Jimmy's Food & Cocktails

Address:
11000 Red Circle Dr., Minnetonka, 952-224-5858, jimmysfoodandcocktails.com

The Scene
This former site of the pioneering Sherlock’s Home is now a suburban supper club. The interior has been partitioned into a large bar area, a spacious dining room outfitted with a collection of booths and tables, and a small salon, walled with fieldstone, with a gas-fired hearth that burns year-round. Although there are a couple of patio dining areas, the view they afford of the surrounding parking lot is not particularly inspiring. The clientele is primarily a mix of casually dressed, middle-aged-and-above suburbanites out to enjoy, as the name suggests, food and cocktails.

Our Take
Named for veteran co-owner Jim Jennings, whose Jennings Red Coach Inn was a longtime St. Louis Park standard-bearer, Jimmy’s is a something-for-everyone kind of place. The menu ranges from relative rarities such as booya, liver and onions, and fried chicken with sausage gravy to contemporized items such as an ahi tuna martini, lobster lasagna, and chili calamari.

As befits a supper club, beef is a specialty. From the amazingly tender cubes of skewered meat in the tenderloin stick appetizer to the tasty Coca-Cola–braised short ribs, the steaks-and-chops category proved uniformly reliable. Not quite so in the seafood realm. A piece of miso-glazed salmon set in a sake-soy broth possessed a past-prime flavor, and orders of halibut and sea bass were ridiculously undercooked. Beyond these, my sampling proved to be hit and miss.

Hits included Parmesan-battered onion rings with an inspired lemon-garlic aioli, a serving of meaty slow-roasted barbecue ribs with a tangy whiskey sauce, and an entrée of simple broiled scallops perfectly cooked in garlic and white wine. Misses included overpowering wasabi-sake-cream–dressed ahi tuna, tasteless calamari, and a Cuban black bean soup so thick and heavy you could stand the spoon in it.

Service was pleasant and attentively efficient, albeit at times just a bit overeager. And when we pointed to the barely touched pieces of half-cooked fish on two of our plates, the general manager told us that he was “comping” one of the two orders. I’m not sure such a Solomonic accommodation was better than doing nothing.

Modern-Day Michelangelo?
Arguably the restaurant’s most striking design feature is a bold, Matisse–inspired food-and-drink– themed mural that wraps around the main dining room. Although it looks like it might have been laboriously painted by an artist perched on a tall ladder, it was crafted in a one-by-thirty-foot version, then digitally enlarged and transferred to wallpaper.