In less than a year, chef Jack Riebel has jazzed up the menu at the Dakota, making it a lunch and dinner destination.
Some may argue that Timberwolves coach Dwane Casey is the year's best local hire, but my vote goes to Jack Riebel. When chef Ken Goff left the top post at the Dakota Jazz Club & Restaurant this past spring after an epic 20-year run, co-owner Lowell Pickett tapped Riebel. Smart move.

In seven short months, Riebel, who logged a decade as Goodfellow's No. 2 before becoming executive chef at La Belle Vie in 2003, has steered the Dakota into what may be a seemingly contradictory category: a casual fine-dining restaurant. The food boasts the nuance, imagination and technical prowess of some of the city's top kitchens, but Riebel keeps the tone playfully approachable and full of surprises, not unlike the jazz that lights up the Dakota's stage.
And Riebel has accomplished this feat while remaining faithful to many of Goff's precepts, including the emphasis on seasonal, locally sourced foods. The effort can't have been easy, given the Dakota's unique demands, with the kitchen often juggling several menus simultaneously and servicing hundreds of diners in a single seating. But so far, so good. Make that great.

At dinner, Riebel's meant-to-be-shared starters really shine. Crostini sport variations on smoked fish, from a creamy whitefish-horseradish-crème fraîche combination to a glossy smoked trout rillette. Puget Sound oysters, each a plush, saltwater bite, are rolled in cornmeal, gently fried and laid out over a celery root salad, an ingenious marriage of smooth and crunchy. Gnocchi is a triumph, the little dumplings as gentle as a down-filled comforter and matched with an earthy mushroom-squash combo. Most striking are parchment-thin pieces of raw beef, rolled around a velvety beef tartare zinging with slow-burn Thai chiles.

The entrees start with juicy, curry-rubbed pork, roasted in an apple cider stock, the bone-in chop then finished with a magical combination of bacon, golden raisins and pistachios; the dish says "autumn" faster than any sugar maple's blaze. Riebel lightens up the classic Wellington framework by cleverly turning it inside out, placing a puff pastry disk -- filled with Swiss chard-wrapped foie gras -- on top of moist, flavorful salmon instead of beef. Braised cabbage and apples nicely complement perfectly grilled lamb, and even plain-old roast chicken and wild rice is something special.

Even after two years at its prime 10th-and-Nicollet address, I'm not sure that Dakota has registered on downtowners' noon-hour radar. But it should. The intricately crafted salads orbit several hundred miles above Planet Chicken Caesar. I would be perfectly happy to spend every lunch hour for the next month with the beauty made with smoked whitefish, a poached egg, brioche and feathery frisée. Ditto an unexpected blend of roasted sweet-tart crabapples and bitter chicory with curried walnuts.

Soups, including a subtle revision of Goff's apple-brie standard, are luxurious single-bowl meals. Sandwiches follow in those same footsteps (a soup-salad combo is a steal at $8.50), and for the burger demographic, Riebel grills up a juicy Angus monster, heaped with avocado and salty blue cheese.

Pastry chef Anne Rierdon (like the vast majority of the staff, she's a holdover from the Goff era) more than meets Riebel's challenge. She merrily challenges a traditionalist's idea of carrot cake, with dazzling results. I'm crazy about her white chocolate cheesecake version of crème brûlée. A particularly nice touch is an honest-to-goodness milkshake and a plate of grandmotherly Snickerdoodles, shortbreads and other bite-size cookies.

The informal, eye-catching room continues to be a model of flexibility, its bar, restaurant and peerless live-music venue all working in well-rehearsed harmony. It's not a swipe at Goff's legacy to say that the gifted Riebel has clearly and rather brilliantly elevated the Dakota's stature in the dining pecking order. If he were the Wolves' front man, the team would be a playoffs shoo-in.

Dakota Jazz Club & Restaurant ***1⁄2

The Scene
The vibe at the Dakota Jazz Club & Restaurant is palpable. The room bustles before, during, and after the show with downtown suits, coveys of elegant ladies, and music mavens of all shapes and sizes. Everyone is sipping a martini and snacking on those famous fries with béarnaise. The collection of jazz-legend photos, wine racks, and clever wall treatments keeps the place from feeling like a big box, and the state-of-the-art sound system (an overused cliché if it were describing any other room in town) keeps the focus where it should be when Marsalis takes a solo. The black-toned, stunningly lit, brick-accented interior has always made for great listening, but the Dakota’s new culinary energy under chef Jack Riebel is nothing short of dramatic

Our Take
Much has already been written about chef Ken Goff’s departure from the Dakota kitchen a year and a half after the restaurant and jazz club’s move to downtown Minneapolis, and the subsequent hiring of local über-chef Jack Riebel. The Goodfellow’s/La Belle Vie alum seems to have lifted the entire kitchen onto his back and marched it into the top tier of Minnesota restaurants. Flaky sea salt is on all the tables, every dish is thoughtfully composed, the quality of cooking has trebled, and the Dakota has lost none of its “taste of the Heartland” philosophy. The famous Brie-and-apple soup is lighter and more balanced and the salads are gorgeous still-lifes created with traditional ingredients, but the flavors and nuances—for example, in the cucumber dressing and the marinated beet and arugula salad topped with curried, spiced walnuts—are definitively upscale. For lunch, the poached- egg-and-brioche salad with frisée and a bacon vinaigrette, the beer-battered walleye with smoked-tomato aioli, the roasted pulled-chicken sandwich, and the crab and pike cakes with pickled-vegetable slaw were all thoroughly fresh, a tribute to Riebel’s insistence on “à la minute” cooking. Dinner was also a joy ride. Pea flan in ham hock broth is an adult paean to the soup my grandmother loved to massacre, the foie gras mousse and rhubarb conserve was exquisite, even Riebel's take on steak, a grilled rib eye with barbecue–blue cheese butter and twice-cooked potatoes was spot-on. Save room for the blueberry-peach upside-down cake.