When H and I were back in NJ for a family wedding last year, we went to a deli near our first place to get Sloppy Joe’s!
Some popular Minnesota dishes:
- Lefse: soft Norwegian flatbread, doughy and bland, made more palatable if rolled up with lingonberry preserves or butter and cinnamon sugar.
- Lutefisk: smelly gelatinous fish dish made from salt cod neutralized by lye. Aficionados say it's an acquired taste, but I'm not sure anyone actually likes it. Served seasonally around Christmas as a ritual to prove one's Nordic bona fides..People in the Nordic countries find it highly amusing that Minnesotans still eat lutefisk to prove they're Nordic.
- Walleye: the state fish, a large perch species native to the cold fresh waters of Canada and the northern fringes of the U.S., caught and consumed in copious quantities in Minnesota.
- Tater tot hotdish: "hotdish" is Minnesotan for casserole, ubiquitous at church socials and family gatherings. A typical hotdish would be ground beef and green beans in cream of mushroom soup, topped by tater tots..
- Booya: a meat and vegetable stew, communally prepared and slow-cooked in enormous quantities in a large cauldron, outdoors over a wood fire or charcoal. A booya is a community gathering and community-building event, typically a fundraiser for a church, volunteer fire department, or organized youth activity.
- Juicy Lucy: an inside-out cheeseburger, with molten cheese inside the burger.
- Chicken wild rice soup: Minnesota's numerous shallow lakes and wetlands produce large quantities of wild rice, most of it harvested by Native American tribes under treaty rights dating to the mid-1800s. It makes a hearty, tasty, and popular soup if cooked with chicken or turkey.
- Smoked Lake Superior whitefish: a hearty, chunky hot-smoked variety of Native American and Nordic origins, not the delicate, thin-sliced, cold-smoked kind of Jewish origins you get at Zabar's or Barney Greengrass on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Of these, I go for #7 and #8, the others not so much (and lutefisk never).
You know your Lake Woebegone, @bclintonk. 
I’ll never forget Garrison Keillor saying, “Minnesota, maker of the color beige.” Best line ever.
@bclintonk our family orders lefse from Minnesota for Christmas (I still have a few packages leftover). My Norwegian grandmother served it rolled up with pork sausages.
I’ll be a heretic and say that In-N-Out isn’t the greatest thing since sliced bread (or ground meat). It’s decent, but I won’t go out of the way to have one.
so we had a taste test comparison burger and fries between In-N-Out, Carl’s JR, 5 guys and Shake Shack. Have to say Carl’s Jr. won hands down for burger and 5 guys for fries. But, that said, there’s something special about that hot In-N-Out burger with special sauce, lettuce, and tomato that keeps us coming back for more. Now, if they could only get those fries right.
Funny you mention Carl’s Junior, my girls were so disappointed it’s not here in the east.
@lookingforward depending on where your daughters are, Hardee’s is the same as Carl’s Jr.
I don’t get In-N-Out Burger at all. I like their business model a lot, but the food is meh. The fries are almost tasteless. DH is not a fan of the scripture references on the packaging.
Nope, no Hardee’s up in New England, thought I know then from the south. (And back then, they weren’t related.)
And I’m not even a native Minnesotan. (It’s Lake Wobegon, by the way).
Minnesota is also the home of such Middle American culinary icons as Betty Crocker, the Pillsbury Doughboy, and the Jolly Green Giant. And of course Spam, the canned meat popular in Hawaii, some other Pacific islands, the Philippines, and some other parts of Asia. But I think we mostly export Spam. I’ve never eaten or been offered Spam in Minnesota. I’ve only ever had it in California, once at a Guamanian restaurant rolled up with rice in seaweed as a kind of Spam sushi, and once at a Filipino food truck. But there is a Spam museum in Austin, Minnesota where the stuff is made, and apparently at one point there was a restaurant a couple of blocks from the museum called “Johnny’s Spamarama.” The owner dropped the Spamarama name in favor of “Johnny’s Skillet” when he moved the business across the street, but I believe they still feature some Spam dishes—probably mostly for the tourists who come looking for Spam delicacies after visiting the museum.
Despite all this, the Twin Cities actually have a quite lively and diverse restaurant scene, the fruits of immigration and a local foodie culture that supports a disproportionately large number of talented Jame Beard award-winning chefs…
For those of you that live near a Culver’s restaurant, they have a delicious Walleye sandwich or dinner on their menu for a short time during Lent.
@ChoatieMom I agree 100% about In N Out fries - they are definitely tasteless! Dh is from CA so I used to hear from my in-laws how great the place is. When I took dd out to CA a couple of years ago to tour colleges, we stopped at one. I don’t normally eat fast food burgers ever, but I had one there. I don’t recall anything special about it but since I don’t normally eat them I really had nothing to compare it to. However, the fries were not worth the calories/fat at all. I kind of forgot about it until we were out west this summer. Dh and the kids all wanted to stop at In N Out as our flight had gotten in really late and they were starved. I skipped the burger and just got shake and fries - oh yeah, I forgot they were awful! I think it’s pretty much ingrained in me now.
You don’t go to In-N-Out for the fries.
Whenever we have flown into CA, we make a point to hit In-N-Out, and don’t bother with the fries. Three double double burgers split between DH and I are plenty.
@intparent if it were up to me, I wouldn’t be going to In-N-Out (or any other fast food place) at all. That said, I like something salty when I have a shake so I got the fries, forgetting they were terrible. Steak and Shake fries are similarly terrible. In fact, perhaps they are from the same source.
Last week I was in Dallas and tried a WHATABURGER. Isn’t that mainly a Texas thing? It was a good burger! (but my tops is still Five Guys! And THEIR fries…)
You forgot Minnesota ‘bars’. You’ll find them on the buffet table right next to the 9 styles of deviled eggs (served on the special deviled egg dishes), the hot dishes, and the 147 kinds of jello.
@bclintonk , your post reminded me that Minnesota (specifically, Northfield, site of Carleton and St. Olaf) is also home to a Malt-O-Meal plant.