Run by Zoo Animal musician and studio engineer Holly Hansen, Heights Coffee Bar in Columbia Heights is an intentional return to an earlier era of locally owned neighborhood businesses and in-person in...

The Heavy Table is a team of writers, photographers, and illustrators telling the stories of food and drink in the Upper Midwest. We publish weekly. Click to read The Heavy Table, by James Norton, a S...

Celebrating the Jewish-by-choice experience with essays about identity, ritual, and spirituality

The Jewish Tourist is an occasional series covering the Jewish sights, foods, and experiences I've encountered on my travels. Today we're heading to New York City for bagels, knishes, and an awe-inspi...

Celebrating the Jewish-by-choice experience with essays about identity, ritual, and spirituality

How a YA novel shaped my spiritual journey My synagogue recently hosted a talk by Rabbi Adam Chalom about how to define a Jewish book, exploring a wide variety of frameworks. Some were discarded as t...

Asian grocery stores are a lifeline to the communities they serve. But store owners say the prospect of sweeping tariffs are threatening their ability to stock up on goods and keep prices affordable.

Celebrating the Jewish-by-choice experience with essays about identity, ritual, and spirituality

I have spent the past several weeks filled with overwhelming grief. For trans and non-binary people whose healthcare, passport access, and dignity is being stripped away. For undocumented immigrants w...

Seven years after quitting my paralegal job, things are still chugging along at Stacy Inc. Over the past few years, I've settled into a groove of covering the Twin Cities food scene for the Heavy Tab...

The record collection isn’t a background feature at the intimate hi-fi bar in northeast Minneapolis, it’s a main focus. Small Hours, which opened last September, is a collaboration between sommelier S...

Celebrating the Jewish-by-choice experience with essays about identity, ritual, and spirituality

During my last semester of college, upon realizing that my B.A. in mathematics would be next to useless in the Great Recession job market, I took a couple of education classes. Both shaped the rest of...

There's a good reason Minnesota's football team is named the Vikings—the state is home to more Nordic-Americans than any other state. About 28 percent of Minnesotans, or over 1.6 million people, have...

Another big year down at the ol' news/arts/culture journalism factory.

I love compiling my annual "best things I ate" post because it's a chance to relive the year's most memorable moments. 2024 included trips to Japan and Montreal, an exquisite kaiseki meal and Laotian...

At my synagogue's Hanukkah party last year, there were dreidels on all of the tables to keep kids occupied until the food was served. I idly picked one up and started spinning it, apparently halfway d...

Are they holiday bars, or are they Christmas bars?

Are they holiday bars, or are they Christmas bars?

The Grater Good MN

Finding my place in Judaism as a midlife convert, one loaf of challah at a time

Some thoughts on December holidays and Christian hegemony Since I converted to Judaism last December, I've spent the past year updating friends, acquaintances, and colleagues on my fairly major shift...