Cafe Yoto and a Downtown Minneapolis Foodhall
The Tap for Friday, March 28, 2025
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MINNEAPOLIS: LAZARUS?
Can the planned LaSalle Plaza food hall resuscitate a catatonic downtown?
By James Norton
She said City Center used to be the center of our scene /
Now City Center's over / no one really goes there
— The Hold Steady, Your Little Hoodrat Friend
The sleepy, vacuous confines of downtown Minneapolis seem to be wrestling with a chicken-and-the-egg problem that just won't quit. Even before the Covid pandemic drove workers out of the office and upended the hospitality industry, there was a sense that there were too few people on the scene to make downtown feel like a "real" city, and the restaurants and bars that existed have long felt marginal - a combination of git 'er done lunch joints for office workers and spendy expense account traps for out-of-town swells.
When friends come from out-of-state to attend out-of-town events, I inevitably end up directing them to spots on the margins of the city core - Gai Noi in Loring Park, for example, or any number of terrific spots in the white-hot North Loop.
The bunker-like sepulcher of City Center is the great Downtown Minneapolis Urban Planning Folktale, a cautionary story about what happens when you try to create a vibrant downtown by way of massive commercial intervention. The specifics of City Center notwithstanding, you can put the best, tastiest stuff in a dead downtown and it won't really change patterns of foot traffic and overall density.
Case in point: Brasserie Zentral, one of the tastiest and most glorious restaurants the state of Minnesota has ever been blessed with, which died a tragic death a stone's throw from City Hall due to the most typical of downtown Minneapolis ailments: a lack of people.
If you put something beautifully conceived and executed into a place where people happen to be, it will fill up and prosper. But it will not necessarily be such a magnet that it will, by itself, alter people's traffic patterns. The struggles of Eat Street Crossing on Eat Street are evidence of this: it has been a solidly planned and managed food hall, chic and of the moment, and a royal pain to get to. That foodhall's tenant turnover speaks for itself.
All of this is my own personal context for assessing the news that the folks behind the brilliant and highly successful Market at Malcolm Yards are teaming up with Hempel Real Estate (the folks behind the 3rd St. Market Hall in downtown Milwaukee) to open a food hall in LaSalle Plaza in downtown Minneapolis.
The 30,000-square-foot project is slated to include, as the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal noted, "16 restaurant spaces, two bars, a self-serve beer wall, event space, kid's play area, a pickleball court and shuffleboards."
It sounds great, and if Patty and John Wall from the Market at Malcolm Yards are as talented as they seem to be, it's likely to be packed with delicious and relevant tenants providing terrific food and drink. That - and I hope to be proved resoundingly wrong on this - may not be enough to prevail against the overall vibe of downtown, which is scrappy, empty, inhospitable and generally unpleasant.
Downtown is one of the last places I would think to bring an out-of-town visitor when there are trendy enclaves like the North Loop and Edina, deliciously urbane stretches like Lyndale Avenue and Central Avenue, and increasingly good suburban offerings, including parks, restaurants, and top-notch shopping.
There are three things that might actually turn downtown around, and none of them are a new eating and drinking destination.
The first is hospitality - benches, flowers, pedestrian arcades, public bathrooms, outdoor music and vendors, street-level appeal.
The second is transportation - more ways for bikes, buses, and trains to bring people into the heart of the city without having to fight upstream against traffic. Accessibility for disabled folks factors into this as well.
The third is simply density - more housing packed into smaller footprints, more affordable housing for the workers who give a downtown its life and workforce, and more opportunity for the one-of-kind businesses and stumble-upon-it urban miracles that make places like Manhattan and historic Boston so magical and vibrant.
None of these things can be fixed with a magic wand, and none of them will be fixed with a new foodhall. But for as long as it lasts, it seems likely to make downtown a little tastier, and that’s something to look forward to.
THE TAP
The Tap is the Heavy Table’s ongoing biweekly account of noteworthy Minnesota restaurant openings, closings, and future openings. Please send any tips to editor@heavytable.com. All dates are approximate based on best information available; opening dates, in particular, tend to shift around a lot.
NOW OPEN (Up to 3 Months)
Khue’s Kitchen, 799 University Ave. W, St. Paul ■ Khue’s Kitchen Chef/Owner Eric Pham is the grandson of Lung Tran, who opened the locally legendary Quang on Nicollet Avenue. Opened March 6, 2025 after a fire-related delay.
Cafe Yoto, 548 North Washington Ave., Minneapolis ■ A casual, counter service-driven Kado No Mise spinoff by Chef Yo Hasegawa, riffing on that restaurant’s internal pop-up concept Yo Monday Cafe. Opened March 4, 2025. Reviewed in the March 28, 2025 edition of the Tap.