On a trip to Minneapolis earlier this summer, I asked a small group of guys from one of my dealers to meet me somewhere for breakfast. They usually do a great job coming up with interesting places to have breakfast and this one was no exception - the Hi-Lo Diner, a new-ish diner south and east of Minneapolis' downtown area. I had read about the Hi-Lo Diner, so I was happy to give the place a try that one morning.
The story of the Hi-Lo Diner starts with two young guys who weren't in the restaurant business, but in the restoration business. James Brown and Michael Smith partnered up to restore an 1880's Victorian home in the Mississippi River town of Red Wing, MN. Completing the task by foraging for original woodwork and restoring the house with painstaking detail, the two young men caught the eye of the Red Wing Heritage Preservation Commission who hired the two to restore a 1920's era Craftsman-style home. Upon completion of that job, they decided to move to the Twin Cities to focus on a growing demand for restoration of homes in historical neighborhoods. They called their fledgling business Brownsmith Restoration.
The Hiawatha/Longfellow neighborhood on Minneapolis' south east side was run down and crime ridden in the early 2000's with empty or abandoned buildings up and down E. Lake St. In 2008, the city of Minneapolis started a program to clean up E. Lake by offering incentives to businesses to come in and take over empty buildings. Brown and Smith purchased a building along E. Lake Street in Minneapolis and opened up a small home furnishings and accessories store by the name of Forage Modern Workshop.
Pictured right - Mike Smith and James Brown.
By 2012, the transforming neighborhood was still iffy with pockets of crime going on. Tired of getting broken into several times over the years, the two looked at the potential of an old Taco Bell building across the street from Forage that they had bought a couple years before for pennies on the dollar. They thought if a business - such as a restaurant - could be there with people coming and going during all hours of the day, that would be a good watchdog for the neighborhood and especially for their business directly across the street.
But those guys didn't know anything about the restaurant business, so they turned to two guys who did - Jeremy Woerner and Pat McDonough, owners of the Blue Door Pub with now three locations in the Twin Cities. (Click here to see the entry on the great burger I had at the original Blue Door Pub in St. Paul.) Woerner and McDonough opened their first Blue Door Pub in 2008 - the same year Brown and Smith had moved to the Twin Cities to start their business. When Woerner and McDonough looked to put in a second Blue Door Pub location in Minneapolis in 2012, they turned to Brown and Smith to do the extensive buildout and remodeling of a building a few blocks south of Forage. The second Blue Door Pub opened in late January of 2013 and the four became good friends.
Pictured left - Jeremy Woerner and Pat McDonough of the Blue Door Pub. Picture courtesy St. Paul Pioneer Press.
The group didn't want to put a restaurant in the old Taco Bell building, so they decided the best thing was to tear it down and go from there. They invited 60 friends to tear down the building one day - ironically feeding them all with Taco Bell tacos - and let them have at it in demolishing the building. After taking away much of the remaining debris from the site, Brown and Smith set their sights on doing something unique with the property.
The Fodoro Dining Car Company was a New Jersey-based manufacturer of stainless steel-clad/art deco-style modular dining cars that were shipped via rail to places around the United States. The company folded in 1981, but there were still a number of these dining cars still in business including Mickey's Diner in St. Paul. Brown and Smith were enamored with Mickey's Diner, a St. Paul institution that is on the National Register of Historical Places.
Pictured right - Mickey's Diner in St. Paul
Brown began to look on-line to see if any of the old Fodoro dining cars were still available. He eventually found an article about a salvage broker in Cleveland, Steve Harwin, who bought and restored the old diners. When Brown talked it over with his partner, Smith enthusiastically agreed to pursue the dining car concept for their restaurant. They contacted Steve Harwin to see what he had to offer.
Harwin's first love was restoring sports cars and vintage motorcycles - something he did for a number of years while living in Europe. But his friends there that had traveled to the U.S. kept gushing about the old dining cars that they saw along America's roadways. Harwin wasn't familiar with what they were talking about, so when he moved back to the States in the mid-80's he set out to find out what his friends were talking about. He found his first dining car in Pennsylvania, a run-down, dilapidated structure that Harwin immediately fell in love with. He bought the dining car and brought it back - via truck with a police escort because it was an oversized load - and began to restore the car. He eventually bought more cars and started a business - Diversified Diners - that also sold salvaged parts for original dining cars.
Harwin would salvage and restore a couple dining cars each year, painstakingly restoring the diners to their original condition. Then he would sell them to people - vetting potential owners to make sure that they understood the historical value and integrity of each of the diners that he restored. Eventually, one of the salvaged diners he picked up was the old Venus Diner outside of Pittsburgh.
The Venus Diner was a double-wide Fodoro dining car that was manufactured in the mid-50's and placed in Gibsonia, PA, just north of Pittsburgh. The Venus Diner was in business for nearly fifty years, closing in the mid-2000's. Harwin took possession of the dining car and moved it to his lot in Cleveland in 2007. It took Harwin nearly two years to restore the diner and he showcased the Venus on his website. The picture at left of the Venus is exactly what it looked like when Brown and Smith first saw it just before they purchased it from Harwin.
