About

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The Heavy Table is a Twin Cities-based magazine passionately telling the stories of food and drink — from roots to table — in the Upper Midwest.

We are interested in small, neighborhood restaurants; ethnic eateries with a story to tell; great home cooking; Upper Midwestern culinary traditions; stuff that’s hilarious; recipes that work; recipes that fail spectacularly; current events; local food; heirloom food; and people at all levels of the food creation, preparation, distribution and consumption chain.

The Heavy Table is for readers who enjoy good food. That might mean a $75 tab at La Belle Vie or a $5 porketta sandwich bought on the road to Hibbing. It might be a dandelion salad or a venison stew. It might be a new variety of Bisquick pancakes.

We read Saveur, and MFK Fisher, and The Art of Eating, and Brillat-Savarin. We also watch Andrew Zimmern and Anthony Bourdain and keep tabs on the local food blogs. We write to be understood, to be accurate, and to entertain.

The Heavy Table is a positive voice with integrity. We will call people out on lousy value and bad hospitality. But we prefer to celebrate the delicious, the creative, the honest, and the heartwarming.

We look forward to serving you.

Staff

Editor

James Norton |
James Norton is the co-author of an upcoming book about Minnesota sandwiches and the people who eat them, the co-author of a book about Wisconsin’s master cheesemakers, a weekly columnist for CHOW.com, and a contributor to Tablespoon.com. Norton has written about food for Salon, Popular Science, Saveur.com, Minnesota Monthly, and City Pages (as a weekly restaurant reviewer).

Contributing Writers

Tricia Cornell |
After five years editing Minnesota Parent and Minnesota Good Age, Tricia is finally willing to admit that she might love food nearly as much as her children. Dinner, in any case, never talks back. Five years writing travel guides in the Baltics taught her to love good beer, dark bread, and savory pastries stuffed with everything from sausage to rice. As a defensive measure, she knows the word for “liver” in nearly every Eastern European language. Tricia has also written for Minnesota Monthly, City Pages, the Rake, and Experience Life. She wrote the Moon Handbooks guide to the Twin Cities and updated the third edition of the Moon guide to Minnesota.

Eric Faust |
Coffee in the morning to wake up and coffee to fall asleep at night is the philosophy that drives the caffeinated life of Eric Faust. Studying coffee roasting for the University of Minnesota Duluth while spending late nights cupping coffee and developing roast profiles has been the foundation for Eric’s quest to develop coffee as a culinary art. He has written about coffee for The Rake, Fresh Cup Magazine, and Roast Magazine. Between roasting and cupping Eric manages Clyde Iron Works Restaurant in Duluth, MN.

Soleil Ho |
Soleil Ho was born to cook. While other kids spent their days outside poking things with sticks and scraping their knees, she was peeling mountains of raw shrimp and making popsicles from regurgitated Teddy Grahams. Various misadventures have brought her from New York City to the great city of Minneapolis, where she now cooks professionally, helps out the guys at Gastro Non Grata, and volunteers at the Trylon Microcinema in Longfellow. In addition to writing at Heavy Table, she wrote a weekly column at Eat Me Daily about food in film and television. She is currently a line cook at the Grand Cafe in South Minneapolis.

Jill Lewis |
The great-granddaughter of an Eastern European Jewish baker, Jill Lewis cannot escape her genetic predisposition to carbs. Her love of baked goods, wine, cheese and chocolate may not come in handy for her day job as a Twin Cities PR professional, but it proves infinitely helpful for her gigs as a contributing writer for The Heavy Table and the co-author of the Cheese and Champagne blog. A former resident of Illinois, Texas, Wisconsin and suburban Washington, D.C., Jill now lives with her husband, two young sons and cat in St. Louis Park.

Susan Pagani |
Susan Pagani has lived in Michigan, Wisconsin, Oregon, Washington, and Texas, and is a native of California. But, for all that moving, she believes she was born to live alongside the Mississippi — and to fly fish. Previously, she was Food Editor at the San Antonio Current, an alt-weekly in Texas, and wrote about everything from familial fig trees and DIY fortune cookies to the Texas legislature and reproductive rights. She is currently working as a copywriter and editor in East St. Paul. She lives in Longfellow with her husband and their nutty dog, and eats as much toast as she possibly can every day.

Alyssa Vance |
Alyssa is the offspring of an eccentric, food-obsessed family. An airline kid who traveled the globe and developed a taste for escargot and foie gras as a child, she now lives in the Summit Hill neighborhood of Saint Paul with her husband, two English Pointers and black cat. As a yoga teacher, she is regretfully apprehensive to succumb to the yogic practice of vegetarianism and thus, does not discriminate against any food, especially bacon. She believes that everyone is a budding chef waiting to be found, and should enter their kitchen without fear. Oh, and when in doubt, should add butter.

