The Restaurant
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.
The cooking is chef-driven New American with a Midwest-foraged backbone. Co-owners Leo La Valle and Bill Roberts source heavily from small Minnesota and Wisconsin farms; the menu reads as a tight ten-to-twelve dishes that turns over every four to six weeks. Recent signatures have included a duck-fat pierogi with caramelised cabbage and crème fraîche, a hearth-roasted half chicken with brown-butter spätzle, a coffee-rubbed bison with chanterelles, a black-pepper sourdough served with cultured butter and a bone-marrow accompaniment. The Sunday supper concept — a four-course family-style dinner at a set price — has been a Twin Cities staple since 2017.
The wine and cocktail programme is unfussy and well-edited: forty to sixty references on the wine list with a clear small-grower bias, a half-dozen by-the-glass that change weekly, an unusually long list of amaro and digestifs that gives a dinner here a proper Italian-American end. Service is warm rather than formal — staff turnover is famously low, several captains have been with the room since opening night — and the price-to-quality ratio is the most consistent in the East Metro. For a first-date dinner that feels chosen rather than defaulted, this is the room.
Why This Is St. Paul’s First Date Pick
For a first date, Tongue in Cheek manages a difficult balance: it is impressive enough to register as a real choice but not intimidating enough to overwhelm a new partner. The fifty-seat room is intimate without being claustrophobic; the open kitchen gives the conversation a built-in distraction if it stalls; the New American menu reads as legible enough that no guest will feel ambushed by an unfamiliar dish; and the price tier sits comfortably below blowout territory, which keeps the date feeling like a beginning rather than a declaration. The Payne Avenue address also offers the discreet signal that the host knows St. Paul beyond its obvious downtown rooms.
Leave a Review
Registered members get published by default; guest reviews are moderated first.