My mother died when I was 17 at the young age of 46, with a lot of life to live left in her. The thing that killed her might kill me. And the thing that killed her that might kill me might also kill my unborn children.
I guess, well, I’m not technically infertile, but I’m “spend $300,000 and have less than 70% chance of having a baby” fertile. I’m “at least seven egg retrievals” fertile. I’m “we won’t know until we test the father if you can have children and not pass this on so you probably shouldn’t even freeze your eggs unless you have a donor in mind” fertile. I’m “it’s a problem on the dominant and recessive line so less than 50% of your embryos will be viable” fertile.
I have one genetic variation that is well known, easy to test for in fetuses, and not something I would ever want to pass on–a potential early death, a life of invasive surgeries, constant worries about what the lumps in your breast might mean, so many tears. And I have another, well, another that people don’t really know if it is harmful to pass on or not. It probably isn’t. Probably. While we can say it’s probably not harmful for me, we can’t say how it might mutate in my children and we can’t test for it in the embryos unless I want to build a custom test for it. I don’t even want to tell you the cost of a custom test to test for it.
“Have the baby and pass it on,” people said as the same year I faced down my fertility I also went to Mayo Clinic twelve times to talk about the four surgeries I need before forty.
“Have a baby and pass it on,” people said as I sat in the office of a doctor who held up a chart to inform me that if I get breast cancer it doesn’t mean I die and if I wanted to wait until I found a husband to cut off my breasts in order to be more attractive, that would probably be fine. And look, I made the call: keep the breasts, find the husband, risk the cancer. “Have the baby and pass it on,” people said as I woke up in an operating room in tears, part of my body taken from me, the first of four parts to be cut out of me before 40–it hurt less physically than I thought it would but sometimes I happen upon the scars and don’t know what to say.
I spent much of 2023 quietly talking to other women who embarked on similar journeys to me (test after test, egg retrieval after egg retrieval, implantation after implantation, cut after cut) who ended up not being able to have babies due to IVF failures where all the eggs they so painfully harvested were exhausted. I asked if they would do it all over again to try. None of them said yes. Then there was a doctor who gently, so gently said, “We don’t actually know how IVF hormones impacts you with your genetic predisposition to cancer.”
So I asked the question you ask of doctors when they can’t give you medical advice because the jury is still out but they have a hunch on if something is harmful or not. “If it were you, what would you do?”
She said nothing. She did not say, “Nothing.” She just looked at me with the face people make when they have something to say to you and don’t want to say it. She said nothing. So that was the death of that dream. That was early in the morning on a weekend, which is a strange time for a doctor’s appointment—walking out into Rochester with everyone in their Sunday best, tears in your eyes. But I looked at my phone and I realized, I might be able to make it back in time to go to Dahlia.
The first time I went to Dahlia, it was that morning, facing down my fertility, driving north back to the cities, Mother’s Day 2023 just around the corner.
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The first time I went to Dahlia, I thought it was just okay.
There was a line out the door and I waited longer to get pastries there than I’ve waited at any restaurant in the Twin Cities ever and it was just okay. My English muffins were not cooked through all the way but were a little burnt on the outside. My pastry wasn’t flaky, it was crunchy.
Look–people hate when I say things like this, but… It was a little over a year ago and if you scroll to spring of 2023, you’ll see in the pastry that it looks better now than it did then. It was too brown in 2023 so it didn’t flake when you bit into it, it was crunchy. When you look at the pastries all in a row in some of the shots from early 2023, you can see they are not consistent. Look at the cakes and they’re messy in 2023, gorgeously asymmetrical and whimsical now but in the same style, like the craft has been honed. Dahlia was also young then, just a few months old doing pop-ups and so they really had only had a handful of open days even though they had been around for months.
The second time I went was, to my knowledge, the first time they did full brunch and not just pastry. I waited even longer in line than I did the first time. Alone. Because that’s how I do things most of the time. I thought the pastry was pretty good–better–and I thought the breakfast items needed a lot of work (and salt).
People asked if they should go and I said, “Wait.” I didn’t say, “No.”
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Just okay execution of a really creative concept is something that gets me going, because people will go to eat the fun thing when they could get a simple and basic thing that tastes better somewhere else.
Everyone in Minneapolis loves a fun concept, loves adventure, and loves new things. It’s one of the things that makes us us–we’ll go to your funky or new concept when other cities wouldn’t darken its door. It’s how we have a unique coffee scene full of gochujang mochas (Wesley Andrews) and lattes with the velvet that grows on deer horns in them (you don’t want to try this so I’m not telling you where it is from) and fun, bright spots like Five Watt which serve drinks with bitters. It’s why we have unique pastry all over the city. It’s why we are the home to places like Union Hmong Kitchen and Owamni. People in this city saw kimchi on pizza (Young Joni, Pizzeria Lola) and said, “Hell yeah.” People in this city eat lutefisk for god’s sake.
