Diane Ruona, Antoine’s Creole Maison
By Mike Mitchelson

Spend five minutes with Diane Ruona and you become suddenly calm. While she’s lived in Minnesota for the better part of 30 years, Ruona conveys the thoughtful, relaxed attitude of her native Louisiana. Her restaurant, Antoine’s Creole Maison in Minneapolis, has the distinct ambiance of a New Orleans café: there might be white tablecloths, but that’s just tradition. It’s a casual place all the way.

Being thoughtful doesn’t mean compromising on ambition, however. Ruona has packed plenty into her life, from rising from poverty in a segregated South to cooking and serving in restaurants and becoming an Army Reservist, all while raising a family and catering events with her own cooking. Throughout her efforts, she focused on one day opening a restaurant.

Antoine’s was ten years in the making. “I began the process in the ’90s,” Ruona said. “Then in May 1997 I saw an ad in the newspaper for a restaurant for sale—this place.” She met Evan Balasuria, whose restaurant, Sri Lanka, occupied the space, but the terms weren’t right, so she walked away. She watched the restaurant became the Uptown Diner, then Taj of India. She came close to an agreement in Taylor’s Falls, but a fire destroyed the building she was to rent.

Like a boomerang, luck has a way of coming back around. Last year she received a phone call from Ashok Bedi, owner of Sahib’s Gateway to India, “He said, ‘The restaurant is back on sale,’” she recalled. “I hung up on him and called the owner.”

Five closing dates later, she had the restaurant, after refinancing her home. On September 19, 2005, she got the keys. “I looked around the restaurant, then went home and crashed,” she said, laughing. Opening day was Halloween. “Our first customer was a man named Kip,” she said. “He still comes here, feeds his face, then goes to work out at the Y (across the street.)”


Growing up

Originally from Lafayette, La., Ruona grew up during the era of segregation. Her family worked in farmers’ fields, picking cotton and vegetables for pennies a day. “We’d get up at 3:30 a.m.,” she said. “We had to get there just before sunup to sign up, get our sacks and hit the fields. …I recall making 11 cents one day and being pleased.”

The hard labor did not prevent Ruona’s family from continuing traditions. “Sundays we went to grandma’s house, and in between the clothes lines we set up tables and chairs, and my grandma, sisters and dad cooked,” Ruona said. Every Monday was house cleaning and laundry. “But mother had a big pot of red beans and rice with corn bread or French bread,” she said.

After Hurricane Audrey struck Louisiana in 1957, Ruona’s father delivered ice, earning between 15 and 30 cents for a block. “If people couldn’t afford to buy ice, they would trade (for it), give us meat,” she said. “My grandmother raised chickens for slaughter for the Southern Pacific railroad, and they would let us have some of them.”

All the recipes her parents used were from their parents, and their parents before them. And the children were expected to learn. “They didn’t have recipes that were written down, but you followed what they did, so when it was your turn, you could do it.”

Her father mastered the art of baking, she added. “He’d always say, ‘Children, don’t go running in the house and make my bread fall.’ Of course, we would run up to the kitchen, then walk gingerly through.”

In addition to working in the fields and attending school, she sought out full-time work. Opportunities for blacks in the segregated South were few. “We were stupid to think we could get an office job,” she said. Potential employers, when called on the phone, would first ask what school a person attended. The answer would reveal a person’s race. Ruona attended the all-black Paul Breaux school. “They wouldn’t hire you based on that,” she said. “It’s ironic I got a waitressing job—if I wanted to eat at that restaurant, I couldn’t go in. I had to go in back to a window to place an order. At a white only restaurant, I couldn’t (waitress), but could work in the kitchen.”

