‘Please come back’: Minnesota restaurants brace for a long recovery after ICE surge

It took three sleepless nights before Gavin Kaysen finally hit send.

The email went out to a core group of friends and regulars who have sustained his Soigné Hospitality restaurant group over the past decade. Showing vulnerability, his email culminated with a plea: “Please come back.”

The situation was bleak. Sales at his flagship North Loop restaurant Spoon and Stable, which he once considered “bulletproof,” were sliding. Two Monday evenings took in the equivalent of a single slow brunch, and in one week it lost $70,000 from canceled events. He was cutting shifts at the new Bellecour in the North Loop, where there weren’t enough diners to account for usual staffing, and sending workers down to Naples, Fla., to spend two months at his new restaurant there. Across his Minneapolis group, business was down about 30% — some days more than 50%.

Kaysen’s email told the raw truth: These last months felt harder than COVID.

From the pandemic and the unrest following the murder of George Floyd, to relentless inflation and economic uncertainty, Minnesota’s restaurant industry was already on edge. Now, Operation Metro Surge might be the final straw. Amid intense immigration enforcement across the state this winter, many restaurant staffers — a lot of them immigrants — stopped coming to work, afraid of being targeted by federal agents.

And diners, for any number of reasons — fear, helplessness, the bitter cold — seemed to stop dining out. Owners, from mom-and-pop shops to fine dining, have been left looking at the books and wondering how long they can stay open.

If customers were waiting until things got better in Minnesota, “I am telling you with conviction, we will not be here in May,” Kaysen said in an interview with the Star Tribune. “And we’re not the only ones.”

They described sales plummeting year over year; corporate and private dining cancellations; a coffeeshop pulling in a total of $188 in a full day; a restaurant group with eight Twin Cities restaurants losing $100,000 when closing for the Jan. 23 solidarity strike.

Some owners are coordinating rides or food for workers afraid to leave home and borrowing money to make payroll, only to come in and see an empty dining room.

“I don’t want to be crying in the refrigerator, crying in the car, because this is awful and I cannot control it,” said Sammi Loo, who owns three restaurants in Rochester. “Every day I will be thinking about this stuff. You put everything you can into making this work, until one point, like, are you done?”

When the lease is up this summer on her cafe Mezza9, Loo says she will let it go.

While Kaysen’s letter went to frequent customers, Sean Sherman sent his own letter to Congress.

“No industry built on human labor can function under terror,” Sherman wrote. More than 1,000 restaurant industry people from across the country signed it.

From farm labor to food distributors to cooks, he said, every link in the chain is fragile.

“We’re already feeling it,” Sherman told the Star Tribune. “Restaurants are kind of like the canary in the [coal] mine.”

Los Angeles is a recent example.

After ICE stormed the city in summer 2024, a lingering “depression” still keeps diners home, said Javier Cabral, editor of the food news site L.A. Taco. The number of restaurants has been “thinning out,” especially the smaller, immigrant-owned spots.

He warned diners in other cities not to assume their favorite places will make it. “There’s no imaginary force that’s going to inject a bunch of money,” he said. “In a smaller community, like Minneapolis, you’re likely that person keeping them alive.”

When COVID-19 shut Minnesota dining rooms in 2020, there was government relief in the form of forgivable government loans and expanded unemployment for furloughed workers.

This time, the safety net has been slower to materialize. Gov. Tim Walz is asking the Legislature for a $10 million relief fund for businesses impacted by Operation Metro Surge, and the nonprofit Minneapolis Foundation will start distributing grants, funded by some of Minnesota’s largest companies, to struggling businesses.

In the meantime, a small network of industry advocates and operators is trying to build one themselves.

Kate Meier, the founder of Craftmade Aprons, joined with a team of chefs a year ago to launch the Help the House Foundation, providing aid to hospitality workers. Many workers are drawn to the flexibility of the industry, but that flexibility comes with a tradeoff.

Her organization covers rent or utilities when someone has to miss work for a crisis, such as illness or a death in the family. Lately, applicants have been citing fear of leaving the house as the reason they need help.

Kaysen, too, has a foundation — Heart of the House — which gives direct aid to his employees. First launched during COVID, “we always kept it as a what-if,” he said. But now, “as quickly as we raise $1, we give away two.”

As much as individuals need help, so do the restaurants themselves. Food writer Stephanie March, along with a coalition of industry leaders, launched the Salt Cure Fund through the Minneapolis Foundation, with the goal of raising $1 million to provide grants to independent restaurants on the brink of collapse. “It’s about preservation,” March said, nodding to the name Salt Cure.

Restaurants are gathering places, she explained, but they’re also places where people build careers and establish businesses that can be passed on to their children, while training the next wave of chefs and owners in the process.

“When we lose those spaces, we won’t even know what it feels like until it’s too late,” March said. With little other rescue in sight, “the only thing that can fix it is people.”

On Nicollet Avenue’s Eat Street, half a block from where Alex Pretti was killed and a memorial now grows, the Copper Hen got national attention for offering water and relief to protesters the day tear gas filled the scene. Soon after, a large private event was canceled. “Now we’re just labeled as whatever people are going to label it as and they don’t want to come,” said owner Marisa Brown.

While Copper Hen’s business is down about 20% to 30% compared with the fall, new faces have shown up in support. Sales of the restaurant’s cookbook spiked to 300 copies in four days — 10 times more than Brown sold all last year.

Asked if she would change anything about that day, Brown didn’t hesitate: “Absolutely not.”

Location is everything for businesses on Minneapolis’ Lake Street, where the customer bases are largely made of immigrants. The Latino business cooperative Mercado Central has been hurting, said project manager Juan Linares. Fewer than half the hot food stands are running, and most days, the dining room stays empty.

“We want to see kids running around, buying ice cream,” Linares said. Instead, the individual owners of the 38 businesses within are each faced with painful calculations.

Sherman isn’t giving up on Washington, even as he prepares to open a larger version of his award-winning Indigenous restaurant Owamni at the Guthrie Theater this spring.

It’s been hard to stay optimistic, he said. An Owamni worker was detained by federal agents outside the restaurant, frightening the rest of his staff.

He worries the current climate leaves every restaurant vulnerable — including his own.