Restaurants: What went wrong?

Chef-driven. Food-forward. Whatever the words, January was a bleak month for the category, with three such Minneapolis restaurants closing in nearly as many weeks. First was Levain, which opened at 48th Street and Chicago Avenue S. in Minneapolis in 2003. For chef Steven Brown and his crew, the party was over on New Year's Eve. Then came Five Restaurant & Street Lounge, which opened at 29th Street and Bryant Avenue S. in September 2005 as a high-profile platform for chef Stewart Woodman's talents; it sputtered to a halt barely two months after the restaurant's ownership gave Woodman his walking papers.

For many the biggest shock was chef Doug Flicker's announcement that his Auriga, the Lowry Hill foodie favorite, was going dark after nearly 10 years in the business. Coincidence? A demographics shift, a souring economy, a surplus in upscale seats? Bad luck? Thirteen Twin Cities chefs, restaurateurs and suppliers offer their theories on Dark January.

PHIL ROBERTS Co-owner, Manny's, Chino Latino, Figlio, Oceanaire Seafood Room, Minneapolis; Salut Bar Americain, Edina; Muffuletta, St. Paul

"I have an aversion to fancy dining. I like to go to fancy restaurants, but I wouldn't want to own one; there are too many fancy funerals out there. Minneapolis is, in my opinion, a two-star city. We aren't Chicago, where Tru is busy every night of the week. Still, I don't think there's a trend going on here. It could be that there just isn't enough of the Armani crowd to fill these restaurants on a regular basis. There's an awful lot of Lutheran DNA here, and that's a prescription for safety in dining. There's just a limited number of folks here who will warm up to sea urchin crème brûlée. It may have something to do with price, but not always. The average check at Manny's is $80, and it's packed every night. But it's not fancy, and you take some steak home and have a sandwich the next day. Oceanaire has a $60 check average, but it's easy to understand. There's not a lot of mystique with a piece of broiled halibut rubbed with lemon and olive oil. Part of it might be that there is always going to be a new girl in the whorehouse, you know? Right now the Chambers is the new redhead."

RICHARD D'AMICO Co-owner, D'Amico Cucina, Cafe Lurcat and Bar Lurcat, Masa, D'Amico & Sons and Campiello, Minneapolis

"Has this happened before? Yeah, with Goodfellow's and Aquavit. The economy is great, we can't complain about that, although I don't think restaurants have recovered from 9/11. At some of our restaurants, sales are up but not back to pre-9/11 levels. And there has been a ton of new, really high-quality operations that have come into the market. That makes everybody better. Minneapolis isn't a foodie town. It's headed that way, but it has a long way to go. It won't be a foodie town until this renaissance of people moving downtown is complete. That city lifestyle is what needs to occur for us to become a foodie town, and we're just in the beginnings of that."

DOUG ANDERSON Co-owner, A Rebours, St. Paul "It's a purging. I think it's criminal that Levain and Auriga aren't open, because Steven and Doug are masters of their craft. Part of it is that people here are less inclined to deal with experimentation. They want what they know; they don't want to take a gamble. They want roast chicken. I also think people are tired of being told that they have to spend lots of money to get great food. It seems like Isaac [Becker, chef/co-owner of 112 Eatery in Minneapolis] is the smartest guy right now. You can spend $10 at his restaurant and still get great food. People also want to be somewhere that has a look. If people are going to spend $150 at dinner and want to be dressed great, they want a place that affirms their perceptions of themselves. It's going to happen at the Chambers, but not at 48th and Chicago."

STEVE HORTON Co-owner Rustica Bakery, Minneapolis, which supplies bread to a half-dozen Twin Cities restaurants "It's sad to see these places go, but I wonder if maybe we got overbuilt on the high end in this market. I wonder if there is an overestimation of the number of people [available] to sustain these high-end restaurants. It is telling that these three restaurants are not middle-priced restaurants. There is a lot of money in the Twin Cities, but a lot of it is in the suburbs, and they're just not coming into the city on a frequent basis. I'm not saying we're all flyover people, but in some degree we are still in the middle of a food revolution, and the feeling I have is that people budget for dining more conservatively here than in other parts of the country."

KIM BARTMANN Owner, Cafe Barbette and Bryant Lake Bowl, Minneapolis "If you're having some economic difficulties and anticipating having to give up the dream, it's typical in the industry to take the time after New Year's to take stock and make some hard decisions. I don't think that as a market we need to worry. The bar continues to be raised in Minneapolis. I do think that there is a little bit of a shift in the mood of diners. If you look around and see what's going to open in 2007, everyone is backpedaling from higher-ticket food and moving into comfort-food land. Myself included. That's what I enjoy, anyway. I don't need to pay extra for a contoured ceiling and a chef with a name."

