Krik's Picks

My sweet daughter sent me the following e-mail about a restaurant she and her husband went to in Chicago . I asked her if it was ok to put it on Krik’s Picks as a guest post. So here it is: Hi Dad! As a fellow foodie, I wanted to share with you the delicious meal Peter and I had last night! This week is Restaurant Week in Chicago and basically what that means is about 25 high end restaurants offer a special tasting menu this week and all menus are $31.95. It's really a great deal because I would say at every single one of these restaurants the average entree is $31 (or more) and with this deal you get 3-4 courses. So it was very hard to decide on a restaurant but we went with Café des Architects in the Hotel Sofitel. To start they brought out a basket of fresh breads with butter and a delicious tapenade. Our appetizers: I got a lobster-mango salad that was so nummy! It was a piece of lobster on a piece of mango and topped with some kind of creamy cheese. (The menu online says it...

The second restaurant that I ever wrote about on Krik’s Picks was Signature Café . Signature is a comfortable, casual restaurant in the Prospect Park neighborhood of Minneapolis . The food is quite good. The husband-wife team that runs it is committed to serving high quality ingredients (more about that later) creatively prepared. Despite all that, in my original review, I said I probably wouldn’t go back. We have other independent, neighborhood restaurants closer to home. I was gently taken to task for ‘damning the restaurant with faint praise.’ The defender was my friend and sometime guest blogger Patty Miller . In fact, it was Patty’s recommendation that took me to Signature in the first place. Late in January, I made plans to take my staff out for a dinner to thank them for their hard work. Since both of them are friends of Patty’s, I invited her to join us as well. As I considered where to take them for dinner, I took into consideration that they would be in St. Paul ,...

The annual meeting of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives brought a group of us from Land O'Lakes to the Walt Disney World Yacht & Beach Club Resort . On the first night of the meeting, a group of us went to the Yachtsman Steakhouse at the resort. So, cut me a little slack, it was a business dinner, as it happens, we all had exactly the same steak – an oak-fired rib eye. It was a perfectly adequate steak. Each of us had it cooked differently to our personal taste. No one complained that it wasn’t just the way they wanted it. The only differences were the sides and accompaniments that we had with the meal. Two of us had a Caesar salad. Classically prepared, it was just fine. The other two had lobster bisque. They both said it was good. We did order sautéed mushroom caps with the steak. One order was more than sufficient for all four of us. General consensus – they were fine, but nothing to rave about. The steaks came with garlic mashed potatoes. Li...

Totally in contrast to the Yachtsman (previous post), the Tornado Steakhouse in Madison , Wis. , is an example of an excellent, independent restaurant that accommodates business travelers. In early February, I had my annual sojourn to Madison for a meeting organized by the Wisconsin Federation of Cooperatives on behalf of Land O'Lakes to discuss legislative issues that affect farmers and co-ops in the state. Last year, we went to Delmonico’s , another wonderful, locally-owned steakhouse. While I could have happily gone back, I’m always eager to try new places. So after checking around a little, I picked the Tornado. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I love traveling to Madison . It’s a beautiful little city and it has a great restaurant scene. This year, the city was not very hospitable. Attendance at our meeting the next day was threatened by a looming snowstorm. Though I worried about the storm, it couldn’t spoil the fun of being in Madison . Tornado describ...