Louisiana Kitchen – St. Paul, MN

D.Rough and I were in the mood for some Sunday brunch before heading out and doing some last minute wedding shopping. She had good luck at the Louisiana Kitchen (and by “luck”, I mean a Groupon), so we headed over there. The place was packed, so we had to wait 10-15 mintues for a table. That’s a good sign, right?

We got seated all the way in the back of the restaurant by a large window and looked at the menu. A ton of things sounded good on this menu, but I kept coming back to the Cajun Breakfast. When the waitress came back to check on us, we had decided. I got the Cajun breakfast, D.Rough got the Crab Cakes Benedict, and we decided we needed to split a cookie dough pancake. Hahahaha. Yeah, a cookie dough pancake.

The place was packed, so we waited a little bit for the food to come out. No worries at all – except that we were starving. Thankfully, we pulled through.

The pancake looked pretty good. It had a bit of whipped cream all around it and was drizzled with chocolate sauce. We tore into this thing with reckless abandon. We were disappointed to find only a few pieces of cookie dough in this pancake. It was mostly chocolate chips here and there and an occasional piece of dough. Bummer, but that didn’t stop me from finishing the whole thing after I poured syrup all over it. Hahaha

D.Rough’s Crab Cake Benedict did her well though. She really loved this thing. It’s got some delicious hollandaise sauce on it, but not enough to make a giant pool of it, like we’ve had at some places. She said there was faint hint of lemon in it which went really well with the generous sized crab cakes that were on her English muffins. The whole thing looked pretty good and was hearty enough to put a stop to her eating about half way through. I got a few bites and it was pretty tasty, if I do say so myself.

My dish was pretty good. I won’t say it was amazing, but it was a generous portion of grilled veggies covered in a generous portion of hashbrowns, covered with a generous portion of cheddar cheese, covered with two over easy eggs, and then some sprinkles of Cajun powder. I had asked for the hollandaise on the side, since I like a really small amount of the stuff on my food. The sauce was good, but I’m glad I got it on the side – that stuff is super rich! The wheat toast I had ordered was really good, even though I had to add a ton more butter. But with the rest of the food, the whole thing was a great start to the morning. I was very happy with my meal, but sometimes, I just wish places would make things more Cajun than just sprinkling some red powder on the top. That’s just me though.

The Louisiana Kitchen is in the same family of restaurants as The Uptown Diner in Minneapolis, and the food is pretty similar. No complaints at all, and since it’s way closer than the Uptown Diner, we’ll most likely be back here before we hit up the Uptown Diner. Both are perfectly wonderful restaurants!

You’ll also be amused that I didn’t realize I had a completely bacon-free breakfast until dinner that night. See, I’m NOT an addict. I can stop whenever I want (especially when I forget).