What’s a Foodie?

The City Pages’ food blog, Twin Cities Eater, recently did a short interview with our fellow food bloggers over at We Got Served. Ben and Erin, congratulations for the well-deserved kudos! There was one thing in the interview that gave us pause, though—when the interviewer asked Erin why she and Ben don’t consider themselves “foodies”:

After the RNC…

Well, by the sound of things the Republican National Convention wasn’t quite the boon for Saint Paul that everyone had anticipated. What we’re hearing is that restaurants near downtown actually lost business, as locals stayed away from the madness and delegates didn’t stray too far from the Excel Energy Center. This likely affected restaurants just outside downtown—on west 7^th, say, or the Cathedral Hill neighborhood—most of all, but apparently even restaurants in the heart of downtown didn’t do as well as they had hoped. Some are blaming city officials, who, the story goes, failed to talk up local businesses or make it easy for visitors to get around the city easily. The finger-pointing will likely continue well into the fall.

Food Court News

Beer lovers, take note—tickets for the 8th annual Autumn Brew Review go on sale tomorrow (Friday, August 15).   Advance tickets are $25 per person, $10 for designated drivers. The website also advertises tickets at the door for $30, but if past experience is any guide, the ABR will sell out well before the day of the event.  Sarah and I went for the first time last year, and decided pretty quickly that we should make it a yearly tradition.  Music, food, and over 35 breweries and brewpubs giving out free samples.

Food Court News

Just a small update: we’ve decided to refine our grading system a bit. We originally chose the letter grading system because it gave us such a wide range of options to choose from when evaluating restaurants—five letter grades with plusses and minuses should, theoretically, mean a high level of accuracy in our ratings. However, we haven’t really been using the resources that such a system gives us. Most of our reviews so far have fallen in the A to B range, with the B carrying most of the weight, indicating an evaluation of anywhere from “pretty good” to “disappointingly average.”

Our Trip to Italy

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve been a little bit delinquent lately in our restaurant reviewing duties. It’s not that we haven’t been going out to eat, quite the opposite, in fact—for the past two weeks or so, we’ve been vacationing, eating, and drinking in sunny northern Italy! Now if that’s not a good excuse, I don’t know what is.

Food Court News

Hey, everybody! We’d like to thank all of you—those who have been visiting regularly and those who have just happened across our humble blog—for reading and for bearing with us while we get this site up and running. We hope, however, that you’re enjoying yourselves, and that The Food Court is giving you something that you haven’t been finding at other Twin Cities restaurant sites.

Outdoor Dining

I love eating outdoors. I’m the type of person who gets a little bit misty-eyed upon seeing an empty, snow-covered dining patio outside a restaurant. But now that it’s May and winter is over, I can look forward to seeing crowded outdoor eating areas all over the Twin Cities.  So here are a few outdoor eating options (some I’ve tried, some I’ve just heard about) to kick off the summer eating season.