121. Salty Tart
City: Minneapolis, MN
Category: Restaurants
Telephone: (612) 874-9206
Address: 920 East Lake St.
Description: Salty tart? Gross! Right? Wrong. Pastry chef Michelle Gayer has a national reputation for working magic on the palate, and she’s been enlisted to create desserts for top local restaurants including La Belle Vie and Solera. Cordon Bleu? She didn’t just go there, she taught there. So when she tries to sell you a goat cheese tart, you really ought to let her.
122. Sebastian Joe’S
City: Minneapolis, MN
Category: Restaurants
Telephone: (612) 870-0065
Address: 1007 Franklin Avenue West
Description: When Italian immigrant Sebastiano Pellizer arrived in the Twin Cities in the 1930s, he was almost immediately rechristened Joe by his employer, a construction-crew chief. The moniker stuck, and in 1984 when his grandchildren Mike and Todd founded this ice-cream shop, Sebastiano gave them permission to use his name. The ice-cream list tops 80 flavors (15 daily) and includes both new spins and old favorites, such as basil strawberry, chocolate, fresh strawberry, vanilla made from ground vanilla beans, ginger cream, and cayenne pepper–laced Chocolate Coyote.
123. Wuollet Bakery
City: Minneapolis, MN
Category: Restaurants
Telephone: (612) 381-9400
Address: 2447 Hennepin Ave.
Description: Wuollet is a family-run bakery, watched over by two brothers, their uncle, and a cousin. In the hands of Wuollet’s cake artists, traditional white-on-white wedding cakes can ascend to seven tiers covered in white chocolate ropes, orchids, and other adornments, while soufflé cakes featuring genoise (egg-rich sponge cake) disappear under drifts of Bavarian cream. A sweets table covered in profiteroles, fancy French pastries, cheesecake, and trifle is a reception addition that uses Wuollet’s skills to their tastiest advantage. The shop also sells delicious doughnuts and princess tortes layered in Bavarian cream and raspberry preserves. All six Wuollet bakeries are open Monday through Saturday.
124. Anodyne
City: Minneapolis, MN
Category: Restaurants
Telephone: (612) 824-4300
Address: 4301 Nicollet Ave.
Description: Anodyne seeks to meld modern design and progressive values with the cozy community feel of a neighborhood coffee shop, and it has a fierce following in its Kingsfield neighborhood. Beans? Roasted locally. Food? Sourced locally. Muffins? Baked in-house. Even its tea is blended in Minneapolis. Anodyne has a notably ambitious menu for a coffee shop, with artichoke melts and quiche among its daily offerings.
125. The Beat Coffeehouse
City: Minneapolis, MN
Category: Restaurants
Telephone: (612) 710-3992
Address: 1414 West 28th St.
Description: The Beat is a unique hybrid of coffeehouse and music club; it books both local and national acts for evening gigs in its back room, formerly a comedy club that hosted the likes of Steve Martin and Jay Leno. It’s no First Avenue, but its coffee is sure a lot better—it’s roasted by local company Bull Run and brewed exclusively by French press. It’s a great place to hear bands, and it’s a particular favorite of up-and-coming bands whose members (and/or fans) aren’t 21 yet. By day it’s a spacious and friendly spot that manages to feel off the beaten track despite being located right in the heart of the Uptown action.
126. Blue Moon Coffee Cafe
City: Minneapolis, MN
Category: Restaurants
Telephone: (612) 721-9230
Address: 3822 East Lake St.
Description: Everything about the Blue Moon breathes comfort and relaxation. The soothing purple and blue color scheme and sparkling strings of white and colored Christmas lights make the cafe the perfect place for a calming evening of quiet revitalization. There are many coffee drinks on the menu and a choice of eight kinds of coffee, 16 types of tea, homemade biscotti, pastries, sandwiches, and a big ice-cream cooler that carries Häagen-Dazs bars and other treats. Blue Moon is open daily.
127. Bob’S Java Hut
City: Minneapolis, MN
Category: Restaurants
Telephone: (612) 871-4485
Address: 2651 Lyndale Ave. South
Description: This funky little coffee shop stays open late in the summer months and closes earlier depending on how many customers linger in the winter. The shop’s theme is vintage motorcycles, and at any given time you’re likely to see a few choppers parked at the curb. The menu is predominantly coffee drinks and juice, with a few baked goods for the morning and lunch crowds. The house specialty is Kool-Aid. On warm days and nights, the large storefront window rolls back to let fresh air and conversation from the outside patio in. Bob’s is open daily.
