St. Paul’s Greatest Tables
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The Top 5 St. Paul Restaurants
Myriel
Myriel opened in 2021 in a small storefront at the corner of Cleveland and Highland Parkway in St. Paul's Mac-Groveland neighborhood, named for the merciful bishop in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables. Chef-owner Karyn Tomlinson — a Corner Table alumna and former Charlie Trotter line cook — went on to win the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Midwest in 2024 and a Food & Wine Best New Chef nod in 2023. The dining room is intimate at thirty-two covers, walnut tables under low-hung pendant lamps, an open pass that the chef herself works most services.
Meritage
Meritage occupies the ground floor of the 1919 Hamm Building on St. Peter Street, two blocks from the Ordway and across from Rice Park in central downtown St. Paul. Chef Russell Klein, a multiple James Beard Best Chef: Midwest semifinalist, opened it in 2007 as a Parisian brasserie homage and has held the menu close to its original template ever since: oysters from a six-state list at the marble bar, escargots, steak frites, sole meunière, plateau de fruits de mer. The dining room runs on copper-and-ebony banquettes, mirrored walls, a tin ceiling original to the Hamm Building.
Tongue in Cheek
Tongue in Cheek opened on Payne Avenue in 2014, a deliberate bet on St. Paul's East Side at a moment when no critic considered the neighbourhood a dining destination. The dining room is a former saloon — long, narrow, brick walls, a sixteen-seat marble bar facing an open kitchen — and the lighting is dim enough that the room reads as supper club at night even though the menu is unrelentingly contemporary. Roughly fifty covers across the bar, the main room, and a small back nook for parties of six to eight.
Estelle
Estelle opened on Saint Clair Avenue in 2019 from the team behind W.A. Frost, working a small Mac-Groveland storefront into a thirty-eight-seat room of leather banquettes, candle-soft lighting, an exposed-brick bar lined with bottles. The cuisine — Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian — leans into the small-plates and shared-dishes format that southern Europe is best at: jamón ibérico carved tableside, gilda skewers of olive-anchovy-guindilla, octopus à feira, a short list of pastas and meat mains for the table that wants a more conventional dinner structure.
Forepaugh's
Forepaugh's occupies the 1870 Joseph Forepaugh House on Exchange Street, at the heart of St. Paul's Irvine Park Historic District — four blocks of Civil-War-era mansions a short walk from the river. The restaurant, after a multi-year closure, reopened in 2024 following a million-dollar restoration that preserved the Victorian interior: parquet floors, twelve-foot ceilings, the original carved-walnut staircase, three intimate dining rooms across the main floor seating between four and twenty guests apiece. The new operator is a local hospitality group with a track record on Summit Avenue and in Lowertown.