Contributing Photographers

Katie Cannon |
Whether it’s the perfect fish taco, a crumbly buttery scone or a thick juicy steak, Katie enjoys the art of making and eating good food. She values sharing a good meal with friends and family and loves to entertain as a means of doing so. A human resources professional for many years, she recently made a career change to pursue photography professionally. She currently is busy enjoying food writing and photography for her personal blog Camacho Watcho and is excited to contribute as both a writer and photographer for the Heavy Table.

Becca Dilley |
Becca Dilley is the co-author of The Master Cheesemakers of Wisconsin, a professional photographer, and the founder of the Independent Wedding Association. Her photos have appeared in Minnesota Bride, Saveur, and the Star Tribune. She won a red ribbon with her Grandma Dilley’s pickled watermelon rinds in the 2009 Minnesota State Fair.

Kate NG Sommers |
Kate has been eating well since infancy, when her mother exposed her to scraping the meat off an artichoke leaf with her newly formed front teeth. Since then she has developed an obsession with all things related to good dining. At her day job she works for an international organic food company. Nights and weekends Sommers can be found at dinner parties, photographing weddings, and working in her garden which she hopes one day will actually grow vegetables. She enjoys working on her personal blog Fork, Knife and Spoon and has a recurring weekly photo column at the City Pages Hot Dish. Born and raised in a Milwaukee suburb, Kate has also enjoyed living and working in Italy and now calls Northeast Minneapolis her home, where she lives with her patient husband and their three cats.

Copy Editor

Emily Nystrom |
Emily Nystrom experiments with new recipes each week and keeps a mile-long list of restaurants to visit. By day, she is the senior editor for a business-to-business pharmaceutical publication. Ever dedicated to Minnesota, Emily was raised in Minnetonka, attended Carleton in Northfield, and now lives in Eden Prairie. She is always impressed by fresh custard-filled doughnuts, perfectly spiced Indian curries, and restaurants that offer more than one vegetarian dish.

Assistant Editor

Maja Ingeman |
The daughter of an artist and a music teacher, Maja spent much of her childhood traveling the country in a rusty old van, attempting to model all of her father’s salable jewelry at the same time, and sampling the many edibles available both on the road and at the art fairs they visited. Though she now lives in Minneapolis, the coffee addiction and love for food that she picked up en route to one of their many destinations never left her. Between marketing work in the medical device industry and Saturday morning shifts at Sweets Bakeshop, she can typically be found holed up in her kitchen, baking bread every weekend and experimenting in between.

Producer

Aaron Landry |
Aaron is an online media hound, media consultant and prolific blogger. He loves pizza, cheeses and almost anything that can be drunk. He works with numerous organizations, non-profits, political groups and large firms on engaging audiences online. On the side, Aaron is an amateur photographer, private pilot and pianist. Born and raised outside of Stillwater, MN, Aaron lives with his cat Nadia in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis. His personal blog is s4xton.com and offices at a design agency in Saint Paul.

Interns

Copy Desk Intern: Elizabeth Cavert Mead Scheibel
Research Intern: Emily Schnobrich

About Our Star System

Full-length reviews on The Heavy Table are accompanied by a star rating from 0 to 4 stars. A 1-star review isn’t negative; it’s mixed. Even a 1/2 star restaurant will have one or two positive points worth mentioning.

We are fully aware that it’s difficult, if not insulting, to attempt to boil a restaurant down to a simple star rating, just as it’s insanely reductive to boil a film down to a thumb jammed up or down. That said, we use these ratings as a condensed thumbnail of the review, as a jumping-off point for reader discussion, and as a way to clarify our reviewers’ thoughts and remind them that, ultimately, they must take a firm stand when they write.

(Poor)
(Flawed)
(Notable)
(Notable)
(Good)
(Good)
(Excellent)
(Excellent)
(Superb)

Our Ethics Policy

Restaurant reviews are sacred. If we’re handing out stars or even publishing a brief listing, we are not being compensated in cash or trade by the establishment. The evaluation will be done with magazine funds and on an anonymous basis.

Any sponsored content will be clearly marked as such. Sponsored content will not include reviews, short or long.

As with all content on the site, The Heavy Table has final say on all wording in sponsored content and will ensure that all claims or statements made are either colorful and subjective or verifiable as factual.

Sponsored information and contests on third-party services (deals or promotions on Flickr or Twitter, for example) will always be clearly marked as sponsored.

The Heavy Table accepts product samples, books, and event tickets for review consideration. Anything valued over $100 US (including but not limited to trips, appliances, fancy liquor, etc.) will be disclosed explicitly in any coverage on the site.

If a writer or a member of his or her immediate family has a direct financial relationship with a subject of an article, he or she will not write about that subject without a full disclosure of the relationship.

Our Values

Appreciation of the seasonal, the local, and the truly creative
Personalized partnerships with advertisers and sponsors
Exploration of context
Aesthetic grace
Unflinching criticism tempered by sympathy for those who dare to attempt something difficult
Accuracy
Truly original content
Nimble use of technology to best convey good information to readers
Stories featuring real people