We know a few things about Charles Barkley. Good basketball player, comically uncomfortable actor, bad at remembering Minnesota.

The Timberwolves came back in the second half of game seven of the Western Conference Semifinals on Sunday night to grind the Denver Nuggets into, well, nuggets. It was the Timberwolves’ best showing since 2004.

Afterward, Barkley, now a TV commentator, told Wolves player Anthony Edwards he hadn’t been to Minnesota “in probably 20 years” and needed some restaurant recommendations.

Fact check: He was in town in 2019 for the NCAA Final Four — where he lambasted the Wolves, onstage at a Katy Perry concert of all places, and was met with boos — and again in 2021 for the 3M Open in Blaine.

On social media Monday, fans offered up plenty of suggestions to eat around Target Center in downtown Minneapolis, including Spoon and Stable, new Argentinian steakhouse Porzana and Fhima’s, reportedly a Wolves players’ go-to.

But may we humbly suggest that the reason Barkley might not remember his visits is because he didn’t spend enough time on our side of the river?

Let’s fix that.

Here are just a few ideas of where Barkley should grab a more memorable bite to eat in St. Paul.

What else do you recommend? Email us at eat@pioneerpress.com.

BREAKFAST

Colossal Cafe

The breakfast burrito at Colossal Cafe in St. Paul includes pickled onions and queso fresco. (Jess Fleming / Pioneer Press)

You can pretty much count on this place to do everything right, from yeasty pancakes to breakfast burritos that shouldn’t be overlooked. And those caramel rolls are big enough to feed several regular people or, probably, one Charles Barkley-sized person.

1340 Grand Ave., St. Paul, 651-414-0543; or 2315 Como Ave., St. Paul, 651-797-4027; colossalcafe.com

Trung Nam French Bakery

Banh mi sandwich, croissant and Vietnamese iced coffee at Trung Nam French Bakery in St. Paul. (Nancy Ngo / Pioneer Press)

The Twin Cities’ Vietnamese dining scene — one of the best anywhere, in our opinion — is massively underrated. There are plenty of spots in or near St. Paul for top-notch classics (Em Que Viet, iPho by Saigon, Mi-Sant in Roseville), but Trung Nam was among the first and makes legendary rolled croissants that come in about a dozen flavors.

739 University Ave. W., St. Paul; 651-229-0887; trung-nam.squarespace.com

LUNCH

Ruam Mit

The longstanding Thai and Lao favorite just reopened this month in a new downtown location after a 10-month closure, and we’re thrilled that they’re back in action. The egg rolls, papaya salad and curry entrees are especially good — but keep your spice tolerance in mind when ordering, so your meal isn’t as painful as getting a Naz Reid tattoo.

367 Wabasha St N; (651) 222-7871; ruammitmn.com

Afro Deli

One of this restaurant’s top dishes is called Chicken Fantastic, after all.

The downtown deli, which also has a few Minneapolis locations, serves East African and Mediterranean sandwiches, salads and entree bowls. The Somali steak sandwich and chapati wrap are also both particularly delicious, and portions here are great for the prices.

5 W. Seventh Place, St. Paul; 651-888-2168; afrodeli.com

West Indies Soul Food

Jerk chicken, chicken curry and stewed cabbage at West Indies Soul Food. (Jared Kaufman / Pioneer Press)

Sharon Richards-Noel knows what she’s doing, folks. She grew up in Trinidad, moved here as a teenager and launched West Indies Soul Food as a catering company in the 1990s. A revived brick-and-mortar location opened a couple years ago, serving tender jerk chicken, sweet potato pie, curry stews and Jamaican patties worth waiting for.

839 W. University Ave.; 651-726-4120; westindiessoul.com

DINNER

Mancini’s Char House

Now in its third and fourth generation, the Mancini family has lovingly kept up (and, occasionally, inconspicuously restored) the old-school steakhouse. Sure, you could get lobster, walleye or chicken, but come on: Char-grilled steak, a supper club relish tray, garlic toast, martini.

And what other restaurant has been inducting local athletes into its own Hall of Fame for nearly four decades?

531 W. Seventh St., St. Paul; 651-224-7345; mancinis.com

W.A. Frost & Company

The W.A. Frost patio in St. Paul. (Nancy Ngo / Pioneer Press)

The classy Cathedral Hill restaurant has long been a favorite special-occasion spot for both locals and visitors — such as, for example, Queen Sonja of Norway, who dined here during a visit in 2022. No guarantees our friend Charles Barkley would be treated to a custom menu and a meal plated on fine china like the queen was, but hey, we think it’s worth it anyway.

