It was a typical busy summer weekend for me.

But less typical, especially lately, was that I attended soft openings for two east metro restaurants! Dare I say things are looking up in the restaurant world?

Dark Horse Bar & Eatery

The Dark Horse Burger at Dark Horse Bar & Eatery in St. Paul. (Jess Fleming / Pioneer Press)

I really loved this West Seventh bar and was so sad to lose its adorable, urban patio and comfortable atmosphere when it closed this winter.

Happily, the owners of Can Can Wonderland and St. Paul Brewing have teamed with chef Shane Oporto and his fiancée Sarah McDonough to bring Dark Horse back from the dead.

Oporto, who was the chef de cuisine when La Belle Vie closed and helmed the kitchen at Octo Fish Bar in Lowertown, also developed the excellent burger at DeGidio’s on West Seventh.

The new menu is full of great bar food — lots of bar snacks, pizza and sandwiches — including a burger and the excellent lobster roll that was on the Octo menu. McDonough is a front-of-the-house maven whose most recent position was general manager at Can Can Wonderland. The pair met while Oporto was working at La Belle Vie.

The space has been brightened a bit, and some funky gold booths and a gorgeous mural added. But it has kept its vibe (and many of the previous tall wooden booths).

We started our meal with some elote shishito peppers, which are your basic fried shishitos, tossed with Tajin spice, crumbly cotija cheese and cilantro. In a brilliant move, the elote sauce, which tends to make things messy, is offered as a dipping sauce so that you can still comfortably pick up the peppers by the stem and eat them as God intended — no fork required.

We ate a lot of pizza at the previous iteration of Dark Horse, so it only felt right to get one here.

The crust is an airy Neapolitan style, and it’s excellent. We ordered the Paisano, which is topped with a generous amount of house-made sausage, pepperoni and spicy Calabrian peppers.

Wondrous Punch at Dark Horse Bar & Eatery in St. Paul’s Lowertown. (Jess Fleming / Pioneer Press)

And yes, we did order the burger. It is a Very. Serious. Burger. Oporto and his crew are grinding brisket, sirloin and chuck fresh every day. It’s a smash burger so it has those crispy edges, but it’s still incredibly juicy. And the cheese! It’s a slow-melted combo of Taleggio and two-year Vermont cheddar that envelops the patty in the very best way. There are caramelized onions for a little sweetness and tasty burger sauce all on a pillowy brioche bun. It was worth every calorie.

The cocktails here are excellent, too. If you were ever a patron of the Red Dragon, you should order the Wondrous Punch, which comes with a surprise mini order of cream-cheese wontons. The punch tastes very close to the Red Dragon version, but in an upscale way.

I also adored my Spanish G&T, made with Skaalven yuzu gin and house-made tonic.

As I told Oporto, I’ll be back. Often. You should go, too. It’s open to the public now, for dinner Tuesday-Sunday and lunch and dinner on the weekends.

Dark Horse Bar & Eatery: 250 E. Seventh St., St. Paul; 651-313-7960; darkhorsestp.com

Liliana

You could argue that the Twin Cities does not need another Italian restaurant.

But in the case of Liliana, the new Woodbury restaurant from the people behind St. Paul’s Estelle, you would be wrong.

I attended a soft open for this crisp, clean, yet cozy restaurant this weekend, and I brought along some picky eaters (my adult children) to put it to a true test.

Liliana’s chef, Kenzie Edinger, previously worked as the chef de cuisine at Mucci’s in St. Paul (and at Saint Dinette before its closure), so she knows her way around pasta, all of which is being made in-house. There’s a window into the kitchen so you can see chefs extruding the dough while you’re dining.

My kids weren’t leaving without garlic bread, which in the hands of pastry chef Nok Piyamaporn is far beyond the usual Italian bread slathered in garlic butter. This airy milk bread is sliced into triangles, kissed with garlic butter and tangy cream cheese, then showered in salty grana padano cheese. I got exactly one small wedge before the kids devoured the rest — it was a good sign of things to come.

The crew should apply for a State Fair booth and serve nothing but the sausage-stuffed deep-fried olives here, which make for a lovely beginning snack. The kids didn’t want any but hey, more for us. And the pickiest eater of the bunch didn’t know that the tonnato sauce on the broccolini had tuna in it and ate several stalks anyway. Who could blame her? It was delicious.

We all ordered pastas for our main course. After watching them come out of the kitchen, there really was no other choice.

Mafaldine at Liliana in Woodbury. (Jess Fleming / Pioneer Press)

I ordered the mafaldine pasta, which is long and thin like papardelle, but has fancy curly edges to soak up the bright pomodoro sauce. Those noodles are topped with three giant spicy meatballs, given their kick and slight smokiness by guajillo peppers. I ended up taking more than half of it home, so if you’re not a fan of leftovers, you might want to split it with a friend.

