Duluth, Minn.

The sign on the building reads Taran's Market Place, lifted from the former Taran's grocery that once occupied the corner of 19th Av. and 8th St. on Duluth's East Side. The titles on the door -- At Sara's Table/Chester Creek Cafe -- are nods to the former Park Point coffeehouse that relocated up the hill and a nearby stream, respectively. All three names reflect the same business, an informal and impressive breakfast-lunch-dinner magnet for nearby University of Minnesota staffers and students.

Morning hours are all about platters heaped with omelets and scrambles, big steaming bowls of oatmeal and thick, smoky strips of bacon, but the real stars are the crisp waffles, marvelous wild rice-cranberry French toast and sturdy buttermilk pancakes, all finished with either a dizzyingly good maple syrup by Duluthian Dave Rogotsky or a quirky apple-beer syrup that's an old family recipe of co-owner Barbara Neubert.

Lunch means burgers, sandwiches and a few nods to Middle Eastern flavors. Dinner is far more ambitious, with a changes-daily menu that could include lime- and peanut-braised salmon, a free-range grass-fed ribeye beefsteak with oven-roasted sweet potatoes or olive oil-poached shrimp with rhubarb chutney.

Neubert and partner Carla Blumberg put a premium on organic, locally raised ingredients. Two-thirds of the very drinkable wines are priced at $25 or less per bottle. Best of all are the gorgeous apple, blueberry and strawberry-rhubarb pies; a slice of baker Diane Bailey's handiwork is truly the perfect cap to a whatever-this-place-is-called visit.