Victors 1950’s Café - Minneapolis

Victor's is a Cuban restaurant.  It is a bit edgy.  If you are afraid of places with graffiti on the walls then this is not the place for you.  The waitresses were all very nice and attentive.  I never saw the dry bottom of my water cup.  They wore cute 1950’s Lucy style dresses and aprons that showed off their tattoo sleeves very well.  Latin music radio is played over the speakers and candles were lighted in front of the plate on display with the picture of Jesus and an angel on it.  There are lots of cool pictures from Cuba around the restaurant.

The booths are wooden with colorful Latin tablecloths.  The booths, walls and ceilings are covered with lots of messages and free expressions of love and war.  One of the messages was “Viva La Cuba!!  Huesa La Vista Fidel.”  There is a poster of a young Fidel Castro with a Soviet Star and the writing is all in Russian.  Right next to that one is another picture of an older Fidel shaking hands with Pope John Paul.

The menu is very Cuban.  Plantains are in several of the dishes.  There are four types of rice that you can order up with your meal.  I had the white rice steamed with a hint of olive oil. 

The crab cakes appetizer was really good.  They were very light and served on a bed of lettuce with a drizzling of some kind of cream sauce.

The Salmon main dish was served on a bed of spinach with a mango sauce and a slice of mango across it.  The rice was white rice with olive oil and it was all served with plantains that had a sweet sticky glaze of probably the mango sauce.

It was well worth the visit.

[UPDATE - Feb. 2012]

I went back to Victor's in February 2012.  The place hadn't changed one bit in the two years since I was here last.  They even sat me in exactly the same spot as last time.  

My previous trip here was for dinner.  This time I came for lunch and had the Sandwich Cubano.  This was a pork, ham and swiss cheese sandwich with pickles and mustard on a bread that is shmushed in a hot press like a grilled cheese sandwich.  I picked the pickles right off of my sandwich just because I can't stand pickles of any kind.  Once that was out of the way I dug in. 

Cuban food to me is very sweet.  This sandwich was no exception.  I'm not sure how they make meat sweet but it was, and very good by the way. 

I got it with the Yuca Frita which the waitress explained was kind of like stringy potatoes that are deep fried like french fries.  They were indeed as advertised.  They didn't have that heavy obviously fried taste that french fries usually have.  They were lighter and again probably a bit sweeter than regular potatoes.

I didn't die but, after half the meal was over the waitress came by and asked how we liked the Yuca.  THEN she explained that the yuca is actually a poisonous root in nature but the cooking process takes the poison supposedly out of the food.  Okey dokey, thanks for that timely bit of news!

The plantains were every bit as great as I remembered them.  They were both sweet and succulent at the same time. The sugars in the food form a wonderful almost creme brulee-like glaze when pan sauteed.   It is really like a desert. 

I got one of their Cuban Coffee's to go.  Wow!  Now I know why the American federal government won't let us travel to Cuba.  It must be a plot by the Starbucks corporation to keep this secret away from us so that we continue to buy their coffee in ignorance.  It was really strong (the way I like it) but very smooth and flavorful.  Not even a tiny bit bitter.  Really good quality stuff.

The last time I was here, I hadn't yet started to rate my dining experiences.  Victor's is a solid 9.9 on my triple-d scale.  The food is absolutely killer, the atmosphere is over the top cool and interesting and the service was really very good.


Victors 1950’s Café - Minneapolis
3756 Grand Ave S
Minneapolis, MN 55409
612-827-8948
victors1959cafe.com

Modern Cafe in Minneapolis

I went to the Modern Cafe in Minneapolis in August 2010.  I had the meatloaf sandwich and the vegan soup.  It was kind of a ying-yang thing, I suppose the healthy vegetables offset the meat/carb celebration.

The meatloaf sandwich was probably one of the best meatloaf anythings that I've ever had.  It had two strips of bacon on a couple of relatively thinly sliced (probably quarter-inch) pieces of meatloaf.  They used a little bit of mayonnaise and the bread was a really good quality white or possibly potato bread.

They claim that that they try to use organic ingredients.  So, it probably wasn't normal white bread.  It tasted pretty good in any event.  The vegan soup was really pretty good also.  The vegetables were still "snappy" so they had to have been really fresh.  The soup had a little bit of a spicy hot kick to it which surprised me because in the northern US most restaurants tend to shy away from spicy kick without giving fair warning first.

The location was in kind of an artsy outer-ring of the city center location.  There were a few galleries, art and printing businesses in the area. 

The restaurant itself was pretty much standard diner on the inside.  It was not very elaborate at all.  Just some basic booths and table and chairs. 

The service was pretty good.  They guy who seated me said that he would send over one of his "friends" to serve me instead of using the term "waitress" which I thought was kind of cool because I think that he might have been the owner. 

It was a relaxed placed.  A nice neighborhood restaurant.  There was a birthday party going on for a little girl, probably about 3 years old.  She was there with her mom and some of her friends, none of which were younger than probably 80 years old.  They all wore silly paper party hats and were having a grand time.



This is definitely worth checking out if your in the neighborhood.

Welcome to Bill's Triple-D Restaurant Review

I’m an unabashed fan of Guy Fieri and his Diners Drive-Ins and Dives show on the Food Network. I’m so much of a fan that I created a GPS database to load onto my GPS so that wherever I am in the country, I can just pull up the nearest restaurants that Guy has visited and choose from them. I’ve visited several of them already; enough to start a blog about them and share my experiences.

I spent a couple of weeks finding the lattitude/longitude coordinates for all of the restaurants that they had visited on the show through about July 2010 and put them into a waypoint database that can be easily uploaded from a home computer to the GPS using Garmin’s Point of Interest (POI) program that is available for free from Garmin. I plan on converting this for use on other GPS brands as well.

I travel a lot throughout the US and Canada. So, the database has been a godsend for me. Wherever I happen to be, I just pull up the database and make my choice. This way I get to be a bit adventerous with a plan instead of just winging it or worse yet, just settling for the easily recognizable national chain restaruants.

Most of the restaruants that I’ve visited have been really good, as you would expect. I would say that probably 100% of them were places that I never would have found on my own and probably 70% were places that I would have passed on without a DDD recommendation just based on outside looks or location. I’m having a lot of fun with it as you can probably tell.