Krik's Picks

I read about Lavagna last summer in Roll Call . Roll Call is a newspaper that reports on Congress and also serves as sort of a community paper for Capitol Hill. It’s well written and I sometimes get insights about life on the Hill that lead to fun or unusual experiences (at least for a business traveler like me). Unfortunately, if you tried the link for the Roll Call article, you discovered that you have to be a subscriber to read the whole thing. And quite to my surprise, I couldn’t find a review of Lavagna in the Washington Post. There are some reviews on Yelp . I wrote one, and gave it a better review than the average. One of the things that intrigued me about Lavagna is that the owner, Stephen Chueng, is Asian. The Roll Call article explains that he got his start in the restaurant business at his parents Chinese restaurant. I thought, “That’s kind of interesting. I wonder how he does with Italian food.” (I suppose that’s an unkind stereotype. Sorry. I’m not Italian, and I do p...

A trio of my bosses invited me to dinner to commemorate my 35th anniversary of working for Land O’lakes. Nice. I chose Vincent in Minneapolis. It’s one of the most highly rated Minneapolis restaurants. I’ve been there before. I’ve entertained there before. But this was different, being the guest of honor. So with 7 people around the table, we had quite a nice selection of items. Several in the group had the house salad. I didn’t taste it, but it looked very nice. I had the pot-au-feu, and I must confess, I didn’t really understand what that would be. The menu described it as containing baby root vegetables and shaved duck breast. Sounded good to me. But I was somewhat surprised that it turned out to be more like a soup. It had a rich brown broth with vegetables and several thin slices of duck. I thought it was good. But like I said, it wasn’t what I expected. My wife had duck rillette pate. The server described it as duck confit, shredded and combined with other ingredients an...

There’s a poster at work (Land O’Lakes) that says January is National Soup Month. OK, so the weather this winter is unusually warm. But soup is still a good idea. In the past I’ve posted two recipes for soup. So in honor of National Soup Month, I’m offering them up again for you to try. The first one goes back to the year I started Krik’s Picks – 2006. I wrote a post about my parents’ garden and the luscious tomatoes they grow and then can for enjoying year ‘round. Then I posted my wife’s favorite recipe for homemade tomato soup. Click here to read it. I posted the next recipe in 2009. I wrote about how my kids used to like having fresh soup and homemade bread on Sunday mornings when they were growing up. Their favorite was a cream of spinach soup. Click here to read it. That cream of spinach soup was a Land O’Lakes recipe. I can’t find it on the web site, but they do have several good soup recipes there. Check them out . Stay warm.

Most of my Kriks Picks posts are not particularly time sensitive. Really the only posts that are time sensitive are ones about restaurants that have since closed. But this one is about a fairly immediate topic. On Jan. 14 and again on Jan. 15, the Food Network is airing a special called The Big Waste. (Click here for details.) It’s about how much food gets wasted in America. I caught most of the special when it aired earlier this week. It’s both fascinating and appalling. The set-up  for the show was interesting. Four chefs compete to prepare a banquet using food that is going to be thrown away. For the most part, the food that they find is perfectly good food that is either unsalable or otherwise rejected because of minor imperfections or excessive variation in size or quality. (Examples: We see a butcher who is going to toss the odd-sized ends of beef short ribs after trimming them all to a uniform size. We see a farmer with a field of pick-your-own sweet corn who can’t se...

The Linden Hills neighborhood of Minneapolis is the perfect home for Naviya’s Thai Brasserie. The neighborhood is quiet, relaxed, and unpretentious. It’s a place where neighbors stroll, kids ride bikes, and visitors to nearby Lake Harriett can find an eclectic choice of restaurants to enjoy. Naviya provides the Asian option for neighborhood dining. My wife and I had some experience with Naviya prior to our Saturday night dinner with friends. My wife had eaten lunch there. We also had take-out when we came to our daughter’s nearby apartment to babysit our grandson. (She and her family have since moved to a house in the Armatage neighborhood several blocks away.) None of the four friends we were dining with had been there before. We did have a very favorable experience. The food was delicious. The ambiance was friendly and relaxed. Our server was very friendly and helpful. And everything was reasonably priced. Our dinner did start out with a glitch, however. My wife and I were t...