Krik's Picks

I’ve written before about how my brother and I have lunch in between our birthdays. His is in October. Mine is in November. (Click here to read last year’s post.) This year, we went to Sea Change at the Guthrie in Minneapolis. I’ve written before about Sea Change . It’s one of my top two restaurants in the Twin Cities. And my brother and I have had our birthday lunch here, too. Only last time, the restaurant was Cue . Our experience at lunch only reconfirmed that Sea Change is one of my two favorite special occasion restaurants in the Twin Cities. (I have to say ‘Twin Cities’ rather than Minneapolis, since the other one is Meritage in St. Paul.) When we arrived at noon on a Friday, the restaurant was mostly deserted. There were maybe one or two other tables of diners there. I hope that’s not an indication that they’re in trouble. By the time we left, there were a few more tables occupied. But still not too busy. At first, I was a little disappointed. The selection of items on ...

I took a week off from working at the office. Notice how careful I was about stating that? I did check e-mails from home on most of the days. I did do one business dinner on Thursday. I did check my voice messages twice. But for the most part, it was a restorative break from the office routine. Which is not to say that I wasn’t busy. Um … that is to say I still had a busy week. I washed windows. I raked leaves. I bought jewelry for my wife. I picked up two new suits at SFA . I wrote a blog post. Well, you get the picture. I did a lot of stuff, just not at the office. A lot of the stuff I did was food related. On Monday night, we had a great dinner at Barbette. That was my last blog post. Click here to read it. One night I cooked bay scallops in a lime-butter sauce and served it on basmati rice. It was good. On Thursday (before leaving for the business dinner), I baked two batches of bread – challah for Friday night dinner with our grandkids (and their parents) and French bread for...

Barbette was the first restaurant I reviewed when I started this blog in 2006. This will be the 4 th post about it. (If you want to read the others, you can click here , and here , and here .) I think that makes Barbette the most frequently mentioned restaurant on Krik’s Picks.Want to know why? Because it’s reliably fun and good. We’ve always had good food, good wine, great service, and funky ambiance. Now you can add entertainment to the list of attractions that make Barbette a place to come back to, again and again. We don’t usually go out for dinner during the week. But I’m taking this week off, just to stay and home, rake leaves, do some cooking, and write blog posts. I recently became a ‘fan’ of Barbette on Facebook , and I’ve noticed recent posts about live music on Mondays and Thursdays. So what the heck? No need to get up early on Tuesday morning. Perfect excuse for a late dinner and check out the music. The other thing relatively new at Barbette is a weekly prix fixe...