Gavin Kaysen to Open Third Project in Minneapolis This Winter
Demi, a forthcoming 20-seat restaurant in Minneapolis, has become one of the year's most anticipated openings within moments of being announced, thanks to Gavin Kaysen's enduring star power.
Kaysen, a 2007 Food & Wine Best New Chef whose restaurant Spoon and Stable was named one of F&W's Most Important Restaurants of the Past 40 Years, will be opening his new restaurant, Demi, in Minneapolis' North Loop neighborhood this winter, he announced on Tuesday.
To Minneapolis St. Paul Magazine, Kaysen likened the restaurant's U-shaped counter structure to The Catbird Seat in Nashville. According to the magazine, the space is quite small at 1,200 square feet, but we're sure Kaysen will do big things regardless. The chef anticipates two seatings a night of wine-paired tasting menus.
The restaurant's website projects an "early 2019" opening date, but in the hospitality universe, that very well could mean spring. We're fine with waiting.
The restaurant will be "two steps" away from Spoon and Stable, according to Minneapolis St. Paul Magazine, and there will likely be an adjacent cocktail lounge. Spoon and Stable's Adam Ritter will be the chef de cuisine.
Named a Food & Wine Restaurant of the Year in 2015, Spoon and Stable is one of the Midwest's most influential, and nationally recognized, new restaurants. The James Beard Award-winning chef, who spent eight years as Chef de Cuisine at Café Boulud, cites Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller as his two biggest mentors.
"Don't doubt what you want to create,” Kaysen remembers Boulud telling him, at the uneasy beginning of the Spoon and Stable opening. “It's the same thing when we open a restaurant in Toronto, or Montreal, or Beijing. If it's not what the city expected? We have to believe in what we're creating. We know that it works. And so, we're going to go after it."
