The Essential Guide to Twin Cities Restaurants

Crystal Grobe is a local food writer who loves trying out new restaurants to gain inspiration for cooking in her own kitchen. She loves Minnesota and is always on the go in search of new foods, events, music, and friends with her husband, Ryan. Find more of her work on Café Cyan and Bite of Minnesota, where she blogs for WCCO.

The Herkimer is a great place to visit any day of the week. Not only do they offer happy hour seven days a week from 3pm to 6pm (and again on food from 10pm to midnight), but they have a fantastic weekend breakfast menu on Saturdays and Sundays.

Stopping by the Herkimer on a late Saturday morning, I was surprised by the extensive menu offerings. While some restaurants limit their weekend menus to breakfast items, the Herkimer offers both breakfast and lunch until 3pm which is perfect for us indecisive late risers.

As it is always five o'clock somewhere, I started with the bloody mary special (screwdrivers are also offered) where for $6 you get a bloody mary, a Herkimer beer chaser and you get to keep both glasses. The bloody marys are smooth, especially when paired with a crisp dark beer like the Dunkel Weiss.

The Herkimer brews a wide range of beers from light to dark that are kept up-to-date on a chalkboard. While I enjoyed the Dunkel Weiss, I also tried the Tooler's Weiss, an unfiltered German-style wheat beer with hints of banana and clove. It had a slight bitterness, but was very drinkable.

While the breakfast items all looked quite appealing, I had to order my favorite, the classic eggs benedict. Two eggs over medium (my preferred style) on top of Canadian bacon and lightly toasted English muffins with lemony hollandaise drizzled over the top. It is served with a generous order of perfectly cooked hash browns, easily enough to share.

After letting breakfast digest while listening to free music on the jukebox, we were ready for lunch. Our server recommended the Herkiburger due to its popularity and she was nice enough to split it for us. The Herkiburger is made in house, so no frozen pre-made patties here. It is an incredibly tasty burger with juicy ground beef topped with mozzarella cheese, crispy battered onions and bacon, and an amazing raspberry barbecue sauce. The sauce makes the burger so unique and is the perfect mash up of raspberry preserves and spicy barbecue sauce that kept our taste buds guessing what was going to hit them next.

Since I do not see brussels sprouts on menus often, I was eager to try the Bacon Spinach Salad. Two poached eggs were served on a lightly dressed bed of spinach, bacon, tomatoes, red onion and sweet roasted brussels sprouts. Every bite offered a different flavor combination of sweet, salty and tart; before we knew it, the salad was devoured.

The Herkimer offers more than food and drink. As mentioned, it has a jukebox that is loaded with local and independent music. It was free until 6pm on Saturday, which encouraged us to hang out longer. The Herkimer also offers shuffleboard leagues and outdoor bean bag games. Since you only have one free hand while playing, bar food comes in handy. Luckily they offer several options in this department like sweet potato fries and warm pub pretzels. The fries are fried until crispy and evenly coated with salt.

The pub pretzels are brushed with warm butter and are great for sharing. They are served with regular nacho cheese and a sinus-clearing jalapeno honey mustard that was surprisingly addicting. I even dipped quite a few fries into this sauce.

The Herkimer offers seating both indoors and outdoors. On-street metered parking can be found on Lyndale Avenue in front of the restaurant.

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