The diner could be split down the middle and it was loaded - front half and back half - onto two flatbed trailers via crane and driven to Minnesota. It took another crane to take the halves off the flatbeds and place them on a foundation. From there, Brown and Smith spent over half a year to fully restore the inside and outside of the diner to its true original state complete with an updated stainless steel outer shell, lights, accessories and signage. Naming the new diner after the Hiawatha/Longfellow neighborhood it sat in, the Hi-Lo Diner opened in early spring of this year.
We met up around 8 a.m. at the Hi-Lo Diner located at the corner of E. Lake and 41st Ave. S. a few blocks west of the Mississippi River. (see map) There was plenty of parking in the lot to the west side of the diner.
Inside the Hi-Lo Diner, it's bright shiny and surprisingly roomy. It's truly like walking back into the 1950's with the restored diner's counter service, old-style fixtures and roomy booths.
We were seated in a booth looking out onto E. Lake St. and were greeted by our server, Susan. She dropped off breakfast menus for us (breakfast is served all day long) and poured coffee for those who needed coffee. One other thing that the Hi-Lo Diner provides is alcoholic beverages and I understand that it's a popular place for third-shifters looking for some food, an adult shake or a bloody mary to help take the edge off after a night of work.
The signature breakfast item at the Hi-Lo Diner are the Hi-Top plates - basically, it's deep-fried dough (like a donut) with a choice of toppings. The Po' Boy Dough Boy Hi-Top features shrimp, adobo slaw and a cilantro lime aoili on top of a doughnut. The Notorious P.I.G. has Cuban-style pulled pork along with a citrus glaze, a sunny-side up fried egg, black bean and sweet corn salsa, and seasoned sour cream topped with finely chopped cilantro. For those with a sweet tooth, you can get the Venus Pie-Trap - a vanilla bean-custard filled donut topped with a sweet glazing, chocolate syrup, whipped cream, almonds and finished with a cherry on top.
They also have traditional breakfast items at the Hi-Lo Diner - pancakes, waffles, omelets, eggs Benedict, and a lavender créme brûlée French toast dish. And keeping with the age-old tradition of diners, Hi-Lo Diner features fresh made pies including a lemon meringue, banana creme, and a mixed berry pie. (Hi-Lo Diner also has a dinner menu that is served between 11 a.m. and 10 p.m., and a late-night "Night Owl" menu that is served from 10 p.m. to close.)
I thought long and hard about the créme brûlée French toast, as well as the eggs Benedict, but I ended up going with the Hash Stuffed Hash - a glorious mess (I still love that term from the Slakingfool) that consisted of housemade corned beef hash, hash browns, chopped mixed peppers, caramelized onions, all topped with two sunny-side up eggs with a hollandaise sauce. The overall taste was - in a word - spectacular. The corned beef was fresh with a bit of a salty taste, the hash browns were real with the great taste of peppers and onions mixed in. (I love the taste of fried onions and peppers, but my stomach gets to talking to me about an hour after I finish them.) The hollandaise sauce on top of the eggs made it a pretty messy breakfast, but messy in a great way.
One of my guests did get the eggs Benedict - two poached eggs sitting on top of smoked Duroc ham and an English muffin, topped with a the same hollandaise sauce that I had on my breakfast. Two asparagus spears accompanied the eggs Benedict. He declared it to be delicious.
But the highlight of the breakfast was when they brought out Yum Yum Yum Hi-Tops for two of my guests - Korean short ribs with an apple-bacon slaw along with wasabi micro greens all topped with a sweet glaze sauce. It looked interesting - a combination of savory and sweet tastes all in one. The presentation was phenomenal, and according to the two guys that got them the taste was just as good as they looked. I couldn't fathom Korean short ribs for breakfast, along with an apple-bacon slaw on top of a syrup glazed donut. But they just loved the taste of the Yum Yum Yum Hi-Top. "There's so much going on with different flavors," one of the guys said as he offered me a bite of the short ribs. I declined, not because I didn't think I'd like it, but more because I was getting pretty full from my oversized breakfast still sitting in front of me. I couldn't eat the whole thing and I was sort of bummed that I had to leave about a quarter of the breakfast on the plate. But I did manage to eat all of the delicious corned beef, though.
The Hi-Lo Diner was a great experience. The unique aspect of eating in a restored diner car is worth the trip, but the food is excellent on top of that. The service we had that morning was efficient, friendly and professional - Susan stayed on top of the situation, but was never hovering over us as she filled coffee cups, brought more napkins or checked to see if there was anything else we needed at the end of the meal. The Hi-Lo Diner is a great addition to the restaurant scenery in the Twin Cities and it will no doubt be successful for years to come.
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