At the start of the week, Colleen and I used the break between the women’s and men’s Big 10 basketball tournaments to have dinner at the new Bûcheron in the Kingfield neighborhood of south Minneapolis. While we mainly knew 4257 Nicollet as the original home to Revival, it was also home to Corner Table and Lufrano’s (h/t to Justine Jones at Eater Twin Cities on that last one).
Open about two months now, this 38-seat room was immediately familiar (yet seemed smaller – didn’t Revival’s dining room eventually expand next door?). Loved to hear that they used the old Revival benches to build the new bar. Also loved to see this comment from Revival on the Bûcheron Instagram page:
We feel honored to be part of the legacy that you are carrying on. It makes our heart full to see all the love and care you put into the space and know you will make memories of your own for years to come!
Lots have been written already about the husband and wife team of Chef Adam Ritter and Hospitality Director Jeanie Janas Ritter (see Sharyn Jackson’s preview in the Strib, Jason DeRusha’s article for Minnesota Monthly and Justine Jones’ story in Eater Twin Cities), so I won’t rehash the backstory. Let’s just say that I completely agree with Jason when he writes “It’s going to be fascinating to watch the first wave of Kaysen proteges do their own things.”
In addition to the owners, there is Chef de Cuisine Cory Western (Spoon and Stable & Demi), General Manager Tyler McLeod (Bellecour & Demi, KZ Provisioning) and bar lead Will Gobeli. Not sure who all we saw on our visit, but there were some strong The Bear vibes coming from the kitchen on our visit, with lots of white T-shirts and tattoo-covered arms. The back of house staff does come out to discuss the dishes, which was super fun (at least for us).
We ordered from all sections of the menu at the beginning of the night so our wonderful server could course it out appropriately. Here are all the items we had (as printed on the menu):
- POMMES DAUPHINES, gruyère, celery, caraway | 10
- LITTLE GEM salad, lobster, sherry mayo, winter citrus, tarragon | 19
- Grilled CARROTS, kohlrabi, chickpea, cilantro yogurt, sweet & sour sauce, vadouvan vinaigrette | 17
- SKREI COD roasted sunchoke, rapini, wild rice furikake, radish beurre blanc | 34
- Feller’s Ranch STEAK*, shallot confit, potato mousse, kalettes, sauce bordelaise | 42
- “COOKIES & CREAM” milk sorbet, cocoa macaron, vanilla custard, lemon verbena | 13
- Shepard’s Way ‘Sogn’ CHEESE, fermented honey, quince, mustard, seeded baguette | 14
I loved every single thing I had and feel that this was the best meal I’ve had so far in 2024. Take the grilled carrots (pictured above): it was a true Ratatouille moment, with flavor combinations just bursting in unexpected ways. Colleen was disappointed in the salad, but her food allergies meant the kitchen had to put some things on the side that I was able to add back. My Feller’s Ranch steak with the potato mousse had fingerlings in the mousse, which was an excellent surprise. Both of our desserts were amazing and it’s always great when I can order a Milk and Honey cider in the city…
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Bûcheron (French for ‘lumberjack’)
4257 Nicollet Avenue • Minneapolis, MN 55409
612-255-5632 (online reservations via Resy)
Hours:
Monday – Saturday 5pm to 10pm
Sunday – closed
This one has been on my list since it opened. Finally made it over for the taco trifecta happy hour special (one calypso carne asada: island-marinated steak, lime cream, cotija cheese, guacamole; one jerk chicken: chopped chicken, jerk BBQ sauce, grilled pineapple, cilantro & onion mix; and one crispy fish: tempura fried jerk red snapper, pickled cabbage, cilantro aioli) 🌮❤️🌮❤️🌮
Need to keep this list handy for future work outings:
- Hen House Eatery
- Hell’s Kitchen
- Keys Cafe & Bakery
- Gluek’s
- The Loon Cafe
- Lyon’s Pub
- Mackenzie Pub
- Red Cow
- Runyon’s
- Tom’s Watch Bar
- Billy Sushi
- Butcher’s Tale
- Dario
- Fhima’s
- Guacaya Bistreaux
- Murray’s
- Red Rabbit
- Zelo
- Nicollet Diner
- Parlour
- Pizza Luce
Been to most of these, but forget about some of them being so close to the crib…
Photo credit: Anthony Souffle • Star Tribune
UPDATE: Twin Cities Eater weighs in with their choices as well.
Thanks to the social media manager in my office, I’m now back on the Gram. She has a goal to increase Instagram followers, so I registered @7minutemiles as a private account, followed @targetcentermn and started looking at the current state of that platform. As some of you may recall, I used to be @kingsbury for years and Colleen had her account stolen by a hacker (Meta support was not helpful).
It’s really amazing to me how much content is generated exclusively for Instagram, especially in the food world. Sports and entertainment is also still going strong and I’m slowly re-discovering golf, skiing and regional travel accounts (Meta appears to limit new accounts to 100 follows a day now). A few people have discovered my new account and sent follow requests, but I’m not sure how much I will publish there.
As Cory Doctorow wrote, now is the moment for POSSE – Post Own Site, Share Everywhere. IndieWeb has also written a lot about POSSE, which I had already started to try recently on both Bluesky and Mastodon. Need to think through this a little more, as I never liked when people would just post the same stuff everywhere.
Still really love the idea of people publishing their own sites and content – whether that is a small business website, a personal blog or something else. What I do here is neither free nor easy, but there are options out there for people if you look. The vast majority of people, however, will likely continue to use services like Instagram and TikTok as their only home to the content they create and publish.
As someone who basically dropped off all social media for a time to focus on my personal site, getting eyeballs on your content is infinitely harder, FOMO is strong and with comments disabled on my site, two-way communication is definitely hindered. And as Zeldman says, “go where the people are.”
Still, people like Jason Kottke remain great examples of self-publishing ideas and implementation. I love reading his posts like this one on the latest kottke.org site redesign. My RSS reader follow list hasn’t changed much over the years, but there is still some great stuff that pops up in there from people like Teri Kanefield, Brian Krebs, Charles Edge, Tom Bricker, Mistletunes and Phil Roberts.
Back on the platforms, I got to explore Threads with the new Instagram account and didn’t see a lot of personal value there. The “For You” view was awful and the “Following” option showed that most activity on accounts I care about is remaining on the Instagram side.
I still enjoy reading content on Mastodon via Ivory, which remains the closest experience to what I had with Twitter and Tweetbot. Recently learned I can follow tags there and have been enjoying the “SKIING” tag a lot. Also like Bluesky, but wish I could use a Tapbots app for that service instead of the website.
Instagram on the web is much better than before, but I’ll probably get back to using the iOS app again once I have the full follow list in place. Still happy I hibernated my LinkedIn – it will be there if I need it in the future, but don’t miss it day to day…