Travail: work especially of a painful or laborious nature

I wouldn't say our experience last night was painful but it was certainly laborious - in a good way.....

I'm sure many of you saw me tweaking out on Facebook last night about our dinner at Travail.  I'm telling everyone I know to go there (its in Robbinsdale just off of 100 and 42nd)!  I've never tasted such amazing food.  There were moans and groans and four letter words coming out of our mouths.  Lots of eyes rolling in the back of the head. So awesome.  Its a small place and when we got there at 615 there was an hour wait (they'd just opened at 5).  We finally sat down about 730.  It was so worth the wait!  On Tuesdays and Wednesdays the "date night" special is a 10 course tasting menu for $65.  Plenty for 2 people - in fact even Julie was eating off our plates so plenty for even almost 3 people!  Their is an open kitchen so you can see the chefs making your food and then the chef brings it out to tell you what it is. So while I can't remember everything (seriously - there were like 3 or 4 starters, 5 meats, and 2 desserts and a soup and palate cleansers in between!) we ate here are a few pics:

These are the scallops served with edamame, mushrooms and radishes.  I'm not even going to try to describe all the ingredients or the flavors because words cannot do it justice.

Steak course with more mushrooms.  The meat courses we got were scallops, monkfish, lamb, pork and steak.  Yes I ate lamb and I liked it.  

This was a palate cleanser - remember dippin' dots from the Mall?  Yeah they make some kick ass dippin' dots - these were key lime pie flavored.

This is beef carpaccio - I tried it but I can't quite do the taste of raw meat so I let Lucas and Julie finish this off.  The homemade crackers were pretty good though. 

 Here we are making our own creme' fraiche dippin' dots!  Yep we dropped the batter into liquid nitrogen which turned them into little ice pellets basically.

And this was our finished product!  Along with chocolate cake, mango "fruit roll up", candied macadamia nuts and chocolate.  

I didn't get pics of 2 of my favorite things!!  There was a potato leek soup with pork belly served with mussels.  OMG - I died and went to heaven eating that soup!  I have no words.

Secondly one of the pasta courses - OMG again - the pasta was like a ravioli but it was stuffed some with lovely lemony buttery goodness and served with jalapeno foam - yes FOAM.  Like I said - there are no words.  You just need to go.  Go. Go. Go.  Hurry. :)  

http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/taste/140019913.html