Downtown/Lowertown : Featured Stories

Nothing helps a new restaurant get off the ground faster than a fresh idea--a brand-new way to dine as well as great food and a hot location. Three new Twin Cities restaurants--the Uptown Cafeteria and Support Group, Barrio Tequila Bar, and Ringo--offer this special kind of conceptual freshness. But they give it an egalitarian Twin Cities stamp too, by fusing the drop-dead hip and the decidedly democratic.

Our intrepid, and maybe just a little lonesome, freelancer Elizabeth Millard decided to road-test Saint Paul's two coworking spaces--offices where people like her, who would normally toil at home or in coffee shops, gather for mutual support, idea swapping, and random chitchat in between bouts of work. This is office life without managers, a dress code, or water-cooler grousing. And there are pancakes.

Garrio Harrison believes that social media like Facebook and Twitter aren't just the latest slick marketing strategy--they've fundamentally changed the way we do business by making everything, including buying and selling, more personal, more connected, and more human. And he's founded the all-social-media-all-the-time marketing firm Doublethink to prove his point.

 What's the special sauce that makes so many bright people who come here stay here--and a lot people who go away, come back? (And what do we need to make that sauce even richer?) Some local creative types weigh in.