March 8, 2010 by Chad.

Ledge Rock Grille

596 Larsmont Way

Two Harbors, MN 55616

This last weekend we spent a day up in the Duluth area scouting out wedding reception locations and dress shopping for my sister-in-law. After leaving Gooseberry Falls, we stopped at a place called  Larsmont Cottages on Lake Superior because their Ledge Rock Grille was a potential reception spot. We of course had to eat there to make sure it was a good fit.

Food: 4

There was an expectation, maybe even an elevated one, that I placed on dining at Ledge Rock. The menu had a more limited selection of choices but it had some really impressive high quality options like Ledge Rock Risotto and Huli Huli Chicken that made my mouth water looking at the menu. They also incorporated a wood fired oven to make fresh flatbreads and local flair like walleye cakes. Was it fair of me to raise the bar for Ledge Rock Grille? It certainly was. If you expect to sell high quality, expect to produce it as well.

When it came to ordering the flatbreads caught my eye. That, and a day of foraging on too many other treats, made it a simple valid option for dinner so I chose the Spicy Chicken Flatbread. When it finally arrived on the table, it looked wonderful. What a presentation! The flatbread was irregular shaped, denoting that it had been rolled out fresh for the meal. Chunks of chicken sat evenly mixed among half sliced cherry tomatoes and were held together with a thin layer of mozzarella and cheddar cheese.

Unfortunately, looks are only the first impression of a good meal because upon tasting it things went downhill.  Firstly, the grilled chicken was nowhere near spicy. In fact, I had someone else sample the chicken just to make sure my taste buds were still working but they reached the same conclusion I did. The flatbread was like eating hardtack, especially as you reached the last inch plus around the edge of the flatbread. My jaw was actually sore after finishing off the meal which is never a good sign. On the upside the cherry tomatoes brought a sweetness to the toppings. Maybe if there was some thin layer of sauce the crust would not have been so hard. It is something definitely needing immediate attention.

Luckily, I was sandwiched between my two kids and was able to partake in one thing I did like, a cheeseburger. What? A cheeseburger? That’s correct. The burger was huge, tender, juicy, and had a great grilled flavor to it. Not bad for the kids menu. If there is a next time I will pose as a child and get that.

Service: 4

A great server can make you overlook a relatively bad plate of food. They are the ones that have the relationship with you, the customer, so their empathy and care can smooth things out if things are not perfect. Our server smiled every once and a while for very short periods but for the most part I had the distinct feeling that she had other things on her mind that were spilling over into her work. When it is game time, you need your game face. She did not appear to be in the game that night.

Another negative to the experience was the time it took to prepare the food. For fine dining it is safe to assume that there will be a 45 minute wait for your meal. Good meals take time to prepare. We arrived after what is normally considered the rush time in dinner service and were seated right away. With about half the restaurant full of patrons at different stages of eating, I kind of expected the meal to arrive a little sooner. It took nearly an hour to get our meals. Of course, unhappiness is precipitated by sitting between a three and a five year old who already finished coloring the entire menu and were nearly two hours removed from their normal dinnertime. It would have been a better meal experience if it were served a little quicker.

Atmosphere: 7

Clean restaurants are important. It says a lot to a patron when you take the time and investment to make your place fresh and inviting. A warm color pallet on the walls, exposed stained wood beams, and a crackling fireplace are very nice to see. Everything looks recently remodeled or built simply because of the architectural  nuances throughout the room. Wine racks line the walls open spaces and are full and ready for customers to pick from.

The only atmospheric downsides are the lack of intimacy and lack of sound dampening that the big open room design naturally suffers from. I thought that if they had some kind of flags or sheer tapestries handing from the overhead beams they might just get over the sound issues. The only problem is that it would not seem to fit the higher class cottage motif throughout the whole complex.

Overall: 5

Overall, I was not impressed with the food or service, and no amount of dolling up the walls is going to replace the quintessential need to produce quality from the kitchen. Their menu looks stellar but the end product was flat, literally and figuratively.

Would I go there again? Not of my own choosing. There are better places to experience on the north shore of Superior.

If you are in the area of the Ledge Rock Grille and want to experience it for yourself, their website posts their menu.

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February 27, 2010 by Chad.

Hello, everyone. It has been some time since my last food post so it felt like a good thing to do here on a Saturday morning. Not unlike that national trend of people tending to eat more at home rather than dining out, our household is choosing to make its own culinary masterpieces in the kitchen. Add to it the fact that I am still without work, there is just too little room in the budget to fit dining out at new and exciting venues.

Sometimes you just need to get out though so we dined out at a place last night for the first time in a long while that didn’t begin with “Mc” in its name or any of its fast food brethren. And… wait for it… it was at a chain restaurant. GASP! Being as such, I will not post a full review because that breaks with the tradition of this blog and all of my previously held beliefs that chain restaurants are mass produced vacuums of taste and creativity.

We drove into downtown St Cloud with kids in tow to find a place to eat where we could actually sit down without having to control our kids outside the confined din of the kids play area. Our choices, based on what we knew they would eat, were limited to Perkins Family Restaurant and Green Mill. We chose the Green Mill because we had not been there in years and, thanks to the street redesign on Hwy 23, there was no long access to the road Perkins is on going eastbound. Hey, the world is about convenience now and the roads were not convenient for me.

I said I would be brief so let’s review only the outstanding lows and highs that, while pulled center by mediocrity make this meal unremarkable.

First off the Highs:

- The portions are chicken on the kids meal of chicken strips were outrageously huge and high quality non presses meat. Kudos. What my daughter was able to eat only accounted for 1/3 of the meal.

- Our server was smart, very friendly, and had a great sense of table presence.