Plus, the patio, with cobblestones and lush greenery, is one of the best in town.

374 Selby Ave., St. Paul; 651-224-5715; wafrost.com

Meritage

Salmon and a glass of French rose can cure anything that ails you at Meritage in downtown St. Paul. (Jess Fleming / Pioneer Press)

We’re talking oysters. Glazed duck breast. Steak frites. An already killer wine list (with plenty of bubbles!) that was kicked up a notch last year. There’s a reason the upscale French restaurant has been a reliable classic ever since it opened about 16 years ago. It’s a great spot to celebrate a Wolves win, and probably also a good pick-me-up if the games go the other way — but that won’t happen.

410 St. Peter St., St. Paul; 651-222-5670; meritage-stpaul.com

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Donald Wood | TravelPulse (TNS)

As travelers set out on their summer vacations, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched a new Heat and Health Initiative to protect Americans from heat exposure.

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In partnership with the National Weather Service, the CDC unveiled a new initiative with three resources. These resources provide proactive actions that travelers can take to protect themselves.

The keys from the CDC include staying cool, remaining hydrated and knowing the symptoms.

“Heat can impact our health, but heat-related illness and death are preventable,” CDC Director Mandy Cohen, M.D., M.P.H. said. “We are releasing new heat and health tools and guidance to help people take simple steps to stay safe in the heat.”

For travelers, the CDC and NWS created the HeatRisk Forecast Tool, which provides a seven-day heat forecast nationwide that reveals when temperatures may reach levels that could harm their health.

The agencies also launched a HeatRisk Dashboard, which combines the HeatRisk Forecast Tool data with other information, including details on local air quality, to advise Americans on how to protect themselves when temperatures rise during the busy summer travel period.

Another aspect of the newly developed CDC clinical guidance is that it helps clinicians keep at-risk individuals safe when temperatures rise.

A recent report from the CDC found that daily emergency department visits due to heat-related illness peaked in several regions over the warm-season months in 2023 and remained exceedingly high for an extended duration.

©2024 Northstar Travel Media, LLC. Visit at travelpulse.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

The Timberwolves entered halftime of Game 7 on Sunday in Denver down 15 points after playing what Karl-Anthony Towns referred to as “park basketball.”

Not competitive.

Minnesota was getting worked on the glass, wasn’t imposing its will defensively and wasn’t playing with any kind of plan on offense.

All of it bugged Wolves coach Chris Finch, but the latter irked him most of all.

“We were getting crushed. They had 14 second-chance points. That was where our defense was letting us down the most — 14 second-chance points in the first half; we had to get a handle on that more than anything,” Finch said. “But I was really pissed about the offense. I thought the offense degenerated completely, for no real reason. So we addressed both those things.”

Indeed they did. The Wolves outrebounded Denver 29-15 over the final two quarters. They suffocated the Nuggets’ offense while scoring 60 points of their own in the second half, roaring back from a 20-point deficit to reach the NBA’s Western Conference Finals, which start Wednesday night at Target Center against the Dallas Mavericks.

Whatever was said at halftime certainly did the job. So what exactly does a ticked-off head coach look like?

Minnesota Timberwolves coach Chris Finch argues for a call during the second half of Game 5 of the team’s NBA basketball second-round playoff series against the Denver Nuggets on Tuesday, May 14, 2024, in Denver (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

“Pissed?” Finch asked.

Yes.

“Pissed,” Finch answered.

Can you please elaborate?

“A lot of F bombs,” Finch said. “A lot of right to the point. A lot of anger.”

“He looks like an angry old man yelling and slamming his crutches down,” Wolves guard Mike Conley described with a smile. “You would love to see it.”

Wolves assistant coach Micah Nori noted there are two different types of ticked off. One is coming in and tossing things around and making a scene. Worse, though, he said, is when your dad or another authority figure expresses their disappointment in your actions.

“That is worse than being in trouble,” Nori said. “He’s done it where he’s like, ‘I’m not going to come in here and yell and scream and break (stuff), it’s just you guys are doing a disservice to yourselves.’ ”

Nori noted marching in and screaming often just compounds issues. Players want solutions. Any anger, Wolves assistant coach Elston Turner said, has to also be “correctional.”

“You’ve got to have a message in our pissedness,” Turner said.

Finch said he was more outwardly upset when reviewing the film with the coaching staff. By the time the coaches went in to speak with the players, it was less of a tantrum and more of an agitated message — or a healthy balance between the two.