DAVID SHEA Architect, Shea Inc., Minneapolis, which has designed many Twin Cities restaurants "My theory is that fine dining restaurants have been circling the wagon downtown. La Belle Vie, Vincent, 20.21, Chambers Kitchen, the Dakota, they're all within or near the downtown core and its expense-account crowd. It's the area where people are willing to spend money. But the neighborhoods? They work well for Turtle Bread or Corner Table, all casual and less expensive. Bryant Lake Bowl fits its neighborhood, it works great. But Five was in the wrong location. The business traveler is not going to go to make a destination out of a fine dining restaurant that's behind the Bryant Lake Bowl."

ALEX ROBERTS Chef/co-owner, Restaurant Alma, Minneapolis "It's tough when you're only thriving on the weekends. How do you keep it fresh, and keep people working, when you're doing 15 or 20 covers on a Wednesday? A slow restaurant never does its best work; at a certain point it defeats even the best chefs. There's something in our dining culture where people don't reward the art of fine dining. The blame doesn't rest solely on the public, but also on chefs. You can't say the customer is wrong. You have to change what you do in order to stay alive. I'm not implying that we're doing a better job, because I don't think that. Are we going to be busier now, with these closings? Maybe. But it's shakier ground all the way around, at least that's how it feels to me."

SCOTT PAMPUCH Chef/co-owner, Corner Table, Minneapolis "Too many seats? I don't know if I agree with that. This town can handle more seats, but it's fickle. The stars have to align: A perfect location, dining room, food, service. It's not the first time we've seen a rash of restaurant closings after the first of the year. It's the market correcting itself, people making decisions to get out of the business. There will be more restaurants opening. People have come to expect that that's going to happen."

JEFF PIERCE Co-owner, Great Ciao, Minneapolis, a fine-foods distributor "There are a lot of fine-dining seats, and many of them that are still around are backed by a hotel, a museum, a theater. It's hard for an independent, chef-driven restaurant to succeed in this market. Minnesotans don't necessarily put their money where their mouth is. I heard someone recently say, 'They have great buffalo at Auriga.' That hasn't been on the restaurant's menu for five years, so that tells you how often they ate at the restaurant."

LENNY RUSSO Chef, Cue, Minneapolis "The knee-jerk reaction that fine dining is done for in the Twin Cities drives me up the wall. It's absurd. If you looked at restaurant closings over the past year, you'd see that a lot more casual than fine-dining restaurants had closed. I've seen this happen a million times in this town. Openings cycle up and down, and not just in fine dining. You'll see a rash of openings, then the market gets saturated and a few players fall off. We'll probably see some more closings, and then we'll see openings. Auriga had 10 years, That's a good run in anyone's book. It's about three times longer than the industry average, so that's successful, if you ask me."

TIM NIVER Co-owner, Town Talk Diner, Minneapolis "Is Minneapolis ready for a whole bunch of chef-driven places? There are a lot of rich people in this town, and they spend tons of money at Manny's and Oceanaire, but those restaurants are concept-driven, not chef-driven. I worked for Phil Roberts, and one day I hope that I wake up and own five restaurants and can sit in an office and dream up concepts, but that's really freakin' hard. That's why there are only a couple of big boys in town. They're the ones that keep propagating other stuff around town."

TIM LAUER Manager, Coastal Seafoods, Minneapolis, which supplies fish and seafood to many Twin Cities restaurants "It's sad, but not a shock. Let's be honest, we've seen this happen before. When Aquavit left town, everyone said, 'The Twin Cities can't support a restaurant of that caliber.' I never thought that was true. It's different answers for different places. Five had different problems than Auriga, which had different problems than Levain. Although in the end they all had the same problem: No customers. How many people are out there that want to spend $150 on dinner? That's a limited demographic. If you looked at the number of high-end restaurants even five years ago, my guess is that it was a radically smaller number ... compared to now, and I don't know that the clientele has grown at the same pace. Then there are people like Jean-Georges [Vongerichten, of Chambers Kitchen] who come to town and do an incredible business, and that has to come from somewhere."

JOSH THOMA Co-owner, La Belle Vie and Solera, Minneapolis "Having worked in this business since 1991, I've seen a gradual decline in fine-dining business spending over the years. I was reading a survey by the National Restaurant Association which said that 45 percent of fine dining at restaurants comes from visitors and travelers, and that segment has gone down over the years. Businesses are more likely to do things electronically rather than meet face-to-face, and that has an impact on restaurants. Every restaurant has a life cycle. With Auriga, they made great food for 10 years. I'm sure a lot of their business came from the Guthrie; even in the short time that the [former] Guthrie was open before it moved to the river, we saw a lot of business from it at La Belle Vie. And it's one of those things where you get into a pattern of having a certain cash flow, and suddenly it disappears and that has a huge negative impact on your bottom line. "

Rick Nelson • RDNELSON@STARTRIBUNE.COM