Author: Stephanie March

  • Trader Joe's

    Scenes from the melee that was the Trader Joe’s opening in St. Louis Park. Seriously, it was packed. Anyone with a cart was nearly lynched. Everything is sold under the Trader Joe’s label. The cheese selection was good but not phenomenal. And I want phenomenal cheese forever more. Yay, gazpacho! A nice deal on frozen…

  • A New Hope

    Joey Chestnut, they muttered beneath their breath, Joey Chestnut could be the one. It may be too soon to talk about it, we may be jinxing the best chance we’ve had in a long time, but the world of competitive eating is a-buzz with Joey Chestnut. Last Thursday, in the Las Vegas qualifier for the…

  • Artful Nosh

    Art-A-Whirl makes me hungry. Maybe it’s walking around all the inspiring art that makes me think I, too, am a starving artist. Maybe it’s all the pondering and provoking of thought that starts my tummy a-grumbling. Or maybe it’s the wonderous lack of cheese curd trucks combined with the knowledge that I’m surrounded by some…

  • Restaurant Decor

    Does anyone remember the House of Breakfast? It was this little counter-service joint run by two Eastern European women out of a house-front in South Minneapolis. The omelets were decent, the pancakes were fine, but that’s not why you went. It was the walls. Near the counter you could read the menu, which was scrawled…

  • Restaurant Rage

    Last winter, over the holidays, a restaurant manager I know clocked what she wryly calls the “Best Five Minutes Ever” of her career. Just seconds after punching in, she was called to the bar to break up a couple of brawlers. While showing one-half of the drunken duo to the door, she came across a…

  • Top Jello

    Tiffani is getting railroaded. I finally saw the “reunion” episode of Top Chef the other night, and I seriously couldn’t sleep afterward. Tiffani is being cast in the role of the villain. Don’t think for a minute that just because it’s Reality Television that there aren’t people behind the scenes working the events into “story…