Spoon and Stable

Spoon and Stable is Gavin Kaysen's North Loop flagship, opened in 2014 inside a 1906 former horse stable, with backing from his mentors Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller. It was a 2015 James Beard nominee for Best New Restaurant and Food & Wine's Restaurant of the Year that same year, and it is broadly credited with accelerating the North Loop's turn from warehouse district to the centre of Minneapolis dining. Kaysen himself has since won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Midwest.

The zero-proof offering is a genuine on-menu programme rather than an accommodation, carried as a dedicated Spirit Free Libations section and attributed to bar manager Jessi Pollak — the same beverage director behind the Temperance Pairing at Kaysen's tasting-counter restaurant Demi next door, which is the strongest signal available that this is a group-wide commitment rather than one room's initiative. The current builds work across registers rather than clustering in fruit: Toasted Oak combines pu'er tea with toasted oak, demerara and aromatic bitters, which is about as close as a non-alcoholic drink gets to the weight and wood of a spirit; Solstice pairs a blood orange aperitif with blueberry rooibos, lemon and cinnamon; and the Café Negroni is built on Pathfinder hemp amaro with cold brew, blood orange and Floreale, covering the bitter end properly. Around them the list carries Oddbird sparkling rosé and non-alcoholic beers from Athletic, Bauhaus and Heineken 0.0, so a table ordering wine has a real parallel rather than a substitute. Mpls.St.Paul Magazine put it simply: "Every picture-perfect plate would pair beautifully with one of bar manager Jessi Pollak's four mocktails." Dinner nightly, with brunch on Sundays. Being able to eat at a restaurant of this stature, in a converted 1906 stable, and drink something built by the same person responsible for one of America's best non-alcoholic tasting pairings next door, is a rare combination anywhere in the country.