Something wicked this way comes
Acclaimed chef Mitch Omer opens a Hell’s Kitchen restaurant in Duluth.
By Wendy Webb

When droves of tourists beat their way to the breezy port city of Duluth, Minn. to escape the midsummer heat and humidity, they’ll be able to find their own little corner of hell. Hell’s Kitchen, that is. Acclaimed chef Mitch Omer opened a branch of his underworldly restaurant in Duluth.

Hell’s Kitchen in Minneapolis has won rave reviews from some of the most prominent food critics in the business, including Gourmet magazine columnists Jane and Michael Stern, who have authored some 20 books about American eating. The Sterns sing a chorus of praises for Omer’s cuisine. Their ratings (a percentage scale of zero to 100) couldn’t be much higher. Omer’s food? 100 percent. Is the restaurant worth visiting again? Yes, 100 percent. How many miles would they drive to get Omer’s cooking? 100 miles. Atmosphere? A paltry 90 percent. It is hell, after all.

“The Sterns love my peanut butter,” Omer laughed. But it’s not so funny. In their review of Hell’s Kitchen, the Sterns proclaimed Omer’s home-made peanut butter, which he serves for free with baskets of fresh, chewy bread, to be the best they’ve had, anywhere. It turned the condiment into an international sensation. Omer was inundated with requests for it from around the globe and had to scramble hard to keep up with the demand. The peanut butter is available online (www.hellskitcheninc.com) along with several other goodies from the restaurant, including home-made ketchup, hot cocoa mix and rib rub.

The Twin Ports are already home to several great restaurants, the New Scenic Café, Burrito Union and the Boathouse among them. But this is the first time a chef of such wide acclaim has brought a restaurant to this town. Word of Hell’s Kitchen’s imminent arrival spread quickly and people here were, in a word, anxious for Omer to throw open the gates of Hell.

But it wasn’t just residents salivating at the thought of a piece of Omer’s unique dense bread filled with bison sausage, nuts, spices, and coffee (slathered with peanut butter, of course) or his Mahnomen porridge, a Cree Indian dish he concocted of wild rice, hazelnuts and dried berries. Duluth business leaders are also licking their lips, and not only because they’re looking forward to his huevos rancheros.

“This restaurant has a fantastic reputation in Minneapolis and we’re sure it’s going to be the same here in Canal Park,” said Gene Shaw, director of public relations for Visit Duluth, the Duluth convention and visitor’s bureau. “We believe they’re going to bring a whole new level of traveler here, people who come because they’ve read about Hell’s Kitchen.”

Omer isn’t sure about all of that. He’s just interested in serving the best food he can in Duluth’s Canal Park, although he’s still somewhat amazed that it’s happening at all. “I never dreamed of—or wanted—a second restaurant,” Omer said. “But my wife and I have a boat docked in Superior and have been coming up here for three years. I’ve fallen in love with this place.”

Gradually, the idea of opening a restaurant in Canal Park grew on him. “I realized it would give me an excuse to spend more time up here on the boat,” Omer laughed.

He looked for a couple of years to find just the right space and then it materialized—an old antique mall, complete with a garage door that opens up onto the street. Omer replaced that with his own gates of hell, red antique doors from a demolished church, appropriately enough.

Inside, visitors will find a gothic lair—dark brick walls, chandeliers, an ornate iron gate that has a rather cemetery-at-midnight feel to it, and artwork by Ralph Steadman, whose inky, vaguely disturbing crows and skeletons make Tim Burton’s famous “The Nightmare Before Christmas” cartoon look like the “Family Circus.”

Unlike its Minneapolis sister, which closes up after the lunch rush, Hell’s Kitchen in Duluth serves breakfast, lunch and dinner, and offers a full bar. Customers familiar with Omer’s cuisine—unique but not fancy, interesting but not fussy—will find the menu similar to his Minneapolis fare, including his signature breakfast specialties, Mahnomen porridge, lemon-ricotta hotcakes (so good they don’t need syrup, so say the Sterns), and bison benedict, a charred bison flank steak topped with two poached eggs and a tangerine-jalapeño hollandaise sauce. Omer develops all the recipes himself.

Omer is a self-taught cook, finding his niche after walking off the Iowa State football field in a huff and, in doing so, leaving a full college scholarship behind. “I got a job in a pizza place out of necessity,” he said. “And I just kept cooking.”

But getting from there to critics’ darling chef wasn’t as easy as all that. Omer is famously open about his, a-hem, somewhat checkered past. He has been fired repeatedly, traveled the country with rock bands as a security guard (the man is an imposing 6 foot 4), married and divorced twice, and in general, lived a wild and unfocused life that always seemed to gravitate toward food.

It was at a cooking demonstration by Jacques Pepin that he found where his heart was leading. “It changed everything for me,” he said. “After that, I was on fire. I knew exactly what I wanted to do.”

Omer got a job in the kitchen of the New French Café, the legendary Minneapolis restaurant. “I got some great training there,” he says. “We were encouraged to grow and experiment and to be inventive with dishes. We had incredible freedom. I really learned a lot.”

Then, in 2002, after cleaning up his act and marrying Minneapolis businesswoman Cynthia Gerdes, he conceived of and opened Hell’s Kitchen in downtown Minneapolis, which was a near-immediate success. When the Sterns’ review hit the stands, his business went through the roof.

Fast-forward a few years and more than a few boat rides on Lake Superior later, and Omer found himself in Duluth’s Canal Park.

He opened the new Hell’s Kitchen with a hand-picked management team, including general manager Pappy Anderson, assistant general manager Kendall Linn, bar manager Joe Walsh, kitchen manager Kelly Kluver and Omer’s daughter Jesse, who moved to Duluth from Seattle to work for her dad as assistant floor manager. “I’ve got some incredible people with me,” he said. “And I’m also struck by the fantastic caliber of servers here.”

Omer designed his Duluth kitchen to be a replica of the one in Minneapolis, specifically to aid in staff training. “The people I brought from Minneapolis already knew their way around that kitchen, so they hit the ground running.”

And, judging from the enthusiastic reaction of Duluth residents and visitors who are filling the restaurant day and night, they’ll have to keep up that harried pace. But that’s just fine with Mitch Omer. It wouldn’t be his restaurant without a little heat in the kitchen.