Krik's Picks

Sometimes all it takes is a little nudge. We had a coupon lying around for El Meson – $10 off. “Wanna go this Saturday?” I asked my wife. “I don’t think the coupon is good on Saturday night,” she replied. But the idea had started to percolate, and the next evening she suggested I get a reservation. The thing is, we don’t really need a coupon to want to go to El Meson. It is one of our reliably good restaurants that we willingly return to. We have been there often. I can’t believe that I haven’t written about it on Krik’s Picks. I have, however, written about El Meson’s sister restaurant, Café Ena . Like sisters, there are certain family resemblances. Both feature Latin cuisine. Ena is more South American. They call it Latin fusion – Peru, Argentina, Brazil. El Meson is more Spanish and Caribbean. Both feature a lot of fish and seafood, fresh ingredients, and artful preparation. We were all set, then a couple of our friends called up wanting to know if we had plans for Saturday...

When I first started working for Midland Cooperatives , we sold groceries to many independent food co-ops on Minnesota’s Iron Range. A lot of those co-ops were founded by Finnish immigrants. (Part of the lore of the co-op paper was that during a period of labor unrest on the Iron Range, 1930s if I recall, communist activists tried to take over the paper, presumably to use it for propaganda. Gus Hall , who was the leader of the Communist Party of the USA was born on the Iron Range. I never met him, but his name was occasionally invoked with awe and a little fear.) One of the fortunate coincidences of my name is that it sort of resembles a Finnish name. Just throw in a few extra ‘k’s and ‘i’s, and and I could pass for a Finn. When I did interviews for the paper, I was sort of accepted as ‘one of their own.’ And when they found out I wasn’t really Finnish (I never tried to pretend), they never held it against me. It was in that context that I came to learn about St. Urho (he has a Fa...

Until last weekend, I’d never been to Sushi Tango . Can’t really say that I had any desire to go. But my sister-in-law decided to have her (can’t really say which one) birthday dinner there with a group of friends, that provided the impetus to go. Several people in the group knew about Krik’s Picks. “Are you going to blog about this dinner?” they wondered. With that kind of a build-up, how could I decline? I can say many nice things about Sushi Tango. But in some ways, it also was disappointing. I guess my summary conclusion it this: It was a nice place for a birthday dinner. We had a lot of fun. But I probably wouldn’t go back. For this birthday dinner, the guest of honor chose a hibachi table. Good decision. It was very conducive to conversation around the griddle, and we had a lot of room to get up and walk around and socialize. On the other hand, our chef was a dud. Granted, we were not an easy crowd. But part of the job is to be entertaining. He couldn’t keep peoples’ attent...

Toward the end of February, there was a lot of internet chatter about oatmeal. Mark Bittman posted an Opinionator column slamming McDonald’s essentially for ruining an otherwise healthy menu item. He also posted a link on Twitter to a Slate article rating various fast food oatmeal servings. This all caught my attention for two reasons. First, I have happy memories of making oatmeal for my kids when they were little. Second, I’ve been eating oatmeal more regularly, lately. I haven’t eaten oatmeal at McDonald’s, and I’m not likely to in any case. But I do order oatmeal sometimes at Starbucks and Caribou. And I regularly have oatmeal at the company cafeteria. Bittman’s complaint about the McDonald’s oatmeal boils down to this: they take a simple basic food and make it into junk food with a bunch of sugary additions and additives for who-knows-what purpose. OK. That’s basically why I don’t eat at McDonald’s anyway. But his article was basically just a rant against McDonald’s. I l...