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Vino 610 is, to be blunt, an enigma. Did I hate the place? Absolutely not. Is this a must stop place to eat? Not really. Is this a place with a ton of potential? Yes.

This is a place that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. Is it a restaurant? Well, it serves food, most of it pretty good. But without a couple of signature entrees, it’s lacking for that food destination quality that makes people want to travel to get there. Is it a wine bar? It seems more than that. Good wine list, good beer list (for those who don’t want wine). Also had “progressive” flights of wines that the number one was a good house wine, but nothing special working up to better wines. So I have to judge this by what I think is what it is, which is a restaurant.

The appetizers were good. The artichoke dip was amazing really. But the bean dip seemed like it had been waiting for someone to eat it…but the chips with the bean dip were incredible, like they were just freshly made. See, this is what I have to deal with. Some of this was good and some of it needed work. Salads, though, seemed universally delicious.

The entrees were…how shall I say…interesting. It was like they took a number of comfort foods and jazzed them up a bit and gave them different names. My Croque Monsiuer was really nothing more than a pretty good ham and cheese sandwich. The pomme frites were nothing more than french fries. The YTBNG had a vegetarian lavash, which is more or less a thin crust Mediterainian pizza. That was quite tasty.

So what are we dealing with here. Let me tell a quick story about the night. Dave got a petite steak that was overcooked. He told the waitress who noticed it immediately and took it back to the cook. A new steak was cooked and brought out. It was done right. Later, the owner who felt bad about the whole thing got our table a round of champagne. If there was something about this restaurant is that with service like that, it is moving in the right direction. However, Vino 610 could use a couple of tips and I offer these in good spirits:

Get a website. A little exposure with the menu can go a long way to helping things out.
Get some heavy drapes. A small place like that with limited seating should not get too noisy. A couple of well placed drapes will deaden the sound and make it more intimate, which it should excel at doing.
Get a couple of really interesting entrees that are not take-offs of some comfort food. Or do comfort food in a new way, one that really makes people want to go there. Barring that, focus the wine a bit more and make it a wine destination…more flights, better flights. Perhaps a line of premium wine flights or host a regular wine tasting.

The best way to describe this place is potential. If Vino 610 lives up to it’s potential, we could have a real winner on our hands. Here’s hoping they get there.

Tonight we had dinner club at a restaurant called Masa located on Nicolette Mall in downtown Minneapolis. Until just now, sitting down to get the website address of this place did I realize that this is one of the dining establishments under the big tent that is D’Amico and Partners. Knowing that before I went would have raised my expectations and I’m glad I didn’t have that knowledge beforehand as I can be more honest about my feelings for the place.

In a nutshell, it was okay. Not bad, but not great. It’s a small restaurant so luckily for them, there were some of the small things that were working for them tonight. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

All nice dinners start with a nice little drink and Masa had a wide selection of wines and a list of specialty mixes and drinks. I took advantage of the michelada, which is Negro Modelo beer with a maggi salsa, spiced lime and a salted rim. It’s a tasty drink and spicy, not too expensive at a very reasonable $5.50. Many people took advantage of other specialty drinks including a number of different margaritas. The mango margarita was quite good as was the two varities of sangria they offered.

We ordered two appetizers, the Sopes Surtidos, corn masa boats with shredded chicken, beef or roasted poblano. This was a tasty dish, to say the least. We also ordered guacamole, which, sad to say, was just adequate. I expected much more, but I guess how much can you expect with just the basic guacamole ingredients.

Entrees were ordered and even though there were nine of us, all of us decided on four different dishes out of eight choices: Pollo con Mole Poblano, Enchilada with Seafood and Pipian Sauce, and Puerco Veracruzana which is a pork shoulder. The last I can’t remember the name, but it is essentially a chicken stew. All dishes had their charm and my choice of the chicken in the mole sauce was good, but not so good that I was making the necessary yummy sounds that seem to follow me when I’m having a great dining experience. There was a lot of “oh, that’s good” and “that’s nice” going around the table, but no one going “you have GOT to try this.”

Only two people opted for dessert and I went for the flan. The flan was very good, possibly the best thing I had that night. I took my time with this one small dish and relished finishing it off. It had subtle hints of coconut that snuck through tasting.

