In the restaurant business, staffers get used to catering to all sorts of VIPs. But royalty? That's another story.
"I'm like, do I bow? What do I do?" Michael Noyes said with a laugh. "Frost is fancy and we've had a lot of people come through here, but to serve royalty, it's kind of a different level."
Noyes is the general manager at W.A. Frost & Co., the landmark Cathedral Hill charmer that welcomed Queen Sonja of Norway during her stay last week for a post-theater dinner. It was, to his knowledge, the first time a royal figure dined at the restaurant.
The monarch was in Minnesota for a four-day tour that included a meeting with Gov. Tim Walz and visits to Norway House and Mindekirken in Minneapolis and to St. Olaf College in Northfield.
But in between her official duties, Queen Sonja made time for elk steak and walleye.
As Noyes recounted, the unusual dinner reservation came about after John Rupp, the owner of Commonwealth Companies, W.A. Frost's parent company, had a chance meeting — "I want to say on a boat" — with a Norwegian emissary based in Washington, D.C. Cards were exchanged. And on the Tuesday before the queen's visit, a couple of scouts from her team came in to check out the restaurant.
"These two women were kind of wandering through just looking at the space and they looked kind of lost. So I said, 'Can I help you?' and they said, 'We're from Norway, and the queen would like to have dinner here.' " She would be attending a performance that evening at the Ordway, they said, and wanted to come in afterward.
Noyes, suitably stunned, was ready to offer a private dining space, but the queen's representatives said she, and her party of six, preferred to sit in the dining room. They selected a table in the fireplace room, alongside windows that face W.A. Frost's storybook patio.
Two days later, a security team came in to examine the building and prepare for the visit.
Meanwhile, W.A. Frost staff prepared by turning up the hospitality to 11. Rupp provided special china and crystal for the place settings. A staffer who is 75% Norwegian was selected to escort the queen to her table. The kitchen team added specials to the menu that highlighted local Minnesota cuisine.
And the waitstaff rehearsed their best "Downton Abbey"-style service. "We do fine dining and all those steps of service, we train on that, but this was everybody in a line with a plate for each position at the table and every plate goes down at the same time," Noyes said. "It was the big-time kind of stuff. We did it up."
When the queen arrived around 8:45 p.m., the restaurant was fairly quiet. No one besides the staff noticed they were in the presence of royalty, Noyes said.
"She had kind of a big-collared, kind of shawl-y sweater on and really cool heeled boots. She's 85 and she looked fantastic," he said.
"She was very gracious," Noyes said. "It was just a really amazing night. There was kind of this dazzling feeling in the air for the staff."
