Tenant TODOTC.com To Do in the Twin Cities Restaurants Tenant Date: Feb 28, 2025 4300 Bryant Ave S Mpls, MN 55409 Phone: (612) 827-8111 www.tenantmpls.com

Tenant

Some nights reviewing restaurants are less than perfect, Tenant was one of those nights. About once a month or so E chooses our next month or so of restaurants to visit and makes reservations. The problem is all restaurants don’t have the same system. It would be nice if you could make a reservation and the restaurant would immediately text you your date and time and then do so again the night before your reservation. Few do successively. I remember busting out laughing when we were told at a well know restaurant, we had no reservation and E turned her phone to the Maitre d and said then you really should stop texting us about that reservation you claim we do not have. We were seated immediately. LOL.

Now I am blaming no one for the reservation issue. Few people other than us do their own web stuff, so pick your culprit. It’s a known problem. And the problem is on BOTH SIDES. A few weeks ago for Valentine’s Day we chose to take Smack Shack up on their cook a seafood boil at home for $100, it was very good. But as E walked out of Smack Shack on Valentine’s Day with one inch of snow coming down the place was almost empty. I’m sure they were full of reservations, and no one showed. Smack Shack still had to buy food and pay employees like people had followed through with their reservations. SO, if a restaurant asks for a deposit we understand.

The restaurant Tenant came to E’s list. She has no idea how she found out about it, but it fit our criteria, so she booked it. E believed we had 7:30 reservations, which is normal for us after doing our normal 6:30 wine tasting in North Loop. So, we expected no issues. When we walked into Tenant there was a couple that did NOT have reservations trying to get a table without reservations and they were told that night the restaurant could not accommodate walk-ins, so they had to find a different place to eat. E does a lot of research, so we absolutely hate that and try to have reservations every Friday night.

We told the maitre d we had 7:30 reservations. He said they had a 6 PM Seating and a 8 PM seating and we were on neither list. Then he did what all great maitrdee’s do. He said we normally don’t do this, but we’ll seat you at The Bar Next Door… which was an additional room on Tenant. And they served us as if we had normal reservations. Again, somehow the reservation got screwed up and everyone worked it out so all was fine. They are nice people.

E normally looks over the menu and gives me a one sentence overview, for some odd reason she did not have that this time. We were told we would be served a six-course meal for $80 each. A bit pricey as we try to keep it at $100 total, but it was almost 8 and we were there. By then we already had wine and bread and cheese. Tenant is a nice small place that seats under 30 people on the east side of Lake Harriet at 43rd & Bryant. I parked a half a block away. We agreed to the meal priced a bit more than we usually write about.
I am going to apologize before I start to talk about the food. I take typically 20 pictures of the place and the food as part of our normal review. Many times, the patron sitting two feet away asks what we are doing. So starts a conversation. Turns out the gentlemen of the couple was from Wausau, WI. I am from Marshfield, WI 40 miles away, and you get two WI people talking and little else gets done. So, I ate and talked.

Tenant restaurant is like a dozen places in the metro like Alma and Travail that brings six courses out one at a time. I tried to get pictures of each and write about them, but I did say I was from Wisconsin, didn’t I. So, some of it is a blur, I even got a picture from our server to replace my bad one. 

After the bread and cheese which were great, we had: a raw salmon bowl which was very good. Then we had what appeared a Matza Ball course, main fish course, followed by a two-item desert. That’s 5 items of the six served… did I mention I’m from WI? My apologies. Everything was good, but though it was a great visual, just not great.

So, in the end we had an interesting dining experience that was salvaged from a night that could have had us at Mickey Ds. The food was very good as were the people. The bill was $218 PLUS TIP. Would we return, it’s just not our kind of place.

Contact us Dennis@ToDoTC.com