Moveable Feast: West Side Feast

For our weekly feature, "Moveable Feast," Rachel Hutton of Minnesota Monthly joins John Birge to talk about where to go and what to eat in Minnesota.

This weekend on the west side of the Twin Cities, there are two cultural events worth checking out: The Twin Cities Film Fest at the Showplace ICON Theatres in St. Louis Park, and the Pen Pals Author Lecture Series with Doris Kearns Goodwin at the Hopkins Center for the Arts. And that gave us a reason to check out different restaurants of these two western suburbs.

There's a surprising variety of dining in St. Louis Park and Hopkins. St. Louis Park is perhaps best known for the health-focused Mill Valley Kitchen. As the name suggests, it has a northern California-type menu and a very polished feel. They list all the calorie counts on the menu, along with other nutritional information — you'll be surprised by how good "healthy" food can taste. There's good Asian food in St. Louis Park too, including Thanh Do, Wok in the Park, and my personal favorite, Yangtzee, which has dim sum.

Downtown Hopkins has quite an array of ethnic eateries. For Japanese food there's Aji, known for its sushi. Perhaps most unusually, there's Samba, which is a Brazillian eatery. Brazil is known as a cultural melting pot, and fittingly they serve a meat-bean Portuguese stew, roasted meats, as well as Lebanese and Italian dishes.

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