My daughter went with the rotolo, which are pasta roll-ups stuffed with spinach and mozzarella floating in a puddle of slightly spicy arrabiata sauce. She was a fan, and I have a new idea for family dinners.

My husband’s occhi, ricotta-stuffed pasta, was super flavorful. The jalapeno pesto it’s bathed in transports the dish from ho-hum to oh, yum! And a fresh corn salsa makes it feel like summer.

My son, a picky, yet adventurous eater (yes, you can be both), went for the farfalle, which we didn’t realize would be stuffed. He was a fan, though, of the lobster and pork filling, and the creamy fonduta, given a touch of sweetness by calvados (French brandy).

I would have called it a day after all the pasta, but the offspring have sweet tooths, so we ordered the tiramisu and the carrot cake, and both were out-of-this-world delicious. The house-made ladyfingers in the tiramisu were doused with just the right amount of coffee, and the feuilletine (crispy crepe flakes) added the perfect crunch to the light, whipped mascarpone.

Carrot cake is my husband’s favorite dessert, and it’s a minefield of possible mistakes — cake too dry, frosting too sweet, underbaking, too much spice … the list goes on. Thankfully,  Piyamaporn’s version, which employs brown butter and miso to add a savory touch, suffers from none of the above. My husband said it was the best he’s had, and that is a true compliment.

Liliana: 10060 City Walk Drive, Woodbury; 651-493-9089; lilianamn.com

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Two groups must be especially thrilled by the prospect of Zohran Mamdani becoming New York’s next mayor.

The first: young, progressive-leaning voters who gave the charismatic 33-year-old state Assembly member his come-out-of-nowhere victory in last month’s Democratic primary. They want what he wants: rent freezes, free public buses, city-owned grocery stores, tax hikes for corporations and millionaires, curbs on the police, a near doubling of the minimum wage to $30 an hour and the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu.

The second: Republicans who want to make sure that Democrats remain the perfect opposition party — far-left, incompetent, divided, distrusted and, on a national level, unelectable. Remember when Ronald Reagan ran against the “San Francisco Democrats” in 1984 and carried 49 states? Get ready for the GOP to run against “Mamdani Democrats” for several election cycles to come.

That’s a thought that ought to give moderate Democrats pause before they accept Mamdani’s mayoralty as a political fait accompli, or even think of getting behind him. Among the reasons the Democratic Party’s brand has become toxic in recent years is progressive misgovernance in places like Los Angeles; San Francisco; Oakland, California; Portland, Oregon; Seattle; and Chicago. If Mamdani governs on the promises on which he’s campaigned, he’ll bring the same toxicity to America’s biggest city.

How so?

Some of Mamdani’s proposals, like the city-owned groceries, are almost too foolish to mention: Public grocery stores struggle to stock their shelves, can’t compete with private groceries, lack economies of scale and have a recent record of failure in the United States. Other ideas, like free buses, would merely exacerbate the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s shaky finances, which is one reason Kathy Hochul, New York’s Democratic governor, didn’t renew a free bus ride pilot program last year.

Turns out, socialism works no better in Brooklyn than it does in Havana.

But those ideas won’t be as destructive as Mamdani’s other brainstorms. “Freeze the rent,” his popular campaign slogan, applies only to rent-stabilized apartments, which account for about half the city’s rental units. But a rent freeze would have precisely the same effects in New York as it has everywhere else: Particularly in a time of inflation, it would lead landlords to cut costs on maintenance, jack up prices on non-stabilized units, convert rental buildings to condos or co-ops and stop new developments that would require affordable housing.

The upshot won’t be a renter’s paradise. It will be decaying and abandoned buildings, middle-class flight to the suburbs and urban blight.

Then there’s Mamdani’s disdain for corporations and the very rich, epitomized by his view that “I don’t think that we should have billionaires.” For billionaires, that needn’t be too much of a problem: The oysters at Caravaggio will be missed, but there’s always a jet at Teterboro to whisk them to safety, and permanent residency, in Palm Beach.

But for New Yorkers less fortunate, it will be a problem: Roughly 50% of New York City’s income taxes are paid by the top 2% of earners, who already labor under one of the highest city and state tax burdens in the country (15.9% in 2022). When New Yorkers pack up and leave, they take billions in taxable income with them.

As for the other geese laying golden eggs, large corporations employing thousands of workers and paying hefty Manhattan property taxes, they also have exit options: Consider Illinois, which marquee employers like Boeing, Citadel and Caterpillar have all left in recent years.