Chefs who don’t have people walking through the doors of their restaurants like to say that Minnesota diners are not adventurous, but as a woman who travels all over the country to eat, I know that just isn’t true. We are. More so than some major cities. If you can’t bring people in, it’s not a “They’re not ready,” conversation. It’s a, “We didn’t execute it right,” one.
My ex-boyfriend said to me once that he hates that food culture has gotten to the point that everyone is hoping for mind blowing food when they walk into a restaurant. “Sometimes food is just food,” he says, and he’s right, but a place like Dahlia is playing at mind blowing. Lots of new restaurants in Minneapolis are. Lots of our new restaurants say to us, “You haven’t had anything like this before,” and when we say back, “Okay, well maybe I didn’t need to,” we get hit with things from chefs like, “Diners aren’t adventurous.” Or if we say, “I have had something like this before somewhere else,” they say, “It’s not my job to blow your mind.” But that’s what they advertised on. It’s quite frankly patronizing and annoying and lacks humility if you can’t see your execution is the problem, not diners.
I think if you’re going to tell me that you’re making me a lemon meringue pie croissant you’re telling me, “I want to blow your mind.” If you’re making me a butter croissant maybe you are trying to blow my mind, too, but you probably just want to make me a really good butter croissant and send me on my way into the world. When I see a creative concept not executed well with a line out the door, it makes me think something about the state of food in this city: we’re always chasing what is next and what is mind blowing, even when opening week is the worst time to go to a restaurant, and even if the fun thing is just okay.
At the same time, there are moments in life in which I leave a restaurant having not had the best experience and for some reason, I believe in the team. Both times I went to Dahlia early on, I felt that. I felt that it could, it would, find its footing. I felt that it could, it would, get better with time.
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Pop-ups are often, well, not actually very good, especially in the early days. Lynette’s first pop up was rough. The hummus didn’t taste like anything. The pot pie wasn’t cooked through. My friend’s turkey leg had sauce on parts of it and not on others.
They had soft serve that didn’t melt and didn’t leave the cone when you turned it upside down.
All over the internet, photos of that ice cream were splattered on Instagram. So I, like the annoying person I am, DMed some of those people and asked them if they liked the soft serve. It was described by multiple people as having texture ranging from an eraser to a cat tongue to a wood chip. I didn’t judge the soft serve–mistakes happen in a kitchen. No, what I was judging was the fact that the damn soft serve shouldn’t have hit the table and did. Legitimately, it would have been better to say there was a mistake during the pop up on dessert and then not serve dessert. Or honestly? It would have been better to buy some Kemp’s than say, “Fuck it, ship it, people love cat tongues.” Sometimes, you fuck up, and that means you lose out on part of what you had planned. What I judged at Lynette was that someone said, “That’s good enough for a pop up.”
I go to a lot of pop ups and most aren’t worth your time. They’re shooting for good enough and saying, “What do you expect? We’re a pop up.”
Buzzy, long waits even with reservations (my friend and I were at Lynette for three hours and we got out of there before my other friend who had a slot the same time as us) with chaos in the kitchen and mostly sold out items means that for me to recommend a pop up it has to be consistent (like Gab’s Veg Table in the Hudson Valley) or mind blowing (Saturday Dumpling Co’s breakfast scallion pancake burrito situation which is somehow even better the day after reheated than the day of, so get two).
Sometimes the first dozen times people are doing things and they aren’t doing it every day, it’s a little bit rough. You just have to go back and hope that it’s better.
Normally, it gets a little better, but not much. People get comfortable. People stop growing. The attitude is: “The line is out the door and so people must like it and we can stop getting better.” That’s an attitude I see a lot in really buzzy kitchens serving just okay food because everyone tells them it is good enough. The best of lists tell them it is good enough. Influencers tell them it is good enough. Their Chef friends who talk shit behind their back about how it still needs work tell them it is good enough instead of doing the thing that is actually, really and truly, camaraderie: telling them it needs work because they believe they can be better.
But I’m not writing to say that Dahlia didn’t get better. I’m writing to say that even with a line out the door and sell out after sell out date, because they did not settle, it did. It got a lot better.
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I cannot bake a pie. I just can’t. I’ve tried and I’ve tried and I’ve tried and now I’m resolved that I must admit that I need to -take a class- to learn how to make pie crust.
