The Nook - St. Paul, MN

The Nook in St. Paul, MN is a neighborhood Irish bar restaurant.  The waitresses all wear green t-shirts with Gaelic-type print.  There is a lighted Guinness sign right in the middle of the place.  It was a friendly restaurant but, this is a place where beer is consumed by the pitcher so, leave the kids at home or take them elsewhere.

There service was maybe not the best that night.  I got the original burger, a vanilla malt, onion rings and asked for A-1 sauce.  At first they didn’t have any A-1.  Then they scraped one up some from the kitchen.  An honest mistake – no big deal.  When I was ready to leave I put my credit card down to pay the bill and had to wait a LONG while until they picked it up.
 
They have several newspaper articles and local magazine covers framed and displayed telling about their many awards for best burger in the Minneapolis / St. Paul area.

The food was pretty good by normal standards but, by triple-d standards, I would say that it was just okay.  I have a feeling that they are known for their double-stuffed burger.  I thought about it but, I just didn’t have the appetite for it that night.  So, maybe this review isn’t being totaly fair to the restaurant.  But, the triple-d reviews aren’t always fair to my cholesterol level.  So, we’ll just have to live with some balance in life.

If you're in the area then I would give it a try.  If you have the appetite for the double-stuffed burger then let us know what you thought.

The Nook
492 Hamline Avenue South
St. Paul, MN

Chef Point Café - Fort Worth (Watauga) Texas

Chef Point was my first Triple-D restaurant and is the standard by which I hold up all of the other restaurants that I visit.

Chef Point is no secret.  Guy Fieri has visited there and so has Paula Dean.  The wait to be seated can be well over an hour even at odd times of the day during the week.  If you come on the weekends then plan to wait a long time.  Just know that you won’t regret it.

Chef Point is not too far from my home.  So, I have the ability to get back there often, and I do.  It probably is my favorite restaurant anywhere.

Chef Point Café is located litteraly in a gas station.  Evidently, when they were starting out the owner couldn’t get a bank loan to start a restaruant but, he could get one to start a gas station.  So, they opened a gas station with a little restaurant area.  They could proabably easily aford to move into more upscale digs now but, that would ruin a big part of their charm.  They might be located in a gas station but, the menu is full-priced.

My favorite dish is probbly the Cioppino Soup.  This is an Italian fish soup.   It is a seafood soup with lots of mussels, scallops, bits of salmon, clams, calamari, shrimp and vegi’s cooked in a broth.  The last time that I was there, they served me an entire lobster tail on top.  It is absolutely incredible!  You get to enjoy it more than once because the servings are ridiculously large.  Only the most robust people can actually clean their plates.  Most of us will leave armed with shopping bags of take-home leftovers. 

On Sundays they serve their comfort food.  I've had the meatloaf each time.  The first time that I went there on a Sunday the hostess recomended it.  It was so good that I won't try anything else.

Save room for desert though.  The bread pudding is also incredible.  They featured it on Diners, Drive-Inns and Dives.  It is the hot cognac sauce that really makes this wonderful.  You can get just one and four forks if you want.  It’s that big and very filling.

5901 Watauga Rd.
Watauga, TX  76148
(817) 656-0080

Dari-Ette Drive-Inn - St.Paul, Minnesota

Dari-Ette Drive-Inn in St.Paul, Minnesota was my first Triple-D drive-inn.  There have been plenty of dives, some of which were diners but, this was my first genuine drive-in.

I went there in the beginning of September which turned out to be about the nicest time to be outside as it could have been.  There were neighborhood people just walking up for ice-cream.

Dari-Ette kind of reminds me of a Sonic with a slower pace and much better food.  It is definitely a throughback kind of place.  They could have used this place in the movie American Graffiti.  Who knows, maybe they did?

There were some people just enjoying the evening outside their cars, listening to the car radio play while just soaking in the great weather. I could see how this might be a social meet-up place later in the evening.

I ordered the pork chop sandwich, jalapeno poppers and a vanilla milk shake.  I’ve had pork chop sandwiches before but, only at home using leftover pork chops.  This tasted like something I would have made at home.  It was served on thick toasted white bread, kind of like Texas Toast without the butter.  It had a little bit of mayonnaise and some lettuce on it: Very good.

The jalapeno poppers were the real treat.  Usually poppers are filled with cheddar cheese which I would have fully expected this far north but, these were filled with a light white cheese.  It might have been ricotta.  The real surprising thing though was that they served it with duck sauce.  The duck sauce really worked well with the poppers.  There was a little bit of spicy heat from the jalapeno but, most of it came from the sauce. It was a nice little Asian twist on the concept.

1440 E. Minnehaha Ave
Saint Paul, MN, 55106
(651) 776-3470

Emily's Lebanese Delicatessen - Minneapolis

I always feel good eating middle eastern food because I feel like I’m doing something good for my body.  A lot of the Triple-D restaurants serve tasty but, not necessarily heart healthy foods.  There's often a lot of red meat, salt and butter involved.

My experience with middle eastern is that it usually contains  a lot of fresh bean based dishes, smaller amounts of high quality meats, rice, tomato and salads.  Emily's was no different.

I ordered the Hummus appetizer and the #8 Lebanese Chicken & Rice with Lubin for lunch.  Lubin is yogurt.  It comes with Tabouli salad.  Tabouli salad is parsley, tomatoes, onions, cracked wheat and lemon juice.

The main dish of chicken and rice had thin slices of almond in it.  The yogurt was served on the side.  The combination of the starchy rice mixed with the citric yogurt was very good.

The more traditional way to prepare this dish might have been with pine-nuts instead of almonds.  That's what their menu says.  They had a sign up saying that they were substituting almonds in place of pine-nuts for some reason.  I don't know why.

The humus comes with flat bread and is practically a meal in itself.  I was making a concoction of humus and tabouli on the flat-bread and sliding some of that back while I waited for the main meal.  I had barely eaten any of it before I started filling up.  There was a lot of humus left over.  Humus is basically a garbanzo bean dip that you put on the tortilla-like flat-bread.

Like many Triple-D restaurants, Emily's is a neighborhood place.  Most of the people who sat down after me didn’t need to see the menu.  The whole restaurant is probably only 30 square feet inside.  They also had an outdoor seating area that isn't apparent if you walk up from the back parking lot.  The paneling was the pride of probably 1960.  There are faded framed posters promoting travel to Lebanon.  The Lebanese flag is thumb tacked to the wall.  There was a sign behind the cash register advertising the daily special: lamb’s tongues w/salad or soup $10.

I'm guessing that the neighborhood is comprised of Eastern European and Middle Eastern families.  There was a Catholic church a couple of blocks away that had a colorful dome roof that reminded me of architecture from that area.

I got turned on to middle eastern food when I used to visit Detroit a lot.  Some of the local folks there took me out to various middle eastern restaruants and taught me a bit about it.  I really developed a taste for it but, I don't get to Detroit too much anymore.  Emily's was a nice reminder.