Now the Lows:

- My Italian sandwich had a plethora of disappointments. It was saturated with Italian dressing for one. I was expecting a tasty pop to the favor of the meat when I chose to have it warm instead of cold. Unfortunately the meat was flat and unremarkable.  Finally the accoutrement you would expect with an Italian sandwich were lacking. There is nothing Italian about a little shredded iceberg lettuce on top and a couple slices of tomato. Sadly, the Italian sandwich at Arby’s had more zest and flavor than this one.

- Ouch! Maybe it’s because I live in central Minnesota but should I pay over $6 for a Guinness when I can buy a 4 pack in the store for $8? This was not surprising but a point to make anyway.

Overall I was not swayed in my belief that chain restaurants are producing anywhere near the kind of quality that stand alone restaurants do. It is the difference between fun and fuel. This was McFuel.

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October 12, 2009 by Chad.

Originally reviewed July 21, 2009

Decoy’s Grill & Bar, 1022 Main Street, Hopkins, MN 55343

I was down at the Raspberry Festival in my favorite hometown of Hopkins, Minnesota to partake in the Waterball competition hosted by the Hopkins Jaycees. While there the hungry bell rang so my friend Tracey Biegert and I stopped into Decoy’s for a bite to eat. Upon entering, we were assailed by a cacophony of discordant Karaoke performers. It was then that we remembered that there was a karaoke competition going on. Oh well.

We sidled over to a booth along the windows and ordered up a couple burgers. Dining with me is an experience of sharing. Thankfully Tracey realized this and we exchanged halves. The two burgers I sampled were the Olive Burger and a burger with blue cheese(The name escapes me and they do not have a web page that appears in Google with a menu for me to check…grrrr).

A guy in the booth ahead of us laughed at me when I breathed in the smell of the Olive Burger. Is that really all that odd? Olives have a distinct smell to them and I was checking to see if the burger had that smell. Little did I know it was an inside joke to his wife, who had her back to me. Back to the burger. I was disappointed that I could not pick out the smell at all. The patty was fresh ground and irregular which is always a good sign and the cheddar cheese was oozy on top. Overall it was palatable and might be worth trying again sometime.

The gem of the meal was the burger I ordered. The blue cheese was thick and added just enough tang to the burger that it complimented the beef. Bacon(?) on top was a textural bonus. This one I would order again in an official review someday. It may not be top 20 worthy but its definitely worth trying.

If the blue cheese burger was the gem, then the fries were the coal. They were inconsistent seasoning, bland, and slightly undercooked for my tastes. They existed someplace in between a jo-jo and regular table fry, with little to no crisp snap but clearly not as soft as fish and chips fries.

The best part of the meal besides hanging out with a good friend? My junior high/high school crush walked by the window as she was on her way to Monsters vs Aliens at the theatre. Thankfully she heard me pounding on the window. That was the first time I have seen or talked to Amanda in person since early college, but enough about me… go eat already!

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October 12, 2009 by Chad.

Originally posted April 23, 2009

This is a bit of a departure for me, if you consider the fact that I usually write reviews about sit down restaurants. Then again, if you consider the food alone a review could focus on Macaroni and Cheese dinners. It’s all a matter of scale.

In the last week I have had the opportunity to sample two dogs of vastly different venue and quality. For purposes of setting the stage I will give a short review of each and then a head-to-head comparison.

The Dome Dog:

For Anyone who has been to the Hubert H Humphrey Metrodome, the Dome Dog is a tradition of tubed meat made in our own state by Hormel. Not exceptionally long but more plump the Dome Dog is meal enough for my kids and even me. Taste-wise, it is a kin to the cheaper hot dogs one can buy at the grocery store. It is oily and exceptionally salty. The texture is softer and more even. Housing the hot dog is a doughy, dry, tasteless hot dog bun. The upside is that you can put all the condiments on it you choose as long as you fancy something other than ketchup, mustard, relish, or raw onions.

Overall, the experience left me feeling a bit ill. To be honest, I was done halfway through the dog. It’s no wonder the Dome nixed the “Dollar a Dog” nights at the Dome for a while. They are far more useful being thrown onto the field than to actually eat.

Mi Famiglia’s Street Dog:

For the record, these hot dogs are not called street dogs by Mi Famiglia Ristorante or Italian Market. Consider this to be a bit of artistic license because it sounds good. This hot dog was the impetus for writing this comparison and I wanted to race home in time to write this review before the taste was fully washed off my pallet.

For those who do not know, Mi Famiglia’s has opened up a New York style hot dog cart just outside their restaurant. A few years ago, the St Cloud City Council in their wisdom made an ordinance allowing street vendors for food. All of the food vending has centered around the weekend night bar crowd. This is the first I have seen one during the day.

On to the review as that is what I really must share. It was one of the most delicious hot dogs I have had in some time. The hot dog was much longer and skinnier. It had a full flavor to it and was texturally rough with skin on casing. The seasoning lingered in my mouth for nearly 10 minutes but that’s a good thing.

Really, the meat was one thing but they managed to complete the experience with a superior bun. It was almost baguette style with a crisp on the outside soft on the inside feel to it. It was also very fresh and moist in all the right places. At $2 a dog I was floored by the quality!

Head-to-Head:

The winner must be obvious from the individual review, but certainly MiFamiglia’s hot dogs are far superior to the Dome Dog. Is that really much of a surprise? Considering the fact that a Dome Dog is three times the price, you truly are getting a better, tastier deal from the hot dog stand on East St Germain in St Cloud and they are local.

You cannot avoid the Dome Dogs when watching a Twins game this summer, but take the time to stop at the hot dog cart in downtown St Cloud for a great experience.

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