Karyn Thomlinson of Myriel reflects on starting during the pandemic as she is named Food and Wine's top chef of 2024

The metro area is loaded with a plethora of fantastic restaurants and we can now add "Myriel" located in St. Paul, to the list as Chef Karyn Thomlinson was recently named Food & Wine's Best New Chef of 2024.

The road to success for Thomlinson started during the pandemic, but in a way it was a blessing. That gave time to work on dishes as they offered only take-out sandwiches and some baked goods.

"There's so much pressure, financial pressure for restaurants to hurry, hurry, hurry to open," says Thomlinson. "You don't get a time to really get to know the neighborhood and, you know, sort of build your brands more organically or build your team more organically. And so in some ways, it was really, it kind of afforded us the time to do that."

Several years later, she's an award winning chef.

"It's easy to just have your head down and work on things from day to day, and then not really think that people from outside of your own town are really seeing what you're doing," she says.

Thomlinson's dedication to sustainability and creating awareness about locally grown food has also been beneficial for her. But the desire to be a chef and open up your own restaurant includes extremely long work weeks and many sleepless nights.

For example, one of the items on her menu is an Heirloom corn dish, with the corn grown in Delano, near where her grandparents farmed west of the Twin Cities.

It wasn't an ideal situation at the start, but it has paid off. Thomlinson and Myriel was recently named Food and Wine's Best Chef of 2024 .

Her mission has and always will be to change the way we think about what we consume.

"If I can do nothing else as a chef, if I can get people here, and in other places, more excited about the food that naturally grows around us and curious about who's growing that, I will be thrilled," says Thomlinson.

It's that Minnesota farm country, restrained Scandinavian cooking that is what makes Myriel special now. Simple ingredients, but immaculately prepared. Her grandmother's apple pie has become a staple and a perfect example of her French cooking by way of rural Minnesota. But this is done to a fine dining restaurant standards: she uses lard rendered from the hogs butchered for the restaurant to give the pie an insanely luscious and flaky crust.

Another example? She sources "grandma plates" to serve on. Those special-occasion vintage china plates your grandma used to break out for holidays are on full display at one of the finest restaurants, not just in Minnesota, but across the country now.

Myriel is located at 470 Cleveland Avenue in St. Paul. They have a small dining space where you can order ala carte or a full tasting menu. Reservations are definitely recommended but they also offer a couple of walk-up tables and seats are first-come at the bar.

Myriel isn't alone when it comes to national honors for Twin Cities restaurants . Just this week, the New York Times named Oro by Nixta and Vinai by Union Hmong Kitchen chef Yia Vang as part of their top 50 restaurants in the country. Oro was also named one of Bon Appetit's "Best New Restaurants of 2024" in this month's issue.