So for Thanksgiving, I asked around about who made the best pie. I got a consistent answer. It was Dahlia. In specific, it was the brown butter caramel pumpkin pie.
I was hosting 35 people for Thanksgiving, so I got two, and made a vegan and gluten free dessert for the vegan and gluten free people in my circle (about 10 people at the party). On my way out of the pick up line, I also got an Apple Pie Snickerdoodle. I started eating it as I was checking out with it (I hadn’t eaten all day) and I said out loud, because I could not help it, “Fuck.” The person checking me out asked me what was wrong and I said, “No, it’s really fucking good. Fuck as in, that’s really fucking good.”
It was the first thing I had from Dahlia that I felt was worth the acclaim. It had been updated. It had gotten better. The first one had less topping and was crunchy. This was soft and covered in topping.
The pie was met by everyone who ate it with completely involuntary, mildly sexual sounds. Is it the best pie I’ve ever had? No, that title belongs to Little Rye’s salted maple pie, which I flew home in January to share with my friends and which I placed $50 on top of for the TSA agent who had to hand inspect it in case they tried to take it from me (I am not above a bribe). I was ready to fight someone if they didn’t let me through. But it is the second best pie I’ve ever had–and I’ve had a lot of pie in the south made by women who sell fried chicken and pie in tiny gas station diners. So I know a thing or two, and have a judgment or two, about pie (even if I can’t make it).
I can’t tell you exactly what happened between the first time I went to Dahlia and Thanksgiving except to say that time had passed, they had tightened things up and found out what worked and didn’t, and maybe some other behind the scenes things very few people know about–or maybe not. Maybe it was all just about finding their footing with time.
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Look. I know you want to go to that new restaurant that just opened with the line out the door.
But most of the time, a restaurant will be better six months in. So if you just rotate your list back six months, still eating at new places to you, you won’t be the first one there to post on your Instagram, but you also won’t have to eat a croissant so hard it needs a fork and knife (sorry y’all but the first one I had kind of did) or cat tongue ice cream or undercooked pizza crust or other kitchen mistakes.
There’s a reason I haven’t been to Diane’s Place or Bûcheron or Chilango. And it’s not because I don’t want to. It’s because I can’t eat everywhere all the time and things get better with time. Let other people try it first. And if you do go early? Constantly saying, “Things will get better with time,” and telling them, “Great job,” or telling others, “Go,” when your meal was just okay isn’t actually helping anyone and isn’t good food culture.
There are countless restaurants I could write this style of piece about, ones that needed work in the early days and are amazing now, but I chose Dahlia because I think that Dahlia is exceptional and because I think you should get brunch there.
For some reason I kept going back because every time it got better, because I believed in it as a diner, even if I didn’t think it was at the peak of its evolution yet.
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My Hinge profile prompt is, “Instead of grabbing drinks, let’s…”
Get bougie at Myriel
Eat pizza at Good Times
Brunch at Dahlia
Dahlia’s brunch has became a theme for me. I’d go and grab pastries and meet men on first dates in the park while eating some insane things like a Leek and Truffle Gouda Croissant. Or I’d go to Oro for a pop up and wait in line and know before I got into the damn restaurant that this man wasn’t the one, but I for one, was going to have brunch even if it was with bad company.
Every time I went, it got better, and it made me think about our fascination with newness in this city. Dahlia isn’t new still, per se, but Dahlia is about 18 months old. The newness still sticks because it is a pop up that is buzzy that most people haven’t gone to yet. Because lines bring more lines. Because buzz brings more buzz. Because influencers look at what each other are doing that gets likes and then they go do it so it stays relevant.
But Dahlia is far better than it was when it was new–in a way that a year ago I would tell you to skip the line and now I’ll tell you to face it down with a good friend.
Like–when Dahlia said they were releasing reservations (thank god, about time, I get why you don’t have them because people dip on them but omg I hate waiting in line, etc) instead of having a walk up for Mother’s Day brunch, I set an alarm and told my followers on Instagram no one better beat me to registering for a reservation. I was the first one to sign up, which I know because Dahlia was tagged in my post and told me that.
A restaurant went from being one that I thought was overhyped and under-executed to one in which I would spend a deeply tender hard moment in: my least favorite holiday of the year. It did that over a 12 month cycle, which is a lot of time, but also hardly any time at all.
I decided to spend this day at Dahlia for two reasons. The first is that it felt like a place I wanted to be on that hard day, with a friend, showing her something I really loved. The second reason is that for some reason Dahlia had become a light for me in the past year swirling around as an occasional touchpoint as I healed my heart and cried over my infertility. As I felt those hard things, I was moved every time I went into a pop up of theirs because they had no reason to get better with their line and the fact that they were sold out early every day. But they did.
