The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

If you were to seriously try to eat your way down Lake Street, from Lake Calhoun to the Mississippi River, you could spend a lifetime and never succeed in completing the task - the artery that runs through the heart of south Minneapolis is a gastronomic hot zone, where new restaurants are constantly being born and dying.

The menu at the new Red Pepper in Saint Paul combines Vietnamese, Thai and Hmong dishes, but since the first two cuisines are pretty widely available elsewhere, I decided to try one of the Hmong dishes. Number 27, sweet pork belly with eggs, turned out to be a savory stew with big chunks of roast pork, (not nearly as fatty as I had feared), hard-boiled eggs, red bell pepper, fresh pineapple green onions and ginger, in a rich brown slightly sweet gravy accented with star anise (I think), served with steamed rice. Delicious, and served in very generous portion.