Barrio - Minneapolis

Rating:

To paraphrase Irving Berlin, the best things happen when you're drinking.

Eavesdropping, for instance. So I'm nursing a margarita in the bar at Masa when the two women to my right start talking restaurants, praising and skewering the latest and greatest. Their views and mine barely converge, in that were-we-eating-in-the-same-restaurant? way.

"What have you heard about that Barrio place down the street?" one asked the other. The response was a shoulder shrug, followed by a somewhat dismissive, "I hear that it's a bar with food." It was all I could do to bite my butt-insky tongue, because what I wanted to say was, "You're half right. It's a very good bar, with very good food, if you ask me." Fortunately for them, they didn't.

Co-owners Tim McKee and Josh Thoma certainly read the market right when they opened this champ, their fourth collaboration following La Belle Vie, Solera and Smalley's Caribbean Barbeque and Pirate Bar. Talk about prescience. Just as Barrio's doors opened, the economy tanked and suddenly it seemed as if anyone with a Gold Card was trading their high-end dining habits for cheaper, more casual alternatives. The kind Barrio just happens to offer. In spades.

Much of the restaurant's appeal rises from a one-two personnel punch. Bill Fairbanks, a longtime La Belle Vie sous chef, is making magic in his square foot-challenged kitchen, guided, no doubt, by McKee's limitless imagination. Company mix master Johnny Michaels -- he's the expert who makes the LBV lounge the city's top cocktail destination -- is responsible for Barrio's crazy-good libations.

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