While there are obvious changes since the civil rights movements of the 1960s, there are still attitudes in Louisiana that remain the same, Ruona said. She recalled an instance in the mid-1990s when she returned to Lafayette with her in-laws, who were white. They went to a restaurant Ruona knew from her youth. “I had never been in the front (door), only the back,” she said. “The waitress wasn’t kind to my mother, and really the whole table. We asked for a different waitress. …You can sense, you can see that unwelcome stare. It cuts to the core. My mother-in-law—who was white—was also very uncomfortable with (the attitude).”

One notable signal of Lafayette’s slow transformation from segregated to integrated society was the city’s “daily advertiser” recipe contest. “It was an evolution of white-only residents to what reflected the community,” she said.

Ruona eventually became the personal assistant for Mirriam Schweizberger, who owned the now-defunct La Parisienne women’s clothing store in Lafayette. Schweizberger moved to New York City for the business, taking Ruona with her. An incident at the store brought them back to Lafayette, but Ruona returned to New York as soon as she could. The day Martin Luther King’s was assassinated, Ruona began work at the Institute of International Education from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. during the day. She also worked 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. in a restaurant in the Bowery area called Nino’s. Somewhere in that schedule, she also met her first husband and started a family. “I cooked for (work), cooked for my family, and did some catering on the side,” she said.

Ruona later became a fulltime housewife and worked in restaurants and catered events part-time. “People kept telling me how great the food was, that they’d never had anything like it before,” she said. The family moved to the Twin Cities in 1972, when her husband landed a job with Control Data. Her life’s work since then has run the gamut, from working in offices to her stint in the Army Reserves in the mid-1980s. One thing her drill sergeant kept repeating stuck with her: “‘Move with a purpose,’” she recalled. “That’s what I do here, and what I try to instill in my staff.”

Her restaurant idea gained traction when she consulted with Women Venture in St. Paul, an organization focusing on career training and small business development for women. “They gave me additional start-up funds for salaries and other needs,” she said. “They helped market the restaurant; their staff comes over for lunch and dinner. I get an e-mail from them almost daily, they’re a great bunch of people.”


Louisiana style up North

With all the options Uptown has to offer at the intersection of Lake and Hennepin, lunch has been slow further north—Antoine’s block, Ruona said. “If I was in New Orleans, this place would be full all the time,” she said.

So why not return to the homeland and run a restaurant? “I can’t stand the heat,” she said, laughing. “It would kill me. I’d definitely have to cook in air conditioning. And I love it here.”

She’s trying different methods to attract a lunch rush, including offering a “bayou platter” with samples of jambalaya, red beans and shrimp Creole for those unfamiliar to the cuisine. And it seems to be working, particularly for dinner. “Our big business comes later, after 7 p.m.,” she said, especially on the nights she has live music.

Antoine’s is named after Ruona’s grandfather. “He’d come by (our home) with his chicory coffee everyday, and we’d make donuts, and he’d have powdered sugar all over himself,” she recalled. “And I never saw him out of a suit.”

It’s those memories and stories of family that, despite poverty and segregation lived well, cooked well, and dressed well when they could. She envisioned Antoine’s as white tablecloth restaurant with a relaxed Louisiana atmosphere: a touch of class within casual confines. “I knew the foods I’d be cooking, and this place, once I found my colors, wasn’t a challenge to decorate. I’m trying to replicate a New Orleans-type restaurant, a combination of jazz and blues—a juke joint.”

There’s more to Louisiana cuisine than seafood, jambalaya, gumbo and deep fried foods, Ruona said. It includes every protein and vegetable, and can be light or heavy. There is one hard line to her cooking philosophy, however: “Do it right the first time, and you must put a lot of heart and soul into it,” she said. “My family taught me how to cook. If I mess it up, I’m dishonoring them and the time it took (to teach). But I see the plates come back, and they’re clean. I tell guests they’ve made me very happy.”

The restaurant celebrates its one-year anniversary on Halloween. “I’m living my dream, my passion,” Ruona said steadily, but dabbing a kerchief to her eye. She’s in a busy, but good place in her life. “People talk about their passion in life. This is my passion. It’s mine.”