It’s an attitude, an energy, that I respect, admire, and live my life by: even if it is good enough, if we can do better, we do better.
That was my theme of 2023 and it was also something I faced down in restaurant after restaurant. I was sitting in restaurants with kitchens who had so much talent in them bored out of my goddamn mind all over the country. I had a server in Chicago say to me, “Well, you know here we play with our food,” and I was asking, myself “How? By adding in some dust on top of a cauliflower? By making me eat something so fast it is mildly stressful?” Play? How?
I wanted heart. I wanted soul. I wanted the funky concept to do the thing it promised it would do. Time after time, restaurant after restaurant, it didn’t. And look–it doesn’t have to be wild for me to love it. Our Kitchen is my favorite classic breakfast spot in this city and no one there wakes up in the morning wanting to blow your mind. They just want to make you a solid pancake.
But if you are telling me that you are going to do something funky, new, or weird, it better be that thing or why are we here?
Dahlia was a touchpoint where I could come back to and say, “They’re really fucking trying to make this the best thing they can make it and they want to execute this concept with a lot of heart.”
For me, restaurants are about entering into a space with intention. What do I feel there? What does it represent to me, to others in my life, to a city? What do I think about the work of the team behind it? On Mother’s Day, for some reason, I felt the need to be in a space that seems hell bent, like I am, on not settling and getting better with time. So that’s what I chose. That’s where I went.
After a year of eating at Dahlia, it had gotten a lot better–my own struggle with infertility had, too.
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I spent Mother’s Day morning laying out on my deck in the sun like a cat or a lizard on the heels of a short relationship’s break up. I walked to my favorite coffee shop and got my favorite coffee. I took my small dog around the lake. I laid in bed for 40 minutes and stared at my fan go round and round. Then I took a shower even though I didn’t want to and picked up 7 bouquets of flowers (2 for me, 5 for friends). In line at Trader Joe’s, the woman behind me asked if I was getting all those flowers for the mothers in my life. “No,” I said. “For me–for friends.”
“Oh,” she said in a bright way that Minnesotans do before they say something kind of rude. “Today we get flowers for mothers.”
I have always been the kind of person to say the thing others would keep inside and I lived in Philly long enough to speak directly to passive aggression in public, so I turned directly to her and in the tenderest voice I could muster I said, “I can’t have kids, but I want them, and this day is for women like me, too.”
She opened her mouth to say something, but I was already gone, turned on my heel and walking out the door to the parking lot to drop off most of the bouquets in water and take two with me to Dahlia.
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I met my friend Nayda there. It was her first time in the Oro space and at Dahlia. We got half the menu. Focaccia french toast. Eggs Benedict. Quiche. Potatoes. Two pastries. I had a pastry box with all of them preordered to go. The pastry I got for breakfast, raspberry rhubarb, was made with rhubarb from the yard of one of the co-owner’s mothers, which is fitting and sweet for this day. The focaccia french toast tastes the way it does because it uses more cream, less egg–and because the focaccia is thick and fluffy.
Nayda and I talked about my fertility, something I haven’t shared a lot about before, and am tying to get better at talking about now. We also talked about what it looks like to live your life in such a way that you would rather be alone than with someone who isn’t your person, how that makes it harder to find love, but makes a richer, more beautiful life.
My friend Nayda said the quiche was her favorite quiche (mine is Black Walnut, but I’ll agree that is very good quiche).
A woman in line for the bathroom told me the eggs benedict was the best she ever had. “Nothing will ever compare,” she told me, flanked by her children and grandchildren on Mother’s Day. On my way to my car someone was arriving with their kiddos in tow and the girl was singing, “Dahlia, Dahlia, Dahlia,” swinging both of her parents’ arms.
Assuming that meant they had been there before I said to the parents, “Hey, do you mind if I ask you a question for a piece I’m writing.” They did not mind. So I asked, “What’s your favorite thing at Dahlia?”
The little girl answered, top of her lungs, “FRENCH TOAST.” She’s right–it’s my favorite thing, too.
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Throughout the rest of the day, I’ll be dropping off pastries to people who haven’t been able to make it to Dahlia along with some flowers. A chef who always works brunch. A friend who is never waiting in line ever. Another friend who doesn’t get up before noon. But the cake? Falling over because of the heat and totally mismatched and kind of deformed and given to me with an apology it didn’t need? That’s for me. Eating it forkful by forkful while I write this.
Maybe it’s trite to say but that’s kind of like life–a little messy, but it doesn't matter. It doesn’t matter what it looks like. It matters how it tastes. And that cake? It’s mind blowing.