Tilia

The restaurant scene in Minneapolis continues to get better and better! There have been a lot of new places that have opened that are really doing their best to bring new and unique food, cook with local ingredients and just up the quality of the options. Tilia is that! A great restaurant in the Linden Hills area of Minneapolis, they are doing their best of support the neighborhood with great food.

We had plans to meet my friends Shari and Joe for dinner on Friday night and I was really excited to finally be trying out Tilia! The plan was to meet at 7, we got their and put our names on the list. Tilia doesn’t take reservations so we knew we would have to wait. Instead of the hour quoted it only ended up being about 30 minutes. Pretty good for a prime time table for 4 in a small space.

Still on the summer white wine kick we ordered a bottle of an Italian White, reasonably priced at $29 and a great wine for a Friday night dinner.

It was very much a back and forth evening of trying to decide what we wanted to eat. Two entree’s? Share a few things? Salad? The choice was to order plates to share. My goal was to try some unique foods and really sample the menu. Escargot, meat balls, braised kale with figs, bacon and clove, blt dogs with pickled cauliflower and a small size squash pasta with walnuts, gorgonzola, spinach, ricotta, and prosciutto. (Imagine this pasta x3, since Joe and Shari each ordered it as well)

I want an escargot plate like this for at home, not sure I would ever use it but I love the shape and I am sure I could think of other things to bake in it

I could only finish half of the hot dog, but it was one kick a$$ hot dog. So good!

I will be visiting again! Even on a jam packed Friday night we had really good service, our food came out pretty quickly, and it was a great place to people watch. It is a bit on the loud side but its a small space and it was completely full.