Minnesota Restaurants Are Struggling, Uniting, Resisting
Plus: More layoffs at Eater and a few quick words about Bistrot Ha
Just a quick bite…Bistrot Ha
I haven’t yet visited Ha’s Snack Bar on the Lower East Side — the acclaimed spot where there’s always a proper line outside — but I rolled the dice and dropped by the larger and newer Bistrot Ha on Friday. I got quoted a half hour wait (not bad) and shortly thereafter I was enjoying French Vietnamese fare in a snugly corralled room where chic patrons were squeezing past waiters carrying basil seed margaritas. So yes, this is definitely a bistro — and one where you’ll inhale the intoxicating aroma of fish sauce at some point. My type of place.
Mike Chau, a local influencer who co-runs the Food Baby account, posted photos of a chile-laced steak frites last month. Alas, that beefy dish wasn’t on offer during my visit (hard to tell with no online menu). Instead, I ordered a blood sausage tart topped with plump kumquats; it was so good I regretted not ordering a second one while Citibiking back to Midtown afterward.
Bistrot Ha — by Sadie Mae Burns and Anthony Ha — is still too young for a review, which is why I’m not really commenting on food! But I’m sure I’ll have more to say in the coming months. 137 Eldridge Street, Lower East Side
I should be back over the weekend with a (paywalled) column; there will be some fun review-y stuff in there! But today…
How Minnesota Restaurants Are Coping With ICE Enforcment
We’ve all seen sobering videos from the ICE surge in Minneapolis.
We’ve watched an agent aggressively arresting a Target employee who was filming him and shouting expletives at him. We’ve seen an undocumented person go unconscious as agents dragged him out of a car at a gas station, before carrying his limp body into a van.
And so many of us have watched the Renee Good clips over and over again.
“This is a military occupation,” Elliott Payne, president of the Minneapolis City Council, told the New York Times last week. He described how armed agents screamed obscenities at residents and patrolled the streets in convoys, shining lights from their vehicles onto pedestrians at night.
And over at NPR, a reporter witnessed agents questioning people in parking lots about their immigration status, while asking for documentation. Those officers exclusively approached people of color, the reporter wrote.
The U.S. has sent roughly 3,000 federal agents to Minnesota.
I pass along these anecdotes because the martial environment — which the Trump administration defends as necessary to fight illegal immigration — is having a measurable impact on restaurants in the Twin Cities.
Here’s a key graph from Sharyn Jackson’s Minnesota Star Tribune column, published on Sunday:
“As immigration enforcement activity increases across the Twin Cities and the suburbs, food businesses are adjusting, making visible changes such as locking doors to screen customers before entry, cutting hours, switching to takeout-only service, temporarily closing and consolidating space. Many restaurants are operating short-staffed with owners taking on multiple roles…”
Restaurant owners told the Tribune that the conditions recall the “early days of the pandemic,” while noting that this time they’re expecting “longer term disruption.”
Crasqui, a Venezuelan restaurant in Saint Paul, is selling frozen meals and has stopped taking walk-ins after an ICE agent dined at the restaurant, per that same story. And Fardowsa Abdul Ali of Albi Kitchen, which sells Somali sambusas and sweets, saw a drop in business after a viral daycare video happened to show images of her establishment. She also told the paper she has received harassing phone calls in the aftermath.
Earlier last week over at MinnPost, reporter Shadi Bushra also wrote about restaurant staffing shortages, noting that both both documented and undocumented workers are “afraid of being swept up in ICE raids, which have sometimes targeted entire establishments’ staff.”
Latin American employees at Homi, a Mexican spot in Saint Paul, have started wearing immigration paperwork around their necks on lanyards; the owner said they’re worried that agents won’t give them enough time to reach for their wallets, Bushra reported.
Or here’s what Savio Nguyen, co-owner of Càphin Minneapolis, a Vietnamese cafe, told MinnPost: “My siblings, even though they’re citizens, are afraid to leave their homes because they don’t want to be harassed.” Do read the whole column for additional notes on how patrons and at least one bar owner are patrolling neighborhoods with whistles and car horns to alert folks about potential immigration enforcement.
On a more heartwarming note: the Twin Cities hospitality industry appears to be doing what most restaurants do during tough times. They’re banding together. Joy Summers, a former Eater staffer who’s now a reporter for the Star Tribune, reported last week about restaurant-led food drives and fundraisers.
One of those efforts involved Wrecktangle, a pizzeria that, in the aftermath of the killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent, gave away a frozen pie for each one purchased. That pizzeria ended up partnering with Smitten Kitchen and collected $83,000 in donations, which it’s now working to distribute. And at Bar of Their Own, the owners hosted coloring and movie days after local schools cancelled classes for safety, Summers reported.
Minnesota restaurant workers detained by ICE agents who visited taqueria for lunch
This story has attracted national attention, but it’s worth recounting: In Willmar — a small community about 100 miles outside of Minneapolis — agents visited El Tapatio Mexican Restaurant for lunch, then returned to detain its owners and a dishwasher, after the restaurant had already closed early due to the presence of law enforcement, CBS News reported (click through to the story for a response from the Department of Homeland Security).