What about other urban necessities, like public safety? Mamdani has backed away from his earlier support for defunding the police and has made positive noises about Jessica Tisch, the well-regarded police commissioner. But her views on issues like bail reform, the handling of pro-Hamas demonstrations and quality-of-life policing against minor crimes are diametrically opposite to his. It’s a political marriage that, were it to come to pass, would be destined for rapid annulment.

All of this is a shame for New York, which spent decades working its way up from the policy fiascos of the 1960s and ’70s. For Democrats especially, it’s worth remembering that the state of so much of urban America in those decades is part of what fueled years of Republican ascendancy, including all the tough-on-crime policies that progressives later sought to overturn. History doesn’t repeat as farce. It simply repeats as a predictable kind of tragedy.

There’s talk of President Donald Trump offering the incumbent, Mayor Eric Adams, or the Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa — or both — jobs in his administration to unite the anti-Mamdani vote behind Andrew Cuomo, the former governor. Why would Trump do that? A Mamdani mayoralty would be the political gift that keeps on giving. The state of the city would become a reflection of the Democratic Party writ large. Every Mamdani utterance would become a test for every Democratic politician, starting with Sen. Chuck Schumer on Israel.

Marxists often counsel: “Sharpen the contradictions.” With Mamdani as mayor, it would be Trump who’d be doing the sharpening.

Bret Stephens writes a column for the New York Times.

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Today is Thursday, July 17, the 198th day of 2025. There are 167 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On July 17, 1955, Disneyland opened in Anaheim, California, after its $17 million, yearlong construction; the park drew a million visitors in its first 10 weeks.

Also on this date:

In 1862, during the Civil War, Congress approved the Second Confiscation Act, which declared that all slaves taking refuge behind Union lines were to be set free.

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In 1902, Willis Carrier produced a set of designs for what would become the world’s first modern air-conditioning system.

In 1918, Russia’s Czar Nicholas II and his family were executed by the Bolsheviks.

In 1936, the Spanish Civil War began as right-wing army generals launched a coup attempt against the Second Spanish Republic.

In 1944, during World War II, 320 men, two-thirds of them African-Americans, were killed when a pair of ammunition ships exploded at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in California.

In 1945, following Nazi Germany’s surrender, President Harry S. Truman, Soviet leader Josef Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill began meeting at Potsdam in the final Allied summit of World War II.

In 1975, an Apollo spaceship docked with a Soyuz spacecraft in orbit in the first superpower link-up of its kind.

In 1981, 114 people were killed when a pair of suspended walkways above the lobby of the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel collapsed during a tea dance.

In 1996, TWA Flight 800, a Europe-bound Boeing 747, exploded and crashed off Long Island, New York, shortly after departing John F. Kennedy International Airport, killing all 230 people on board.

In 2014, all 298 passengers and crew aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 were killed when the Boeing 777 was shot down over rebel-held eastern Ukraine; both Ukraine’s government and pro-Russian separatists denied responsibility.

In 2020, civil rights icon John Lewis, whose bloody beating by Alabama state troopers in 1965 helped galvanize opposition to racial segregation, and who went on to a long and celebrated career in Congress, died at age 80.

In 2022, a report said nearly 400 law enforcement officials rushed to a mass shooting that left 21 people dead at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, but “egregiously poor decision-making” resulted in a chaotic scene that lasted more than an hour before the gunman was finally confronted and killed.

Today’s Birthdays:

Former sportscaster Verne Lundquist is 85.
Queen Camilla of the United Kingdom is 78.
Rock musician Terry “Geezer” Butler is 76.
Actor Lucie Arnaz is 74.
Actor David Hasselhoff is 73.
Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel is 71.
Film director Wong Kar-wai is 67.
Television producer Mark Burnett is 65.
Singer Regina Belle is 62.
Country music artist Craig Morgan is 61.
Rock musician Lou Barlow is 59.
Actor Bitty Schram (TV: “Monk”) is 57.
Actor Jason Clarke is 56.
Movie director F. Gary Gray is 56.
Country singer Luke Bryan is 49.
Film director/screenwriter Justine Triet is 47.
R&B singer Jeremih (jehr-uh-MY’) is 38.
Actor Billie Lourd is 33.
NHL center Connor Bedard is 20.

A 7-year-old was hospitalized with life-threatening injuries after a driver struck her in St. Paul Wednesday night.

Officers responded to the vehicular crash on the East Side about 7:30 p.m. It happened at White Bear Avenue and Fifth Street.

After officers began life-saving measures on the girl, St. Paul Fire Department medics arrived and took over, said Sgt. Toy Vixayvong, a St. Paul police spokesman. They took her to the hospital.

The driver was cooperative with police and the man showed no signs of impairment, Vixayvong said. Investigators spoke with the driver and he was released at the scene. The investigation is ongoing, including into the circumstances of the crash.

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