13-03-2025
Minnesota restaurant, sculpture display named on Time's 'World's Greatest Places' list
There's a long list of reasons to visit Minnesota. Just ask Anthony Edwards (and not the men of Love Is Blind.)
Or you could ask Time. The magazine has included a Minneapolis restaurant and new sculptures around Detroit Lakes among its list of "The World's Greatest Places 2025."
The list, which has sections for "places to stay" and "places to visit," includes Vinai, the long-awaited Hmong cuisine restaurant from Chef Yia Vang that opened in 2024.
It hasn't taken long for Vang's restaurant to become a must-do item in the Twin Cities. In the short time since opening, it has been included in the New York Times Restaurant List, Esquire's Best New Restaurants, Eater's Best New Restaurants, and Mpls St. Paul Magazine's best restaurants list, among other accolades.
Oh, and Vang was named Esquire's Chef of the Year.
Vinai has been praised for its distinctive dishes, but also for its ability to tell stories through the menu.
The restaurant is named after a refugee camp in Thailand where Vang was born, and the food tells the story of his family's journey from Laos to Minnesota.
'We are here to illuminate Hmong food,' Vang told Time. 'If you want to know our people, get to know our food because our cultural DNA is intimately woven into the foods that we eat and how we eat it.'
The other Minnesota inclusion was Danish artist Thomas Dambo's "Alexa's Elixir," a series of massive trolls and other mythical objects scattered around the Detroit Lakes area.
Dambo has built his zero-waste trolls across the world, but the installation in Detroit Lakes, which opened last year, is his biggest to date, brought to life by the artist's team and hundreds of local volunteers.
The locations of the trolls, giant rabbit, and other objects are kept under wraps, turning the experience into something of a treasure hunt. Visitors uncover the work through clues or a map.
Vinai and "Alexa's Elixir" join a list of far-flung, enviable locales like the Stockholm Archipelago Trail, the Nintendo Museum in Uji, Japan, and the Eagle Hunter Cultural Center in Mongolia.
