Bike and Bistro Sunday Date
Jun. 15th, 2008 08:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreamsharkBike trip: Carver Park Reserve (Victoria): 11 miles
Bistro: Cafe Maude (54th and Penn, Mpls): seared tuna, lamb skewers, house-cut fries, corn chowder, chocolate pistachio torte, fried catalones.
Carver Park is a beautiful place for an afternoon bike trip. It's maybe a half hour drive from our house and very easy to get to provided you know to turn north on Victoria Drive from Hwy 5 (if there is any signage for the park in the town of Victoria, we didn't see it. Odd, when you consider that this huge regional park is maybe 10 times the size of tiny Victoria.) There's 8-10 miles of mostly very well-maintained paved bike trails rolling gently up and down through prairie, wetlands, lakeshore, second growth hardwood forest and oak savannah. And there was practically NOBODY there. We saw maybe a dozen other bikers, a few hikers and picnickers, and a handful of pitched tents. Considering it was Sunday afternoon on an absolutely exquisite June day (72 degrees, big white fluffy clouds sailing along in a cerulean sky) I'm thinking this is a very underutilized park.
The only downside as a biking destination is that there is a gap in the middle of the network of bike paths necessitating riding along a road for 1/2 mile and then dragging one's bike around a car barrier to get to the second set of trails. However, since there was practically nobody else in the park, riding along the road was not particularly onerous. It's not like there was a lot of traffic. We managed to rack up 11 miles without even covering all the trails in the park, since the layout requires riding out and back along several stretches of trail. The scenery was so varied that this was not in any way boring. It also took us a couple of hours, what with stopping to gawk at the scenery and take pictures. It would have been a great place for a picnic lunch, what with all the little grassy overlooks with viewing decks and shaded picnic tables. But that would have negated the point of the trip, which was really to build up enough of an appetite (and burn enough calories) to counterbalance the second part of the trip: a decadent meal in one of our lovely South Minneapolis bistros.
I had been to Cafe Maude on a![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
minnehaha review dinner, but Richard hadn't eaten there and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. This worked out perfectly, as 54th and Penn was right on our way home, and we just happened to arrive about 10 minutes after they started their dinner service. 5pm on a Sunday evening is a perfect time to eat at this popular restaurant. On my previous visit it was noisy, dark and crowded and we had to wait an hour to get seated. This time the ambience felt much different, with sun streaming in the front windows, happy diners out on the patio, and maybe half the tables filled inside. It's quite an eclectic crowd, I must say: casual young couples, a family wearing turbans, a group of middle-aged men in astonishingly loud shirts (golfers?), somebody having dinner with her grandmother, and so on. The food was really good, although it is all too easy to run up a $40/person bill on the a la carte menu. However, the best thing on the menu (IMHO) is the cheapest - the roasted corn chowder. The best dessert, which easily serves two: the Fried Catalones.
Which reminds me,minnehahas : did you ever publish a review based on that earlier expedition? Do you happen to have a link to an online version?
Bistro: Cafe Maude (54th and Penn, Mpls): seared tuna, lamb skewers, house-cut fries, corn chowder, chocolate pistachio torte, fried catalones.
Carver Park is a beautiful place for an afternoon bike trip. It's maybe a half hour drive from our house and very easy to get to provided you know to turn north on Victoria Drive from Hwy 5 (if there is any signage for the park in the town of Victoria, we didn't see it. Odd, when you consider that this huge regional park is maybe 10 times the size of tiny Victoria.) There's 8-10 miles of mostly very well-maintained paved bike trails rolling gently up and down through prairie, wetlands, lakeshore, second growth hardwood forest and oak savannah. And there was practically NOBODY there. We saw maybe a dozen other bikers, a few hikers and picnickers, and a handful of pitched tents. Considering it was Sunday afternoon on an absolutely exquisite June day (72 degrees, big white fluffy clouds sailing along in a cerulean sky) I'm thinking this is a very underutilized park.
The only downside as a biking destination is that there is a gap in the middle of the network of bike paths necessitating riding along a road for 1/2 mile and then dragging one's bike around a car barrier to get to the second set of trails. However, since there was practically nobody else in the park, riding along the road was not particularly onerous. It's not like there was a lot of traffic. We managed to rack up 11 miles without even covering all the trails in the park, since the layout requires riding out and back along several stretches of trail. The scenery was so varied that this was not in any way boring. It also took us a couple of hours, what with stopping to gawk at the scenery and take pictures. It would have been a great place for a picnic lunch, what with all the little grassy overlooks with viewing decks and shaded picnic tables. But that would have negated the point of the trip, which was really to build up enough of an appetite (and burn enough calories) to counterbalance the second part of the trip: a decadent meal in one of our lovely South Minneapolis bistros.
I had been to Cafe Maude on a
minnehaha review dinner, but Richard hadn't eaten there and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. This worked out perfectly, as 54th and Penn was right on our way home, and we just happened to arrive about 10 minutes after they started their dinner service. 5pm on a Sunday evening is a perfect time to eat at this popular restaurant. On my previous visit it was noisy, dark and crowded and we had to wait an hour to get seated. This time the ambience felt much different, with sun streaming in the front windows, happy diners out on the patio, and maybe half the tables filled inside. It's quite an eclectic crowd, I must say: casual young couples, a family wearing turbans, a group of middle-aged men in astonishingly loud shirts (golfers?), somebody having dinner with her grandmother, and so on. The food was really good, although it is all too easy to run up a $40/person bill on the a la carte menu. However, the best thing on the menu (IMHO) is the cheapest - the roasted corn chowder. The best dessert, which easily serves two: the Fried Catalones.Which reminds me,
minnehahas : did you ever publish a review based on that earlier expedition? Do you happen to have a link to an online version?
