Restaurant Reviews » timboerger.net

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.