday.

I was looking over our list and randomly clicked on Tilia to see what it was, and they helpfully had an updated web site that showed they were indeed open on New Years Day. Located in Linden Hills, it also fit the bill for not being close by, and Erin had been wanting to check them out, so we were set.

We arrived around 9 o’clock to a restaurant that was about half full. I appreciated the heavy curtains on both sides of the door that did an effective job of blocking any cold air from coming in when people entered or exited, very smart.

The host attempted to seat us near the door which, in spite of the curtains, was certainly colder than NOT being by the door, even though there were far better tables available. I asked if we could instead sit closer to the exposed kitchen and the host complied, but she certainly seemed a touch annoyed. We weren’t having seating luck on these New Years Eve restaurant outings.

Our server stopped by soon after and got our coffees going. When our coffee was brought out, I was immediately in love with the coffee mugs. They were white, simple, easy to hold, and had a thin rim. I loved them so much that I located them at Crate and Barrel and have since bought us four of them :) They’re only $4 each too.

The coffee setup was cool too, with a nice matching cream cup, and large hunks of brown sugar for Erin to get her fix. The actual coffee itself was just ok, it tasted a bit burnt to me, but the mug more than made up for it :)

Looking over the menu, I came across their Cuban breakfast sandwich and knew that I was done looking. “¡El Sapo en la Cubano!” has your typical Cuban ingredients of pork, ham, pickle, mustard, and they add a runny egg on top. Either the mustard had horseradish in it, or they added horseradish on its own, because there was a ton on the sandwich that nearly made some bites inedible it was so strong.

Other than the occasional hit of horseradish, this sandwich was amazing. The people leaving at the next table over helpfully told me to just break the egg and use a fork and knife, and that was certainly necessary. The sandwich is humongous and would be difficult to eat as a normal sandwich (and I hate getting my hands messy anyways). Tilia uses high quality ingredients in their food and it definitely showed with my dish, it was absolutely superb.

While we ate we had a chance to check out the restaurant and I really want to make it back in the evening for dinner sometime. The entire restaurant is well decorated with a rustic, vintage feel to it, and the bar is no exception. They have a great list of tap beer and a large wine selection as well. The quality of our brunch makes me think the dinners are also excellent. We may have to venture over to Minneapolis again soon to give it a try.

Erin's Review
I was really excited to find out that Tilia was actually open for brunch on New Year's Day. I've been wanting to try the place since they opened, but we very rarely got over to Linden Hills, and I knew that the chances were slim of getting a table quickly if we did have time for brunch - the idea of waiting for a table with 2 little ones was not appealing! We have been able to go out for brunch a few times on weekdays, but none of the good places are open then. This time, we got lucky!

I was really surprised at how not busy it was when we got there. As far as I know, this is still a pretty popular spot, but maybe people were like us and just assumed they'd be closed. Their loss, our gain! I was glad that we decided to move over the side of the restaurant by the kitchen since it was freezing outside and the vibe on that side was much more pleasant and bustling. I loved the decor here, everything was very simple but felt very thought out and worked well together with the beautiful bar and the open kitchen. We saw some kiddos and it looked like they had some little fun stuff for kids to play with which is awesome.

We immediately ordered coffee and I got a cinnamon roll since I was starving. The menu had many enticing options, but I can never turn down a benedict, and the Reuben one on the menu sounded amazing. I went with that, and enjoyed the coffee. The coffee was ridiculously strong, so it took quite a bit of cream and sugar for it to be prepared to my liking, but I made do. The cinnamon roll was pretty good, but I've had better and it would have been a lot better if it was warmed up a bit.

Our food came out pretty quickly, and I had to chuckle at the couple who came over and told Ben how to eat his cuban - the instructions were great, but the fact that they name dropped the chef as if they were best friends (and, I guess, maybe they are??) seemed like a very Linden Hills thing to do. It was good, because Ben honestly did look a little confused as to how to proceed, so he clearly needed some direction.

My Reuben benedict were simply amazing. The corned beef hash croquettes were the best part, along with the perfectly poached egg and delicious hollandaise. Sooo, everything was the best part. It was just delicious. Definitely the best breakfast dish I've had in recent memory. We lingered over our food for a long time, and I had a few more cups of decaf as well. It was so nice to enjoy a nice long breakfast without having to manage the kids.

I loved our meal at Tilia, and would definitely go back. I'd love to try their dinner options, but wouldn't hesitate to go back for brunch or lunch or any meal for that matter.

Deets
Tilia
2726 West 43rd Street
Minneapolis