The 20-year-old son of the owners has since stepped in to run the restaurant.
For great context on Willmar, a city of about 21,000 with sizable Latin American and Somali populations, check out this MinnPost profile from earlier in January. The story of Willmar, journalist Forrest Peterson reported, is a “story of resilience that is nonetheless being tested in the wake of demeaning rhetoric about immigrants in the aftermath of fraud scandals involving Somalis, the never-ending political battles over immigration and ramped up immigration enforcement in the Twin Cities”
How to support restaurants and residents…
Justine Jones, food and dining editor at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, is maintaining an updated list of food drives, fundraisers, temporary closures (to protect employees amid ongoing ICE sweeps), restaurants to support, and grocery stores offering free delivery.
Why are grocery stores offering free delivery? Because “many of their immigrant customers — including those who are citizens or are documented — are afraid to venture out in public due to ICE’s presence throughout the Cities,” Jones writes.
For local updates on support and mutual aid, you can also follow independent food critic Kirstie Kimball here on Substack!
Vox Media Fires Three More Journalists at Eater
If you asked me what Eater does right now, I’d say the site continues to produce great reporting about our food and restaurant world, and the team does precisely that with some of the best reporters, videographers, designers, and editors that I know. Here’s a Nadia Chaudhury report on where our new Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been eating. Here’s Mona Holmes on how “Kavanaugh stops” are making Los Angeles restaurant workers more vulnerable. Here’s Melissa McCart on the Eater NY Substack, writing about how DoorDash is entering the reservations space.
But if you asked me what I thought Vox Media’s long-term strategy is for the food publication, I’d say I have no idea, because upper management just keeps firing great journalists at Eater.
Jim Bankoff’s company laid off three more in-unit employees late last week, including Kayla Stewart, the James Beard Award-winning writer and co-author of the New York Times best selling cookbook “Gullah Geechee Home Cooking.” The senior editor joined Eater full-time in September of 2024 and recently spearheaded the publication’s Best New Restaurants package.
Vox Media also parted ways with Harry Cheadle, editor for the Pacific Northwest and Northern California, and Erin Perkins, former editor of Eater South.
Perkins, whom I met over a decade ago, had been with the company for nearly 13 years.
I’m told an out-of-unit employee on parental leave also saw her position eliminated.
“There is almost no further room to be shocked at these developments,” Vox Media Union wrote in a statement, adding that the company has laid off workers at an average of once per quarter in the last year.”
I’ve written about previous rounds of layoffs, including the loss of longtime critic Robert Sietsema, correspondent Jaya Saxena, reporter Amy McCarthy, Midwest editor Ashok Selvam, reporter Emma Orlow, Northeast editor Erika Adams, home editor Rebecca Flint Marx, editor Jesse Sparks, and others.
Heck, I actually thought about pinging a friend at Eater last week to see how they were coping; I’m glad I didn’t because I’d momentarily forgotten that they too had been laid off earlier last year.
It’s honestly hard to keep track.
Any large company will undergo competitive pivots and reductions in force over its lifespan. That’s just how things work. But the defining aspect of Vox Media’s stewardship of Eater over the past three years has been the firing of some of the smartest journalists working there. The people who keep Eater running every day — both in labor and in management — deserve better.
Vox Media Union also reported that the company will no longer have a centralized diversity, equity and inclusion team; that work will be redistributed.
In 2022, Adam Platt stepped down from his role as restaurant critic at New York Magazine. He remained as a part time staffer, but last week Platt wrote on Instagram that he was departing the Vox Media-owned publication after a quarter century.
Gourmet lives on!!!
It’s highly amusing that the Condé folks let the Gourmet trademark lapse, but it’s awesome to learn that some good journalists are rebooting the brand as a worker-owned newsletter publication on Ghost. Here’s Jessica Testa of the New York Times with the story.
Among the co-founders are: Nozlee Samadzadeh, of the NYT, Sam Dean, formerly of the Los Angeles Times, Cale Weissman (The Real Deal), Amiel Stanek, and Alex Tatusian. Here’s one of Gourmet’s first columns: A story about what might be the only Kyrgyz restaurant in Southern California.
How about a burger?
“What a time for my first restaurant review,” Raphael Brion, formerly of Food & Wine, The Infatuation, and Eater, wrote on Instagram a few days ago. In case you missed the news: Brion is the new critic at the Star Tribune!
Brion added the following in his social post: “But maybe what we all need right now is community. A gathering spot. Perhaps a dive bar that’s at the center of a neighborhood. A place that gives good vibes, where the food is significantly better than it needs to be.”
Check out Brion’s column on Bull’s Horn Food and Drink from chef Doug Flicker. “Sure he grinds his own beef blend, but then he does stuff like make his own American cheese using rendered beef fat from the burger griddle’s drip tray,” Brion wrote in his Insta caption. He awarded three stars!
Alright. That’s it for today. More soon.
Ryan Sutton is editor of The Lo Times and a contributing restaurant critic for The New York Times. Previously, he was a longtime restaurant critic and reporter at Eater; his position there was eliminated as part of companywide layoffs that hit three years ago this week.
Previously:
Thank you for covering Minnesota. We need it ❤️❤️❤️