Myriel’s Karyn Tomlinson is a Food & Wine Best New Chef

While she’s a familiar face to Twin Cities dining fans, Karyn Tomlinson of Myriel is now working on a larger stage as one of Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs of 2024. The accolade is part of her consistently rising fame, while continuing to run a restaurant that is, in part, stunning for its quiet confidence in a cozy St. Paul neighborhood.

“Restrained and subtle, precise and sophisticated, Karyn Tomlinson’s food is brave in its minimalism,” the magazine proclaims.

“It’s such a testament to my team,” Tomlinson said about the recognition. The chef is flying home tonight and looking forward to visiting the restaurant, which had been closed for a week of vacation. “What we do is such a collective effort.”

Tomlinson is the first chef to bring home the recognition for a St. Paul restaurant. “I love that Myriel is in St. Paul. It fits the neighborhood,” she said. “And it doesn’t put me off to have to earn trust in a community. And the community has been really supportive.”

Her culinary career began in Minneapolis first as a pastry chef at Borough before joining Thomas Boemer’s Corner Table. She worked her way up that line and was the kitchen’s second in command until it closed in summer 2019.

While working at Corner Table in 2018, she brought home her first national award as the first woman to win the Cochon culinary competition. To win, chefs are challenged to use whole-hog butchery to create multicourse tasting menus. Tomlinson shone in the event with Scandinavian heritage cooking and a delicate French technique. Her winning menu included Swedish meatballs and an unabashedly humble yet stunning apple pie with a lard crust. That dish and the lessons she learned by embracing her rural Midwestern roots would inform Myriel.

During the pandemic, Tomlinson gained more notice, taking part in a documentary about women in the kitchen and producing her own online cooking-from-home video series.

In depths of the pandemic, she took possession of the restaurant space that would become Myriel. It’s because of that timing, and the pandemic break, that she was eligible for the Food & Wine’s Best New Chef honor, which stipulates that a chef must not have run a pastry program or kitchen for more than five years.

Tomlinson slowly took the space from Karyn’s Quarantine Kitchen, offering takeout-only sandwiches and cinnamon rolls, to Myriel, which now includes two dining options: an a la carte menu and a tasting menu that creates special bites, with many ingredients coming directly from farms in her hometown region of Dassel-Cokato.

Food & Wine’s Raphael Brion took note. “Myriel could have taken an austere, minimalist direction. Instead, you’ll find warmth and light, grace and hospitality, life-changing lentils, and a soul-satisfying apple pie.”

“It takes a special person to see what’s going on,” said Tomlinson of the praise.

This isn’t Myriel’s first notice on the national stage. Tomlinson was on the semifinalist list for Best Chef: Midwest award from the James Beard Foundation in 2019, 2022 and 2023. In 2023, the restaurant was favorably reviewed by The Washington Post’s Tom Sietsema.

The chef said she’s known about the Best New Chef accolade since this spring, but has had to keep it under wraps from everyone — including her team. “It’s weighty, being handed a bigger platform,” said Tomlinson. “It’s exciting, but I’ve been primed. I’m ready for that responsibility.”

Since 1988, Food & Wine magazine selects a class of chefs from around the country as the change and tastemakers of the year. It’s original class included Daniel Boulud, Rick Bayless, Hubert Keller and Thomas Keller, now all industry heavyweights.

Other Minneapolis chefs selected for the honor include Tim Anderson (Goodfellow’s) in 1991, Tim McKee (D’Amico) in 1997, Seth Bixby Daugherty (Cosmos) in 2005, Stewart Woodman (Heidi’s) in 2006, and Jamie Malone (formerly of Sea Change) in 2013. Gavin Kaysen, the chef behind the Minneapolis restaurants Spoon and Stable, Demi and Mara, was recognized in 2007 for his work at El Bizcocho in San Diego, Erik Anderson, formerly of Sea Change, was a 2012 honoree for his work at Catbird Seat in Nashville, and Jim Christiansen — the last local chef to receive the honor — was honored in 2015 for his work at Heyday.

Myriel, 470 Cleveland Av. S., St. Paul, 651-340-3568, myrielmn.com. Open 5-9 p.m., Wed.-Sat.