“It was just more like, ‘We’ve got to get our head out of our (butts), make the simple play,’” Finch recalled. “We watched clips, and I was angrily narrating the clips.”

“It was more like, ‘I know we going to win this game, we’ve just got to do this to win the game,’ ” star guard Anthony Edwards said. “He wasn’t really mad. It was just like his clips on the screen were, ‘This is what we’ve got to do to win this game. And if we do it, we’ll win. And if we don’t, we’ll lose.’ ”

Frankly, Finch was annoyed. The Timberwolves had done so much good in Game 6, which led to a 45-point blowout victory.

Turner made sure to give the Nuggets credit for their first-half effort — “It wasn’t just us. They were playing well on both ends. … They were all over the place.” — but the Timberwolves clearly weren’t sharp.

There was no decision or aggression. The corrections made between Game 5 and Game 6 were nowhere to be found.

Nori said Finch reminded players they had talked about being the more physical, harder-playing team. They had talked about getting into Jamal Murray. They had talked about doing the same things well over and over again on offense.

And none of it showed up over the first 24 minutes of play.

“I wanted us to pick up our play, pick up everything,” Finch said. “But yeah, I was angry. I said, ‘This is a major regression.’ ”

Even as he was describing it after the game, the emotions came flooding back. His voice loudened.

“We just went through this!” he recalled. “What are we doing?””

“So you’re loud, you’re firm,” Turner said. “Especially with stuff that you’ve already covered. If you’re blowing something that you’ve already covered — in Game 7 — there should be no mistakes.”

Dad was disappointed, and his kids felt it.

“We respond to anything Finchy says,” Conley said. “But you know he wants it so much that it just kind of gets your attention a little more than normal.”

Turner could tell the message was sinking in. There was feedback in the forms of head nods.

“Like, ‘Yeah, yeah, you right,’ ” Turner said. “But there’s still a time when you’ve got to do it — from the film to the practice court to out there in front of the fans. Most of our guys, this is the first time in a Game 7, so I didn’t really know what to expect, but I’m proud of them.”

Because they answered the bell. Nori thinks the “heightened awareness” of the stage likely increased the team’s response to the message.

“Fear is a helluva motivator — and I’m not saying we were scared of them, I’m saying fear of your season being over. Fear of just not performing and going out the way that you would want to,” Nori said. “I think it was a reality check of, ‘You know what, he’s absolutely right. We’re not doing this. And we’ve got to do these things in order to win the game.’ I think the big thing that helped was it was Game 7. … We knew what gave us success, and just trying to repeat that. Especially being the best version of ourselves for 24 minutes. In my opinion, that’s kind of what he was telling them.”

Message received, as it so often is with Finch and his staff. Much of it stems from the delivery. Nori noted Finch treats the players like “grown men.” There’s evident respect. There’s also accountability, for everyone. Edwards noted as much in his postgame press conference.

“He don’t sugarcoat anything. If KAT (messing) up, he going to get on KAT. If I’m (messing) up, he going to get on me. If Rudy (messing) up, he going to get on anybody that’s messing up throughout the game, and I think that’s what makes him the best coach in the NBA, to me,” Edwards said. “Because, no matter who it is, no matter how high up on the pole, he’s going to get on you from start to finish.”

Nori noted Finch at times may hold players to higher standards than they hold themselves. That’s required, he said. Because if you don’t put players on film, you won’t see progress. But the bad is well balanced with the good. The coach is just as quick to praise as he is to criticize.

“He does a very good job of that, so that he can get on ‘em. And then, after the course of 93 games this year and being there for three years, his voice never gets old,” Nori said. “Because it’s not like it’s just ranting and raving.”

And there’s never an intent to embarrass anyone.

“It’s merely just for the team, and you have to be better for us to be better. And that’s why he tells the guys and it’s why they appreciate his coaching, and then they’re cool with it. It doesn’t linger,” Nori said. “It’s like, ‘Here’s what we talked about doing, here’s what you’re not doing, we need you to do what we talked about, and do it with more effort and execute it to the best of your ability.’”

Simply: Go out and do better.

“He has a good message behind everything,” Conley said. “The message (Sunday) was, ‘Make the small plays, and that’ll win us the game.’

The Timberwolves carried out the marching orders to perfection.

“It starts with the head of the snake, and (Finch is) the head of our snake,” Edwards said. “We all look up to him, listen to him, and he do a great job of making sure we’re ready to go every night.”

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A Black Panther revolutionary and a Hollywood insider walk into a bar … and plan a caper that has the latter helping to smuggle the former out of the country.