But this gets back to the whole thing with Masa. Some of the little things that are done are spot on. The flan, the drinks, the chairs we sat in which at first take you by surprise by their shape but are eminently comfortable. But there were little things, obvious things, that were missed. One small plate of tortillias for the five people that needed them was embarassing. It eventually was too much of a hassle for me to keep asking for the tortillias to be passed back down from the other end of the table. One at each end of the table would have been a suitable and easy solution for this. Wait staff was friendly, but didn’t seem to really knock me over with service and I wasn’t compelled to think much about what great service I was getting. The chicken mole, which was good, had to be sawed off the bone which is a lot of work for a little chicken.

Masa is a place that you walk into and you expect a great meal and when you get a very good meal, you feel left out, like you missed something that should have been there. It is a place that seems like it’s almost there. Sadly though, there wasn’t anything besides the flan that is immediately compelling to me and makes me want to return soon on my own which would be the sign of a good restaurant with a bright future.

Tasty Wine

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Feb 022006

Wine tasting is like watching a foriegn mystery movie in another language. If you don’t understand the whole thing, it can still be enjoyable, but you still feel like you’re missing out on something. Such was last night as we went to Brits for the Twin Cities Uncorked event. The night was billed as a wine and chocolate pairing, and it was pretty good. I prefer the actual sit-down wines paired with various entrees or appetizers where you really get a good sense for the stuff you’re drinking. Not only that but you get some good food with it that some sommelier picking out what goes well with what. Last night was a crap shoot. You tasted some wines, were given some suggestions on what goes with what, but other than that, good luck. Chocolates were pretty good, but I wasn’t really there for the chocolate. I like chocolate, but I don’t need it.

To give you a feel for my night last night, let me tell you the most memorable thing. I found a cheese that I absolutely love, can’t get enough of. Oh sure, I drank some good wine, and some of those I would even consider getting if the price was right (and many were), but one taste of that cotswold cheese and I was in heaven. I wasn’t the only person gushing over that cheese either.

When you have a wine event and people are talking about the cheese, something is amiss.

As usual, conversation drifted from here to there. After the event, we went to have another drink (at least some of us had a drink) and I needed food, particularly some bangers and mash. Not sure how we got to the point, but we started talking about blogs and how someone’s blog was funny. Also, apparently I need a nickname for…oops, almost spilled it.

I thought about using initials, particularly SO for significant other. However, I occasionally talk hockey and SO means shut out. Also, if you are familiar with baseball it means strike out. Somewhat ominous, if you ask me. If you read some sports columns, Dr. Z often calls his wife the flaming redhead, never referring her as anything else. Fun, I thought, but then where do I go with that? I could call her the cute blonde, which she is, but it’s not a grabbing phrase, is it? We don’t really have any nicknames for each other (hell, we don’t even have a song) so it compounds the problem. I could use gf, which is netspeak for girlfriend, but that is so 1998. But on the other hand, she is unconventional, unlike anyone I’ve ever known. In that thought, some ordinary psuedonym just will not do. I have to give this one some thought. Suggestions welcome. Leave thoughts in comments please.

A tip for single men who are looking for women. If you like wine, I mean actually enjoy drinking the stuff, wine tastings like this, mixer style, are a gold mine for you. Sit down dinners, not so much, but where you mingle and taste and converse and such, it’s money that’s well spent. I saw a number of guys there last night that were 1) actual wine drinkers looking for good buys or something unique. They tended to be older and were taking notes. Probably not “in the market”, as it were. Then there were 2) guys that were dragged there by their girlfriends. These poor bastards would rather be on the other side of the room getting their drink on if not for being tethered by an invisible collar around their emaciated necks, leash held by their girlfriend. One could almost see the sad, lost puppy dog look in their eyes, the tell-tale sign of a man being held against his will. Then there were 3) young professional guys who actually wanted to be there. I saw maybe two of these guys…maybe. If you actually fall into this group and are single and looking, you really need to get to one of these things. That is, unless you are intimidated by smart, professional women who have their ~~shit~~ lives together. But the ratio of women to men was at least 3 to 1, good odds.

Here’s the catch though. If you don’t like wine, this is not for you. The only guys there that weren’t there to taste (not drink) wine were the #2 saps from the last paragraph. You come here alone or with a couple of buds and start bitching about the tiny swallows in your glass, you’re a fake and easily spotted. From there, you quickly move to pariah status and then it goes downhill from there. Might as well move on to a meat market and look for a shread of dignity on the way out. Just remember that.

Now to contemplate more nicknames. Be back later.