On the morning of Tuesday May 30th we got a phone call from the management of Toast Wine Bar that they would be closing after service that evening. I asked if I could announce it to the Twin Cities Wine Education fans to give them one last chance to enjoy, and they requested no. They […]
There was a time about ten years ago that we rented a house in a little French villages called Pelissanne, located near Salon-de-Provence and the Southern Rhône Valley. Pelissanne is a perfect little real French village, off the radar of tourists (especially Americans). The old part of the village is full of 16th and 17th […]
Sad day. Very sad. The closing of La Belle Vie came out to the blue. Maybe people on the insider track knew it was coming, but a casual post by a friend on Facebook tipped me off to the news. Absolutely out of nowhere, bam! The best restaurant in town is closing in two weeks. […]
Wine lovers rejoice! After the elimination of the stupid 70/30 law in Minneapolis, the doors have now been opened to having a wine scene more akin to that of Portland, L.A., Seattle, or San Francisco. I’ve bemoaned for years that I couldn’t find a west-coast style wine bar in the Twin Cities. Yes, there are local wine […]
Let’s start with Steve Hackett. Who? I doubt if many of you know who he is (and if you do, we should be friends). Steve Hackett is a guitar virtuoso. He’s a musical philosopher. Inventor of the string-strike method of playing an electric guitar called “tapping”, and a major influence on many of the top guitarists […]
Here’s a story about finding a nearly perfect wine bar in the most unexpected of places. If a wine bar like this opened in the Twin Cities, it would be packed every night, guaranteed. Last August and September we took a blissful ten days off and went to the Black Hills of South Dakota. No […]
I had been trying to get to Surdyk’s Flights, the new wine bar, deli, and wine shop inside Minneapolis-St. Paul International airport, for months. I’d flown out of town about five times in the previous twelve weeks, but each and every time I flew out of the Humphrey Terminal (now confusingly and blandly called Terminal […]