128. Caffetto
City: Minneapolis, MN
Category: Restaurants
Telephone: (612) 872-0911
Address: 708 West 22nd St.
Description: Caffetto has a reputation as a hookup spot for singles, and it’s no wonder: The close-packed, irregular seating pretty much forces you to get social. Once you do warm up, there are booths for cuddling—sometimes to the disgust of other patrons, they are indeed used for such—and a dark basement featuring a ping-pong table and a pinball machine starring an oversexed robot. (Seriously.) The coffee’s good, too, if you care about that.
129. Common Roots
City: Minneapolis, MN
Category: Restaurants
Telephone: (612) 871-2360
Address: 2558 South Lyndale Ave.
Description: Common Roots faces off against the C.C. Club at the corner of 26th and Lyndale, playing the roles of angel and devil on Uptown denizens’ shoulders. Common Roots is the angel, a brightly colored and sunlit spot serving wholesome food, mediocre but fair trade coffee, and even a few microbrews. Consistent with its forward-thinking philosophy, Common Roots offers its back room for nonprofits to hold meetings—and then after closing time, everyone heads over to the C.C. Club to pay the devil his due.
130. Java Jack’S
City: Minneapolis, MN
Category: Restaurants
Telephone: (612) 825-2183
Address: 818 West 46th St.
Description: Java Jack’s is geographically located midway between Uptown and Edina, and its atmosphere and clientele are representative of the lifestyle fence upon which it sits: There’s a little bit of shopping-mall burnish and a little bit of indie funkiness, the latter especially to be found in the subterranean lounge. The baked goods are tasty, but the coffee is skippable.
131. La Société Du Thé
City: Minneapolis, MN
Category: Restaurants
Telephone: (612) 871-5148
Address: 2708 Lyndale Ave. South
Description: This well-stocked, comfortable teahouse offers more than 100 varieties of specialty and whole-leaf teas sold in three-ounce portions, ranging in price from $4.50 to more than $20. The helpful staff gives careful instructions about heating water, steeping time, and the story behind each particular type of tea, all of which are preserved in airtight canisters. You can also enjoy tea by the cup or the pot in the teahouse. La Société du Thé is open Monday through Saturday.
132. Muddy Waters
City: Minneapolis, MN
Category: Restaurants
Telephone: (612) 872-2232
Address: 2401 Lyndale Ave. South
Description: “I didn’t know that people in Boise were gonna ask me about the Muddy Waters coffee shop,” rapper Slug said about his favorite south Minneapolis hangout when his local act Atmosphere became nationally famous. This long-established coffeehouse, furnished like a college student’s first apartment, caters specifically to the quirky hipster crowd, with menu items like Pop-Tarts and Spaghetti O’s. Saturday-morning cartoons are often featured on the TV screens. Muddy Waters is open daily.
City: Minneapolis, MN
Category: Restaurants
Address: 2451 Nicollet Ave.
134. Urban Bean
City: Minneapolis, MN
Category: Restaurants
Telephone: (612) 824-6611
Address: 3255 Bryant Ave. South
Description: The Urban Bean doesn’t display art on its walls—the shop itself is a work of art. Designed in a modern, minimalist style but saturated with red and aquamarine rather than boring white, the Urban Bean is an independent coffee shop with a design theme that’s more coherent and better developed than you’ll find at any chain shop—there’s even a branded merchandise line featuring iterations of the shop’s raccoon-face logo. The social atmosphere is largely work-oriented: Voices ricochet right off the bare walls, so a non-whispered conversation at one end of the shop can earn you a dirty look from someone sitting clear across the room. When you stop looking at your cup and actually drink the coffee, you’ll find yourself pleased with that, too.
135. Wilde Roast Cafe
City: Minneapolis, MN
Category: Restaurants
Telephone: (612) 331-4544
Address: 518 East Hennepin Ave.
Description: Precisely as its name suggests, Wilde Roast is a magnet for Minneapolitans who are droll, literate, gay, and decadent. If any of those words describe you—and especially if more than one of them do—you’ll want to invite yourself to Wilde Roast. Besides coffee, the extremely comfortable spot has a fine wine list and a food menu that is without peer among local establishments that could conceivably be called coffee shops. Specialty pizzas, mixed-green salads, strata and frittata, desserts made from scratch: It’s food to die for, but if you truly want to follow Oscar’s example, you’ll wait to expire until you’ve delivered some highly quotable last words.