St. Paul’s demise greatly exaggerated

Closings, schmozings. The city’s restaurant scene is doing fine.

Rumor has it that after hearing his obituary had been published in the New York Journal more than a decade prior to his actual death, Mark Twain quipped, “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” It’s not difficult to imagine the venerable city of St. Paul uttering a similar phrase after the most recent spate of restaurant closings set the bell tolling for the city’s dining scene.

The practice of announcing the last gasps of St. Paul has seems to have been a common one since I first moved to the Twin Cities fourteen years ago—and from what I know of it, long before that as well. At that time, media reports equated the city to a kind of municipal Miss Havisham, with her decades-old entertainment and dining options not wearing well. Now, granted, the city does indeed roll up its sidewalks a bit early in some neighborhoods but that and it’s many other corduroy-blazer and sensible shoes-type qualities are endearing traits to those of us who either live in or have a fondness for the city.

As far as the restaurant scene goes, back up naysayers, cause it ain’t over yet. Several of the closed restaurants were quickly reoccupied, including 128 Café and the former A Rebours (now Meritage)—and those restaurant owners even attribute some of their success to the neighborhood and independent-oriented community fabric that is St. Paul in a nutshell.

One such person is Jill Wilson, 128’s new owner, who worked at the café from 2002 until 2006 but had been a frequent diner long before that. “It was one of mine and my husband’s favorite restaurants,” she says. “We lived in Longfellow and at the time there weren’t a lot of dining options for us, so we started coming to St. Paul, which was uncharted territory for us Minneapolis kids. One night we came for dinner and I applied to be a server. About a year later I started waiting tables here. It was always a good fit. I liked the crowd, the style of food and the atmosphere of the place.”

Wilson had been in conversations with Brock and Natalie Obee about purchasing the restaurant in 2006, but the building came under new ownership and there were designs on turning it into condos. Thinking that it wasn’t meant to be, Wilson left to take a management position at Cesare’s Wine Bar in Stillwater, where she and her husband now live and put it out of her mind. When the Obee’s put in their 90-day notice, the building owner contacted Wilson to start up the conversation again, and after that, she says, one thing quickly led to another. The restaurant closed in June and Wilson reopened it in November of last year with very little second-guessing on her part. “I’m superstitious about restaurants and I feel like they either fit you or they don’t—and this one fit me,” says Wilson.

Chef Russell Klein and his wife Desta Marie Klein have that same kind of affinity for their restaurant Meritage, as well as for St. Paul and its offerings. The pair met, fell in love and began to dream of owning a place of their own while working at W.A. Frost. They were scouting around for a location and looking in Minneapolis and St. Louis Park, but were continually drawn back to St. Paul. “Russell really established his reputation in St. Paul and when we really started to think about where we wanted our restaurant and our community, we realized it was St. Paul,” Desta Klein says.

The pair originally looked on Grand Avenue and was in negotiations for a space when they heard that A Rebours was closing. It was a space that held special meaning to both of them. “We hosted our wedding reception here and had come here on our second date. It reminded Russell of Balthazar in New York, which is one of his favorite restaurants,” says Klein. “We knew it was going to be forever personal to us. Things just fell into place and it really seemed like fate.”

A week after the restaurant closed they signed a lease and began working on Meritage in earnest. “We’d been looking for spaces and planning for a long time so while the deal came together overnight, it didn’t necessarily happen overnight.”

Klein cites the sense of community in St. Paul as a real benefit of owning a business there, as well as the desire of residents to have places to go that are more than just a corporate cutout. “It’s interesting for us to see how much the city and the community has come out to support us and even thank us for being there. We’re blown away by that and the interest that we’ve seen since we opened.”

Wilson too says that there’s been support for 128 in spades since it reopened. “We’ve been really warmly received and gotten wonderful press. A lot of the regulars have come back and we’ve also been able to introduce ourselves to a new cadre of people. In a way, we’re experiencing a benefit of ‘you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone’ with our customers,” Wilson says. “When I’m taking reservations I’m always surprised about the disproportionate number of 651 area codes that are on the books. I think that really says something about St. Paul people and how loyal they are to their neighborhood restaurants.”