Violent altercation leads to abrupt closure of BernBaum’s in downtown Fargo

A beloved James Beard Award-nominated restaurant in downtown Fargo suddenly closed over the weekend, stunning customers and the community. Police records show a violent altercation between an owner and employee led to the abrupt closure.

BernBaum’s, the breakfast and lunch eatery bridging Jewish and Icelandic cuisines, was a destination that gained national attention. Co-owner Andrea Baumgardner was a semifinalist for Best Chef: Midwest earlier this year.

Over the weekend, her husband and co-owner, Brett Bernath, was in a physical dispute with an employee leading to the restaurant temporarily closing Sunday. Monday it announced it had permanently closed.

Baumgardner said the closure was due to “personnel reasons” when reached by phone Tuesday morning. She was in the process of donating perishable foods to local shelters. ”I’m just trying to get stuff out of here before I have to throw it out, because that’s a little more heartbreaking,” she said.

In a separate phone interview, Bernath explained that his firing of a female employee Saturday afternoon led to a male employee confronting him, and Bernath asked him to leave.

The employee, Joshua Stallard, a cook at BernBaum’s for three years, refused to leave, and Bernath physically removed him from the restaurant. The two wrestled and Bernath lost his glasses in the process of pushing Stallard out the door. Bernath at one point grabbed a windshield ice scraper as a weapon to get Stallard to leave.

Stallard said Bernath put his hands around his throat. Bernath said Stallard tried throwing a punch but missed.

Both men were uninjured, according to a police report obtained by the Minnesota Star Tribune through a data request Tuesday. The report says police responded to a disturbance call around 4:30 Saturday and stated there “is no evidence of a crime.”

Bernath declined to press charges. Stallard was told by police that Bernath had a right to remove him from his property and that he therefore cannot press charges against his former boss.

Many employees quit in the aftermath and agreed they would work under Baumgardner but not Bernath. Bernath said he and his wife have been wanting to close for some time.

“We’ve been unhappy with the business for a while, and we actually took a six-week vacation this summer to just get away and see if Andrea could cope with not being at the restaurant. ... She’s worked her butt off for years and years and years, and she’s not able to do it anymore physically. And so we knew we were moving on. We had kind of come up with a strategy this summer of, hopefully, you know, try to make it work for two more years until our son graduated high school, and then we were going to close it down.”

Last fall, Bernath said they met with a business broker, but he said closing under these circumstances was not anticipated and they are grieving the closure.

“We’ve built a business to be proud of. It’s a sadness for us definitely to be shutting it down,” he said. “If people want to blame me and think I’m some sort of monster that’s fine by me. It doesn’t concern me.”

Stallard said in a phone interview that the manner in which Bernath fired his co-worker was unprofessional and riddled with expletives. Bernath agreed that he “dropped f-bombs” in the firing, which led to tensions flaring and the fight.

“Here’s the thing,” Stallard said. “You can go ahead and be that person, be the owner that tries to take advantage of people, but then don’t go on social media and make big posts about how you’re a great place to work in a nontoxic environment and all this, because it’s just insulting.”

Baumgardner said she pleaded with the men to stop fighting. She added that she didn’t agree with the way Bernath fired the employee.

On a virtual message board to employees Sunday, she said that they don’t condone violence, “yet that occurred yesterday. It is a big failure on Brett’s and my part. ... I am very sorry that it happened and that it frightened people.”

She added that the “cataclysm has allowed me some thinking overnight. To be blunt, the current workload and setup is not something I can keep up with any longer. There may be a smaller, more manageable restaurant that comes out of this, for short term or longer term. Or not.”

The Facebook page for BernBaum’s was taken down after the closure announcement Monday, and its website is empty save for an email address to redeem unused gift cards.

BernBaum’s opened in 2016 on Roberts Street inside a midcentury furniture store. About five years ago, it moved to Broadway and became a downtown mainstay blending Scandinavian influence with a traditional New York style deli.

Its closure is the latest blow to downtown Fargo after a flagship bookstore, Zandbroz, closed this summer.

The Minnesota Star Tribune’s former food critic, Rick Nelson, in 2021 described the funky and casual BernBaum’s as one of the Midwest’s top restaurants.