That story — about political activist Huey P. Newton and movie producer Bert Schneider, who made counterculture classics such as “Easy Rider” — forms the basis of the six-episode Apple TV+ series “The Big Cigar,”  which attempts to be many things at once, weaving in serious themes amid the jaunty energy of a heist.

Developed by Jim Hecht (and based on a 2012 article by Joshuah Bearman), the series makes its intentions clear at the outset, with the voice of Newton, played by André Holland, offering a disclaimer: “The story I’m about to tell you is true. At least, mostly true. Or at least how I remember it. But it is coming through the lens of Hollywood, so let’s see how much of my story they’re really willing to show.”

It’s the summer of 1974 and Newton is arrested on charges of assaulting a tailor and fatally shooting a teenage prostitute. Is it a frame up? Newton says yes, and tensions with the local police and the FBI suggest this isn’t out of the realm of possibility. Out on bail, Newton needs someone who can move mountains, so he turns to Schneider (Alessandro Nivola), with whom he had been developing a biopic. “You’re the hotshot producer,” he says. “You want to produce something? Produce this.”

So Schneider concocts a non-existent movie that will shoot on location in Cuba called “The Big Cigar.” (If the fake-movie-as-subterfuge premise sounds familiar, a similar scheme was cooked up to help American hostages escape from Iran in 1979, a story depicted in the Ben Affleck-directed best picture winner “Argo,” also based on a Bearman article.) Not mentioned here? This wasn’t Schneider’s first fugitive rodeo; he had also recently funded Abbie Hoffman’s escape, stemming from drug charges.

But his plan this time becomes a comedy of errors. Dire circumstances, both logistical and psychological, ensue. But the series is committed to keeping things fairly light and palatable, even as it contends with the brutality of racist police and internal schisms (some of them baited by the feds) that would splinter the Black Panther party.

Regardless of the role, Holland is the kind of actor who holds the screen with a quiet charisma. In Newton, he has also found the character’s roiling intensity fueled by his justified paranoia and a tendency to hold grudges. Sometimes his temper gets the best of him, but he has a clear-headed assessment of how rigged systems function.

Temperamentally, Schneider (and by extension, Nivola) is his opposite — a creature of Hollywood with a movie star girlfriend (Candice Bergen) and a reputation as a renegade despite his nepo-baby origins (his father is president of Columbia Pictures). In flashback, we see Newton begrudgingly attend a party at Schneider’s invitation. When Newton spots Richard Pryor, he asks his opinion of the white crowd: “Deep in their genes,” says the comedian, “they got a lot of guilt and they’re willing to pay a steep price for absolution.”

Newton is skeptical. Revolution is survival to me, he tells Schneider, it’s optional for you. “That’s exactly why I gotta do it,” comes the reply. “I want to finance the revolution!’ To punctuate the moment, Schneider turns and does a line of coke. I mean, I laughed! (Schneider did in fact funnel considerable funds to the Black Panthers, so his words weren’t just Hollywood hokum.)

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Like so many projects of this type, it was initially developed as a movie. Nothing came of that and now here we are, with the story stretched out into a multi-part series from showrunner Janine Sherman Barrois that is enjoyably watchable if occasionally tonally uncertain. (One of Barrois’ previous credits is “Claws,” which had a similar approach, both exuberantly outsized but with substance.) Tiffany Boone (as Gwen Fontaine, Newton’s girlfriend and the stabilizing force in his life), P.J. Byrne (as Schneider’s childhood friend and producing partner Stephen Blauner) and Jordane Christie (as Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale) are terrific in supporting roles. The FBI are portrayed as clowns rather than heroes, which makes “The Big Cigar” a rarity in Hollywood at the moment, and the series itself is enjoyable despite the self-congratulatory speeches for Schneider and Blauner each, explaining why they’re good white people. Schneider in particular keeps stressing his close friendship with Newton, but nothing on screen backs that up, leaving it unclear how Newton actually felt about Schneider.

A reason to watch is simply for a terrific exchange that transpires after Blauner has just escaped with his life while trying to coordinate some of the logistics of their plan.

“You were in a shootout in a Jewish deli?” Newton asks incredulously.

Blauner is numb. “All delis are Jewish. I think.”

“Nah, the Italians got ’em,” Schneider chimes in. “The Greeks, too.

Bottom line, he tells Newton: “The mob’s got a hit out on you.” That’s only one of the many problems he will have to contend with. “The Big Cigar” turns all of it into big entertainment.

“The Big Cigar” — 2.5 stars (out of 4)

Where to watch: Apple TV+

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.