The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

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When the publishers of Where The Locals Eat - Minneapolis St. Paul (Magellan Press, $14.95) asked me to tell my readers about their new dining guide, I told them I wanted to see a copy first.

Good thing I asked. They sent me a copy, and if this book were ground beef, it would be illegal to sell it as hamburger: too much filler, too little meat. Where The Locals Eat is 240 pages long, but only about 30 of those pages are actually listings of Twin Cities restaurants, and this is one of those long, skinny books (like the Zagat guide) so it's really more like 15 pages of content about local restaurants. The rest of the book is padded out with lists of top ten restaurants from 49 other metro areas around the country.

As for the local content, a lot of it is stuff they could have gotten from a phone book. There are 100 restaurants listed, but more than half of those listings are just name, type of restaurant, price category, address, phone number and website. And some of those listings are inaccurate: La Belle Vie, one of the best and most expensive restaurants in town, doesn't rate a review, but it's listed as a $$ restaurant, while the modestly priced Cave Vin is rated $$$. (I assume that $$ means moderately priced, and $$$ means expensive, but I am just guessing - the symbols aren't actually explained in the book.)

The authors claim to have consulted with local gourmets, and perhaps they did, but to judge by the names I googled, the book appears to have been written long-distance from Tennessee. For the most part, the restaurants they included are reasonable choices, though there are some oddities: only two Chinese restaurants are listed, and one of them (Azia) isn't really Chinese, and the other one (Relax) is out of business.