Eater Twin Cities’ Best Dishes of the Month: June 2024

Welcome to Eater Twin Cities’ Best Dishes column. True, the heatmap is the best resource for intel on exciting new restaurant openings around Minneapolis and St. Paul — but here we’re tracking standout dishes at restaurants old and new. Here are the best dishes an Eater editor ate around the Cities in June, in no particular order (not ranked).

Tea and sweets at Qamaria Yemeni Coffee Co.

In mid-June I met Eater Twin Cities contributing writer Ali Elabbady at Qamaria Yemeni Coffee Co., the Dearborn, Michigan-based coffee mini-chain that just opened its first Minnesota location in Little Canada. I made a mistake by not taking a photo of our tea, an Adeni chai that came in an elegant glass pot, cardamom and cloves swirling around in a creamy evaporated milk base. I did snag a photo of the pastries we ate, the best of which was a pull-apart honeycomb bread with a bite of cream cheese nestled into every section.

Jerk chicken and slaw at Tropical Bowl

On Ali’s recommendation I ate at Tropical Bowl in Roseville, a new(ish) Caribbean restaurant in the former La Tapatia space on Larpenteur Avenue. This jerk chicken had beautifully charred skin, and was truly falling off the bone, much as I hate to use the cliche — but the undersung element of this dish was the rice and beans, which chef Sanjay Brady makes with immense care, cooking them with freshly strained coconut milk, whole scallions, and a few Scotch bonnets tossed in pot. The coleslaw was creamy and delicately sweet; we finished the meal with slices of pudding-like rum cake.

Risotto al salto and rhubarb olive oil cake at Hyacinth

Hyacinth lured me in with an Instagram post of its ricotta and rhubarb olive oil cake — I’m always maximizing rhubarb season. I got this slice to-go at the end of a meal, and it honestly looks like a delicious smothered burrito in its little cardboard box, but it is indeed a cake, dense and lemony and finished with sea salt atop its tangy ricotta cap. For dinner, I had white beans and asparagus and a plate of risotto al salto, its crackly golden shell hiding tender mushrooms, walnuts, and morsels of Castelbelbo cheese beneath.

A wild rice bowl and lemonade at Miijim

Earlier this month I made the trek up to Wisconsin’s South Shore and took a drizzly ferry ride to Madeline Island. I’ve been meaning to visit Miijim, chef Bryce Stevenson’s Ojibwe restaurant “with a touch of French style” for a while, and came by for a weekend lunch (dinner service starts next week). I’m still thinking about this blueberry cedar lemonade, which I guzzled, and this wild rice bowl of white hominy, smoked whitefish, and really exquisite whole mushrooms, which soaked up the dish’s chaga mole and blueberry sauce in their pleated caps. Stevenson was a James Beard semifinalist for Emerging Chef this year — keep an eye on Instagram for the forthcoming dinner menu.

Butternut squash yellow curry at Khâluna

I ate at Khâluna for a friend’s birthday and tried a new dish: a Bengali yellow curry made with butternut squash and topped with puffed rice, pepitas, and a few purple sweet potato chips. I don’t often order hot curry dishes in the summer, but this was one of those rainy early June evenings, and the coconut cream swirled through the dish tempered its richness, as did the bright notes of Thai basil. I spooned it over my longan fried rice.