Picnic TODOTC.com To Do in the Twin Cities Restaurants Picnic Date April 19, 2024 4307 Upton Ave S Minneapolis, MN 55410 Phone: (612) 505-0785 www.picniclindenhills.com

This week we went to a new place Picnic in Linden Hills.
There are a hundred new restaurants opening every year in the Twin Cities. We try to get to about 40 of them. So how does one get on the list for us to review or avoid as it may? E is a regular viewer of Twin City Live on KMSP channel 9. Weekly she will see the latest and greatest. That is how we found Pink Ivy the phenomenal must try restaurant in downtown Hopkins.
But there are dozens of ways to get on our list, if you want, and you may not want. E may hear about it, doing random searches online, we drive past it, someone might have mentioned it to us. Or like this past week we were doing our six-thirty wine tasting a North Loop Wine & Spirits on Washington and I went over to say Hi to Lisa the fun owner. Lisa introduced me to a gentleman. Then she said Dennis he just opened a new restaurant in Linden Hills called Picnic, you should review it. So, a week later we were there.

We like Linden Hills, well except for when the druids threw out of their Inner Drum circle on New Years Eve, but that’s for another day. Linden Hills always feels safe to us. We taste wine at France 44 & buy gardening stuff in the area. It’s just a nice part of town.

So, when we heard there was a new different type of restaurant in the area, we wanted to go. Picnic is across the street from Martina always one of our top ten restaurants and a place anyone should go when designing a restaurant, it is done right, besides the food, people & drinks are great.

Perhaps it is not fair to judge picnic, a new try at a restaurant after Martina. And yet there we were. On an average Friday evening there are hundreds of restaurants of all kinds filled in the Twin Cities. Everyone likes something a little different when it comes to food, drink, and ambiance.

We like a nice quite Friday meal. If you do too, Picnic is NOT for you. It’s a very loud venue, and some people love that especially the guy about five chairs away who most of us heard everything he had issues with that week. But again, if you LIKE loud restaurants, Picnic is for you.

If you are going to start a new restaurant you either need to start with one of the hundred know genre’s or you can pick your own. Picnic invented their own. The concept is picnic food. It is an interesting concept.

I can see sitting outside in July on a beautiful evening eating a good old American Hot Dog, it works. Maybe not so much in the ten months in Minnesota we call winter. But again, it is an interesting concept.

So, we went into Picnic knowing it would be a bit unusual. The place was very clean and well laid out and being it was a new restaurant it was packed. We were seated at a nice, a bit small table on the wall, next to the loud guy.

The wine list and menu both were on a single piece of paper. Our waiter was very attentive though he had a good number of tables. I happened to say Hi to the gentleman/owner we met at North Loop the previous week.

The menu included: grilled chicken, Shrimp roll, beef sandwich, Bone marrow fried Rice and Picnic dog. They had two salads an arugula & shallot salad and the Trolley Path for $16 with Spring Mix which we had and was huge and very good. As always, we always split our food and it was two plates heaping with salad.

For our main entre we had the Beef Sandwich for $16 with braised beef, slaw, and creamy mustard on French bread. Not something we would normally eat on a Friday evening, but it was different and good.  

In addition, we ordered the Bone Marrow Fried Rice. Why? Because it was there and like the Squirrel Fish I ordered last year, I wanted to try it. Well, I tried it, two forks worth and it was like licking a saltshaker. For someone who is regularly told salt is bad I stopped. Our great server noticed it and nicely took it off our bill without even asking.

For wine E had the house red for $9 she thought was very good and I had a nice Oregon Pinot. Both were good wines with good pours.

The bill was $78.19 which is one of most reasonable meals we have had in a while from a sit-down Friday night restaurant. If you want to try something a bit different give Picnic a try!

Contact us Dennis@ToDoTC.com