My wife and I and friend were in Owatonna last weekend (the one before Memorial Day weekend) and needed to find a place to eat. We decided to take a chance on Plaza Moreno for some Mexican food. The service was good, everything else... meh. It was Mexican food for the meat & potatoes Minnesota palate.
They immediately had chips and salsa at our table to start, naturally. The chips were fine. The salsa was super mild, bland, and very thin and runny. I kept fishing for some chunks of tomato... or anything. Then came time to order dinner. My wife wasn't very hungry so she just ordered a couple tacos. I ordered the pork tamales and our friend ordered the chicken tamales. It was three tamales served with rice and beans, again, naturally. The tamales were ok. The pork had some flavor, but the tamales had zero spice. The rice looked like Spanish rice, but had almost no flavor, and the beans, sadly, were as spicy as the rest of the food. The sour cream on the side seemed very unnecessary. Was that there in case I accidentally found some spice in my food? I did find the spice, though. It was all in a bottle at the end of the table. The hot sauce improved both the tamales and the rice.
My wife said the tacos were ok, but also on the bland side.
On what sometimes is a plus side, the portions were huge. When I was finished it looked like I barely made a dent eventhough I almost finished the tamales and ate over half of the rice. It reminded me of the PJ Bland'scommercial.
Since it hit 97° here on Tuesday, ugh, we found ourselves at an ice cream shop. We are both born and bred Minnesotans so we don't need an excuse, like it being incredibly hot in May, just to get ice cream. We'll eat ice cream in any weather. You'd be amazed at how many times we eat ice cream on -20° days. That's just how Minnesotans work. But, since the temperature reached god-awful, ice cream was required.
We played a round on mini-golf at Dred Scott and then went to Scoops, which is just across the street. It's in a strip mall at the corner of Old Shakopee Rd. and Bloomington Ferry Rd. They have a selection of about 15 to 20 different flavors as well as soft serve and shakes. Some of the ice cream is Kemps (I think it was Kemps) and they have a few from Sebastian Joe's, which is a very popular ice cream shop in Minneapolis, and the rest must be their own. If you ask the owner of Scoops (who was in the shop when we were there) a question about the ice cream, it's clear he really has a passion for it.
I had the Pavarotti, which is a Sebatian Joe's flavor. It's banana, caramel, and chocolate. It was really good, but it's rather banana-y so be warned. My wife had the birthday cake ice cream. I don't remember the name. It was a Kemps flavor and it had cake flavored ice cream with chunks of yellow cake and sprinkles mixed in. That was very tasty as well.
Scoops is a fun little shop to visit any time in the Summer (it's closed in the winter) but especially when it's stupidly hot out.
I took my parents out to Punch Pizza on Mothers Day. I decided on Punch because plans for this weekend were a bit up in the air until the last minute on account of the weather, my dad is a farmer, so I couldn't really make reservations for some Mothers Day brunch. And, I didn't want to wait some place for 45 minutes to an hour and fight crowds and noise for some food where the quality had more than likely been sacrificed in order to feed a giant number of people on account of the holiday. I knew with Punch it may still be busy, but the wait wouldn't be long and the pizza would still be good and, above all, mom would like it.
Punch is authentic Neapolitan style pizza. In fact, they are one of only about 25 U.S. members of Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana, which is an international trade association that seeks to “promote the culinary tradition of the Neapolitan pizza”. They have strict rules for members ensuring the authenticity of the pizza, which include wood-burning domed ovens and dough that is made from only flour, yeast, water, and salt. Punch actually flies in some of their toppings from Italy each week.
We arrived there with my parents at 11:35. I remember this exactly because I was going to meet my parents at their hotel at 11:15 in order to be at the restaurant at 11:30 and I would have been perfectly on time had I not nearly forgotten mom's card and had to turn around to get it and waste 5 minutes in the process. My brother and his fiance were meeting us there and beat us by a few minutes. The place was still pretty quiet at this point with maybe not even half of the cozy dining room filled. We spent a few minutes going over the menu and my wife and I tried to answer any questions the best we could but neither of us have done the "craft your own" option, so we weren't exactly sure on all the details. I was willing to spend as much time as needed on the menu because I had some concerns about bringing this group here. My mom, my wife, and I will eat pretty much anything. My brother's fiance is a really picky eater. She does a good job of making it her problem and not everybody else's, but I really don't know the things she likes and doesn't. My dad is Norwegian and most of my siblings display this trait when it comes to food. I seem to have overcome this affliction.
My brother and his fiance ordered and grabbed a table while we spent another minute on the menu. My wife ordered her favorite, the Siciliana (proscuitto, artichoke, picholine olive, basil), and then I ordered my favorite, the Visuvio (spiced salami, saracene olive, cracked red pepper, pepperoncini, basil). Mom order the Palermo (spiced salami, sun-dried tomato, saracene olive, oregano) and then told the girl at the register that "you're going to have to help him" and pointed to dad. Dad then explained to her that "I'm Norwegian". He ended up ordering a Napoli (sauce, oregano, mozzarella) with ham, sausage, onion, and garlic. My brother had also ordered the Palermo and his fiance got the same thing dad did but without the sausage.
We couldn't have been sitting at our table for more than five minutes before our pizzas came, which is about par for the course. It only takes 90 seconds to bake a pizza in their 800° oven (there is video of this on their website). If you aren't familiar with their pizzas, they are individual sized and are very thin crust. The outer crust rises in the oven and the middle stays thin and doesn't get crispy. You will need to be prepared to use your utensils or carefully dive in with both hands. It can be a messy experience between that and the wonderful charred spots on the crust that can leave your fingers and lips black.
I just love Punch and everybody in our group seemed to really like it too. The ingredients at Punch are very flavorful and I love the spiciness of the Visuvio. The only blemish was that my brother must have missed that the Palermo has olives on it and, after eating a couple, he picked the rest off. I'm not a fan of olives myself, but I do kind of like the saracene olives that are on my Vesuvio.
Punch has 6 Twin Cities metro locations.
UPDATE: Here is that video I mentioned, courtesy of Punch Pizza.
They also have a Flickr page where you can check out some photos like this one.
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