These Minnesota restaurateurs proved that after COVID, anything is possible

On March 6, 2020, chef Sameh Wadi was in Mexico City when he noticed a number of people wearing masks.

On March 11, Jeff Rogers was prepping deep-dish pizzas, wondering if he could add a second employee.

On March 14, Jamie Malone was on the phone, canceling diners’ reservations at her restaurants Grand Cafe and Eastside.

On March 17 at 5 p.m., restaurants, bars and other gathering places closed, following an order by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to curb the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

And on March 18, chef Tyler Shipton stuffed the last of his belongings into a U-Haul and left San Diego hours ahead of California’s stay-at-home order.

For restaurant workers, success comes from being prepared to face an impending rush. Most learn those skills early and carry them throughout life, along with the reassurance that restaurant jobs will always be there. When the pandemic hit, and the wave of closures followed, industry veterans put those skills to the test and did what they knew best: reacted.

Much less certain was what would happen after the wave retreated. Five years later, these four chefs and restaurateurs have taken the good, coped with the hardship and built a better, more resilient and fulfilling life.

Tyler and Ame Shipton lived two blocks from the beach in San Diego. “I had a really cool chef job,” he said.

“We were never going to leave,” added Ame, a SoCal native and hairdresser who was his girlfriend at the time.

“I remember watching the news in January,” he recalled. “I hadn’t really paid too much attention until then, but I’m immunocompromised. I thought, yeah, this might take me.”

Ame’s dad had property in northern New Mexico — lots of space, very few people. As dread mounted and coronavirus cases rose, they packed up and took off. The country life worked for several months, but Shipton’s health remained precarious. They soon discovered Ame was pregnant.

“And Dad don’t got a job,” Tyler said, laughing.

“We had zero support out there,” said Ame. They called Tyler’s dad and asked if they could come home to Lanesboro, Minn. It was also much closer to Mayo Clinic, where Tyler was promptly treated for kidney and lung disease. Between doctor visits, they tried to figure out how to build a new life.

Tyler was working at Estelle’s in nearby Harmony, Minn., preparing to-go meals, when they heard about a small riverfront restaurant available in Lanesboro. After walking through it and weighing their options, they bought the restaurant. Their Midwest support system helped them refurbish the space, and the couple took friendly advice and named it after their newborn daughter. Juniper’s opened in December 2021.

They’ve since found the rhythms of small-town life, and learned that winters are rough on small eateries — half the restaurant’s seats are outside — and shifted to a seasonal model (they open April 4). That means Juniper got to spend her 4th birthday in Mexico, by the beach.

Sameh Wadi came home from that Mexico trip and got to work on plans to close the dining rooms of World Street Kitchen and Milkjam ice cream shop, which he runs with his brother, Saed. Their products were built to travel, making their switch to takeout easier than some.

“There was an incredible amount of support from diners and our community. Truthfully, it was exactly what we needed to keep going,” said Wadi.

They also were poised to open a “Willy Wonka-style” ice cream factory on Chicago Avenue, near 36th Street. When the pandemic shut things down, they put off signing the contracts. Two months later, George Floyd was killed on that same block.

“Having gone through the Gulf War myself as a kid when we were living in Kuwait, it brought back a lot of painful memories,” Wadi said. “And I was burning on the inside for my city and my community. Witnessing the physical destruction and seeing people being treated ... it was just one gut punch after another.”

He went back to the restaurant books and figured out how to care for and feed more people. He stopped drawing a paycheck. They started running specials, giving away meals to front-line workers and dropping food at hard-hit neighborhoods and protest sites.

Once there was time and space to take a break, Wadi had another realization: “I need to cook.”

Still in the midst of the pandemic, he started pulling ingredients out of the pantry, tackling dishes he’d always meant to try and sharing them on Instagram. “It was a moment of joy when we were in a joy deficit,” said Wadi.

It also was the first step on a larger journey back to where the chef began. “I moved to this country when I was 13 or 14 and never stopped working,” he said. From high school to culinary school to opening the critically acclaimed Saffron, he had not stopped.

“I really did not budge much and it made life [expletive] hard," he said.

In summer 2023, Wadi took time off to do what he calls a “hard reset.” He worked through trauma, family legacy, physical health, burnout and grief. And he cooked, following his curiosity into ancient Arabic recipes.

“You think progress means looking ahead. I’m like, ‘No let’s look at these medieval feasts,‘ ” creating community and camaraderie over epic meals. That rediscovery led Wadi back to his first restaurant, the one that built his identity as a chef.

