3rd- boston market, st. louis park
12th- pinstripes, edina
25th- roasted pear, burnsville
30th- el azteca, apple valley
3rd- boston market, st. louis park (c-)have not been here in over half a decade. which doesn't surprise me 100%. but i wanted some creamed spinach, which was fine. the cornbread (not the sweet kind) was ok. the turkey, though? meh. heavily meh. no seasoning, slightly gelatinous. it reminded me of fake food. and also though i ordered online, they didn't have my food ready when i came in, which i thought odd. what's the point in having online orders then?
i am not at all sure why this place is called pinstripes. yes, the bowling they have there does have pins. maybe the stripes have something to do with the bocce? no clue. the only person wearing them was the manager, it's not reflected in any decor. that reads shea knock-off but yet more generic (i.e. somewhere between fast casual and vaguely upscaleish)... you could be anywhere. interesting there's a press release on their web site saying that there was a contest for local artists for their work to hang on the walls, but if it's there it's not prominent, we only noticed one piece of art on the wall.
the food reflects the 'you could be anywhere' also. but we went because it's newish, nearbyish and we had a groupon that i got after seeing they had an early bird dinner entitled 'dinner on the fly' (maybe that's their try at whimsy?). for $12 you get a beverage, focaccia bread (average) with pesto (very oily, it was more like basil bits and pine nuts swimming in olive oil, i didn't detect parmesan, or much of it) and a dinner large enough to bring roughly half home and still leaving not at all hungry. the group was $12 for $24 worth of food. so two dinners at $6 per, not a bad deal. worth a try, maybe.
mom liked her food better than i liked mine- it was a half slab of bbq ribs with a sweeter than she preferred sauce, a fried chicken breast that no one tried, a very firm coleslaw with both mayo and vinegar that was mostly cubed (that was pronounced 'interesting') and surprisingly crispy and way above average sweet potato fries. i've never seen a batch so uniformly not floppy. i was impressed by that. they were good in whatever dipping sauce was on the plate (perhaps more bbq sauce?).
and since i am having some sort of 'hey is it thanksgiving yet' month, mine was the roast turkey, which was better than the boston market version but still verged on overcooked and dry. i managed one of three slices but had to scrape the boring cream gravy off- i would've asked for it on the side had i known it was going to be dumped on the food. most places don't, i think. maybe.
but the gravy was good with the bread. and it helped with the with bland bread pudding stuffing, which tasted like... starch. there wasn't much going on with it. it could've used the cramberries that came in the best part of dinner, the sauteed brussel sprouts. yes, we're all surprised with that. but they had been sauteed in rather a lot of butter and crisp tender and were the freshest things on the table.
seasonal? not at all. but the menu is so not seasonal. but nothing is. or regional. it's like crave with bowling. if you bring people here, they'd find at least something they'd eat on the menu, and it would be... ok. not great. but hey, at least it tastes like food. and there's room in the world for places like that, i guess. it's just not the type of place i would like to go to. maybe if we had great service or something. but the server wasn't personable, they did the job... sufficiently, i guess. we've had worse. i wasn't fond of the upselling, for sure.
there's only like a few of these in illinois, and the one here, but you can tell this has corporate written all over it.
25th- roasted pear, burnsville (b-)
for some reason i thought this would be more 'wine bar' or something given the name and menu online, but it was more bar/restaurant than anything (like the free taco bar one night of the week for bar patrons)- kind of generic decor (not shea, more like 'chain'), it probably used to be some sort of chain place at that. but i quite liked the music- more obscure cuts from r.e.m., u2 and other more 'classic' alternative.
also odd- menus and pricing. the drink menu didn't have pricing on it. when i asked about the pricing on the drink specials it was a price range. but either way, i got the cotton candy martini (with shaker) for $8.50 (supposedly a dollar off) and indeed it was very sweet and girly, so i'm pretty sure most anyone reading this is cringing right now, as was the person who tasted it and much preferred their pomegranite one (no, i don't wish to refer to it as a whatever -tini. cope.)
i had a bowl of the broccoli/cheese soup, which was on the menu (online and print) as $5, but was only $3 when i saw the full receipt later (we scanned the total for check-splitting purposes, but i didn't look closely until after we left). it had real broccoli that didn't taste frozen, and the soup was very smooth and didn't have that weird floury taste or odd textures. it was quite decent.
the chicken egg rolls ('grilled chicken and oriental vegetables with thai peanut sauce') spent a bit too long in the deep fryer and didn't seem worth the $11 price tag- there wasn't a lot going on literally or figuratively. we also split a side of fries (oddly listed on the menu as 12 oz. for $2.50) which were hot and crisp, but didn't read 'potato' or 'salt.'
service started out ok, but then the server disappeared as soon as they got more tables- it took a while to order more food and get the bill. since the water glasses were large (as was the martini shaker) at least that was ok.
i did kind of want to try a pizza and a few other things on the menu. and i will say that for burnsville, especially one of the few places that's not a chain? it wasn't awful.
30th- el azteca, apple valley (c-)
was craving nachos, so went with this instead of the mushroom quesadilla. and wasn't quite happy with the results. the nachos supreme ($8.25) gets you chicken (or beef) a hint of sad tomato, some chips, not a whole lot of white cheese (not quite melted, and compared with how cheese-laden other things are, this less than adequate amount was odd) and a tiny bit of sour cream and a bigass pile of lettuce. they were salad nachos.
they didn't even taste bad for you (or that flavorful). the chicken was good, but there wasn't a lot of it. i used the nachos they have at the table to scoop up the falling-apart soaked chips, used the ranchero sauce for the lettuce, which i ate like a salad. would've gotten a side of guac, but that cost about half of what the whole plate was... the whole meal seems spendy for what you get, compared with many of their other dishes (especially as the price of lettuce has not gone up as much as many other commodities).
so now i know better. and i still want nachos. oh, service was adequate, i think i got a newbie who was off with their timing.
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