Palomino in Minneapolis

Italians began arriving in Minnesota in the 1860s, settling first in Saint Paul and later in Northeast Minneapolis neighborhoods like Beltrami, where they built grocery stores, bakeries, and restaurants that fed their communities and eventually the whole city. By the time Palomino opened on Hennepin Avenue in 1991, Italian food had been woven into the fabric of Minneapolis dining for well over a century. What Palomino offered was something different—Italian-ish, Mediterranean-leaning, Euro-metro in the way that the early nineties understood that phrase. 

Palomino arrived on LaSalle Plaza in a big way with art-glass chandeliers, enormous hand-painted knockoffs of twentieth-century masters on the walls, and an open kitchen where cooks tended an oak-fired oven and a wood-burning rotisserie in full view of the dining room. 

The phone rang a thousand times a day when it opened. The lunch and dinner-and-a-show crowd streamed in, drawn by the location steps from the State and Orpheum theaters and the promise of validated parking.

The menu was crowd-pleasing by design, with wood-fired pizzas with blistered, parchment-thin crusts; a Caesar salad with a feisty garlic-anchovy kick; the famous Chop Chop salad; rotisserie chicken; Copper River salmon; waffle fries with blue cheese; and creamy rigatoni Bolognese. Nothing too challenging, everything reliably good. And the happy hour was a steal. The bar crowd was lively. For twenty years, Palomino was the kind of place where you could always get a table, always get a decent meal, and always feel like you were somewhere downtown worth being.

The restaurant closed December 12, 2013, evicted mid-month by a landlord who’d found a shinier tenant willing to pay more rent. The timing was pointed; nobody walks away from one of the busiest restaurants for  weeks of the year without making a statement. Palomino had apparently called the landlord’s bluff on a rent increase and lost.

What it left behind, beyond the fond memories of regulars, was a repertoire of recipes that captured that particular early-nineties confidence, before photos of food were plastered all over social media and a bad review from one huberistic influencer could kill a new restaurant, back when a restaurant could just make good pasta and call it a day.