A new iteration of Saffron, honoring that history and his deep love for Minnesota, will open later this year.

Knowing how to react calmly during chaos is a skill Jamie Malone has honed. She knew the bottom could fall out of life at any time — she’d already lived through that.

“One of the reasons I wanted to open a restaurant is because my dad had wanted to be a chef,” she said. “He was sick for most of my childhood.”

Meals were rare moments when everything was OK, life rafts of levity between doctor and hospital visits. “That’s where that desire to create this oasis for deep intimacy came from,” she said.

Malone first created those experiences at the Guthrie Theater’s Sea Change, but they were most evident at her iteration of Grand Cafe, which opened in 2017, a cozy space with a mix of vintage elegance and rose-colored glassware.

During the pandemic, those bubbles of intimacy became islands separated by closed doors and dire news reports. Connection required effort.

“The pandemic we’re currently living in is loneliness,” said Malone. “And I’m an introvert. Making those connections requires effort, but those moments at a table aren’t just luxury.”

Like many restaurants during the pandemic, Grand Cafe offered meals packaged for home cooks, calling it Paris Dining Club. But the experience Malone delivered went beyond food in a box.

“I remember in Italy, when people would open the windows and sing opera,” said Malone. “We needed to find beauty — because what the [expletive] else is going to get us through this?”

Plus, her team needed purpose. “It’s known that restaurant workers can be more familiar with the edge of emotional stability than other careers. In a restaurant you accomplish something together every night. What happens when that gets thrown away?”

Paris Dining Club leaned into their talents. In addition to sumptuous meals, there were art supplies and wine pairings, music playlists with moods and storytelling to lead conversations. Each meal was an experience of aesthetic revelry.

In 2021, Malone and her staff stepped away from restaurants to build on what they started during the pandemic. There was a steep learning curve of technology, subscriptions, newsletters and more, but they weren’t constrained by nightly service.

Malone now works from a historic North Loop loft, her curated dinners savored in museums, at weddings, dinner parties and at home with immediate family — much to the introvert’s delight.

Wrecktangle Pizza started as a small adventure: onetime bartender Jeff Rogers was going to make really good Detroit-style pizza with his partner Breana Evans, brother Alex Rogers and Nic Wendel, director of operations.

They’d been selected to be one of four businesses in North Loop Galley, a new food hall offering one-year leases for food upstarts that opened in December 2019.

In the beginning, Jeff Rogers was the only one working at the business full time, but all hands were on deck whenever possible.

“We were open for like three months, riding high, selling out. We started with only 150 pans that could make pizza,” Rogers recalled. Another 100 pans still didn’t satisfy that early demand. Alex was driving down from Duluth every day; their mom made blondies and bars.

None of them really saw what was coming until the stay-at-home order was issued.

“Initially, I was stoked to spend 18 hours on the couch,” said Rogers. But none of them are good at sitting still for long.

The core tenets of Wrecktangle Pizza are friendship and fun, and both were in short supply. “Like, what can we do? Pop-ups?” said Rogers. They partnered with friends who opened their kitchens, and spread pizza joy to new neighborhoods.

While taking a break from pop-ups at a cabin over Memorial Day weekend, the spotty connection to the outside world brought news of the uprisings in Minneapolis. “And there’s our apartment on TV in the middle of the fires,” said Evans.

They didn’t know what they could do to help, but they could work.

“In terms of being able to do take out, we didn’t have to make the biggest pivot,” said Alex Rogers.

Once Galley reopened with limited hours, they started cranking out pizzas. They skipped paychecks to buy more ingredients to be able to give proceeds away. A Community Pizza was added to the menu, where it remains, a fresh ingredient-topped option with proceeds benefiting neighbors in need.

When Galley had space, they added the lunch concept Wrap to create more jobs, even giving a graphic designer friend some work designing the logo. Another food hall, Market at Malcolm Yards, was under construction in Prospect Park. They added another stand there in August 2021.

Their ultimate goal was a full restaurant with a bar that could employ some of that top talent, whose incomes were spotty after the pandemic. (Bars weren’t able to add to-go cocktails.) That dream was realized in 2022, and remodeling the Lyn-Lake restaurant space was an all-friends-on-deck endeavor. Finally, the band of hospitality buddies had a home base.

They moved Wrap into Graze Food Hall, and added a Wrad, a thin-crust pizza stand. Plus, they just announced Wrecktangle Duluth will open later this year.

“We look back on it all the time,” said Jeff Rogers. “And we’re like, man, I wouldn’t really like to do that again, but I am glad we all made it."