Introduction
This interview with David Fhima comes at a critical time for Minneapolis restaurants and businesses. Restaurants in particular are feeling the pressure of rising wages, food costs, and property taxes. Add to those challenges a shift in lifestyle, less drinking, more nights at home, and it’s easy to understand why a concerted effort from the city is needed to rehabilitate Minneapolis’s reputation. We need people from outside the city, both from our suburbs and from across the country, to see Minneapolis as safe, vibrant, and worth a visit.
It’s our reputation that needs burnishing. As Fhima puts it, “charity begins at home. Take care of home.” That sentiment is widely shared, and it’s why so many residents have expressed frustration over recent efforts to bring back bathhouses, decriminalize drug paraphernalia, and pass resolutions about Cuba and foreign banks. People want their city government laser-focused on repairing the damage done during Operation Metro Surge. But even before the surge, residents were feeling the effects of high taxes, rising costs, and a general sense of disorder.
Many restaurants along Lake Street have closed or are operating in survival mode. In addition, several restaurants considered cornerstones of their neighborhoods have closed recently, including the Lowry, Pajarito, D’Amico & Sons, and Sunstreet Bread. As we write this, we’re learning that 801 Chophouse on Nicollet has filed for bankruptcy protection. These weren’t pop-up restaurants taking a chance; these were established businesses with loyal patrons and a proven product. As Fhima notes, restaurants rarely close for a single reason, it’s usually a confluence of factors. But for those of us who frequented these places, their closings have created a creeping sense of dread about the city’s future. Our elected officials often seem oblivious to the perceived decline and appear to have priorities out of step with the majority of residents.
Recent actions by the city council feel transactional. Rather than focusing on the health of the city as a whole, they appear focused on serving specific subsets of constituents without considering how those choices color perceptions more broadly. These groups represent votes and campaign support, which in our current system can be enough to win a council seat with fewer than 4,000 total votes. It's reminiscent of the U.S. Senate, where a senator from North Dakota represents 780,000 constituents while a senator from California represents over 39 million, a structural imbalance that rewards catering to a narrow base rather than governing for everyone. Minneapolis might be best served by abandoning this model in favor of proportional representation.
Most restaurants and businesses cannot survive on their immediate neighborhood alone, they need people coming into the city or traveling across it to achieve the volume required to stay open. That reality demands a city government oriented toward more than narrow constituencies. We need elected leaders aligned around a common goal: improving Minneapolis’s reputation throughout the state and the country. Building a marketing campaign around the vague concept of “neighboring” isn’t going to do it. Neither will a listing in the Michelin Guide. What’s required is a change of attitude, fewer rigid definitions of who’s “in” and who’s “out,” and far more signs of open-armed welcoming.
We must come together as a city committed to seeing more “just opened” signs than “sorry to say, after many years, we’re closing.” The entire city loses if we don’t recognize the urgency.
Interview Summary
David Fhima has seen a lot in his 30-plus years in the Twin Cities restaurant business, the 2008 financial crash, COVID, the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. But he says the current moment feels different, and more fragile. Born in Casablanca to a French-Moroccan-Spanish mother and a Sicilian father, Fhima came to the U.S. speaking little English, knocked on a French restaurant door, and never looked back. Today he runs a portfolio of Minneapolis institutions including Maison Margaux, Motherdough, and Vagabondo in Excelsior. It’s that last one that tells a telling story: doing business in Excelsior, he says, costs 30 to 40 percent less than in Minneapolis. The political climate there is simply more encouraging for business, and he’s not afraid to say so.
On the economics of running a restaurant in the city, Fhima is direct without being bitter. Restaurants operate on thin margins, and when regulations designed for corporations get applied to a tipped-wage industry, those margins disappear. He’s not opposed to fair wages or worker protections, he wants them, but he wants city and state policymakers to actually understand the industry before writing rules for it. For example, the fees that restaurants charged to cover employee health insurance are no longer permitted with little acknowledgment of what they accomplished. Alcohol sales are down 40 to 60 percent. Inflation has made it impossible to raise menu prices fast enough to keep pace with rising costs. Any one of these things is manageable, he says. Together, they create a perfect storm.
But Fhima’s deepest concern isn’t regulatory, it’s cultural. He describes a growing trend of customers choosing restaurants based on perceived political affiliation, leaving fake reviews as acts of protest, and staying out of Minneapolis entirely because they feel unwelcome. Suburban diners who might once have come downtown aren’t coming. Downtown residents who might drive out to the lake aren’t going. The polarization that has fractured civic life, he argues, has now crossed the threshold into the dining room, and most chefs he knows see it but are too afraid of a boycott to say so. His ask is simple: remember that restaurants are where division ends, not where it starts. People of every background, belief, and politics have always come together over a meal, and if Minneapolis wants to recover, economically and culturally, that’s a good place to begin.
Thank you for reading and caring about Minneapolis.
