Meritage

The Restaurant

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 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.

The oyster bar is the conversational centre. Half a dozen East- and West-Coast varieties rotate every twenty-four hours; the kitchen pairs them with house mignonette and a small selection of cold dishes — a smoked trout rillette on toast, tuna tartare with caper berries — that lets a four-top split a properly French start before settling into mains. The classical brasserie programme has technique it would not have to advertise: the steak frites uses a forty-day dry-aged ribeye and a true béarnaise; the duck breast is finished in a red-wine sauce that takes most of an afternoon to build; sole meunière is filleted tableside.

The wine list — over four hundred references, ninety per cent French — is the room's deepest competitive moat. Sommelier-driven, with serious Loire and Burgundy depth, several legitimately collectible Bordeaux verticals, and a by-the-glass programme that lets a single diner taste five different Sancerres in one evening. The casual back-room oyster-and-wine bar, opened in 2018, runs the same list at lower price points. For a downtown dinner that needs to feel grown-up but not theatrical, Meritage is the address every St. Paul concierge defaults to.