MNMO's Restaurant Issue

We run a very tight little ship here at Minnesota Monthly. Only a handful of writers and editors put out the whole magazine (Joel, Tim, Elizabeth, and I, to be exact! And I also edit Real Food), and the various people who run the website, marketing, and so-on work not just on our magazine, but on all the other projects we do, like the magazines Midwest Home and Where, and our various food and wine related fundraisers. (Minnesota Monthly is essentially a fund-raising activity of American Public Media Group, which owns MPR, the Fitzgerald Theater, and so on. Those guys fundraise during pledge drives; we fundraise all year long!) If I do say so myself, our tiny, excellent team is fabulous in terms of the magazine’s editorial voice and integrity; unlike many magazines I’ve worked for, stories here never get diluted by millions of editors having their great ideas incorporated into a story.

Yet, our tight little team is not as fabulous at letting the online world know what’s going on in the magazine; by the time the magazine hits the newsstands, we’re usually all immersed in the next set of print deadlines. Sometimes I wonder if my online readers even know I publish restaurant reviews! Well, we are redoubling our efforts and trying to do better on that front, starting with November’s restaurant issue, which should have hit newsstands yesterday.

I’m quite proud of this restaurant issue. I’ve had a feeling lately that a lot of food people’s conception of what our restaurant scene is froze in about 2005 and only has had a few things tacked on to it (2009 = 2005 plus Barrio plus Chef Shack minus D’Amico Cucina), but actually, that’s not even close to true. It’s been changing in lots of meaningful ways, not just in terms of high-profile openings (like D’Amico Kitchen, Ginger Hop, and Om) but also in terms of what I think of as new restaurants hiding in plain sight; with new chefs, restaurants like the Red Stag, Restaurant Max, and Solera are not at all what they once were, they’re far better.

Anyway, I’m not going to recap the whole story here, I already wrote it once! But pick up an issue if you want to see the whole of it, otherwise check our homepage, where we will be putting up parts of it little by little all month long. Enjoy!

P.S.: We’re also hoping to revamp this blog and Minnesota Monthly’s website as a whole sometime soon; if any of you have any tips or pet-peeves, please post them in the comments. We need your help!

Posted on Friday, October 23, 2009 in Permalink