Two Minneapolis restaurants are featured on The New York Times list of 50 best places to eat in America.
Bûcheron, a French bistro located in south Minneapolis, and Diane’s Place, a Hmong restaurant in northeast Minneapolis, both made it onto this year’s list of top restaurants.
Both establishments have received several awards this year. Bûcheron won a James Beard Award for best new restaurant, while Diane’s Place was recently recognized as Food & Wine’s Restaurant of the Year.
Here is what the New York Times said about both restaurants:
Bûcheron is almost certainly the country’s first French bistro to count lumberjacks as a source of inspiration. It’s a sincere claim, if you can imagine large men laying down their axes to enjoy meals adorned with juniper and pickled elderberries. The flavors, redolent of Scandinavian American home cooks and the North Woods, are part of a broader, Upper Midwestern palate staked out by the chef Adam Ritter, who owns the restaurant with his wife, Jeanie Janas Ritter. Mr. Ritter’s talents are particularly evident in the fall, when he’s turning rutabaga, butternut squash and pumpkin into dishes worthy of an anniversary. But the restaurant’s real gift to the Twin Cities is that it aims to achieve that standard in a neighborhood setting with staples you can count on, like the smoked whitefish dip and pommes dauphine that, as every regular knows, are really amazing Tater Tots.
The chef Diane Moua was a star pastry chef in Minneapolis before she opened this warm, elegant neighborhood restaurant. The barely sweet coconut-pandan croissants and crisp-edged scallion Danishes would be reason enough to visit, but there are so many more. Ms. Moua exalts the Hmong home cooking she grew up with in the Midwest with a sense of both technique and abundance, serving heaps of the pan-fried bean thread noodles that her aunties and grandmas used to cook, as well as sheer-skinned steamed pork rolls just flickering with pepper, and a deeply restorative chicken soup with thick housemade noodles. This is the kind of restaurant that turns you into a regular — if you’re lucky enough to live nearby.
Last year, The New York Times also named two Minneapolis restaurants to its 2024 list: Vinai and Oro by Nixta.
