Food and restaurants

Drive down Eat Street – Nicollet Avenue – and you can see the whole drama of restaurant existence in a block or two – life, death, and sometimes renewal. MORE »

What’s next, green stamps? With the cost of food and dining going up, and the economy going down, restaurants are scrambling to find new ways of keeping diners coming in the doors. Both Parasole, Inc. and the Twin Cities Originals have recently introduced customer loyalty programs that use member cards to track purchases and reward customers. With the Twin Cities Originals reward card, you get a point for every dollar you spend at a participating restaurant, and once you reach 150 points you get a $10 credit. MORE »

I got a hot tip recently – a sighting of a pasta making machine at Italiani’s Family Restaurant Grill & Bar, 3508 E. Lake Street. That’s pretty rare these days – making pasta by hand is very labor intensive. MORE »

Sometimes it seems like the owner of the Café Wren has a better idea of what’s going on in John Adams’ vegetable plots than he does. “I think she has spies in the garden,” Adams joked on a recent August afternoon while showing me his produce operation near Luck, in western Wisconsin’s Polk County. “She knows when my stuff is ripening. She knows her stuff about food and promoting local food.” MORE »