The first time I walked into Small Hours after it opened in September of ’24, in the Northeast Minneapolis spot up where the arts district meets the Lowry Avenue commercial corridor, I took in the big windows, the killer wine list, the beyond-the-beyond hi-fi and DJ situation, and thought: This is not a restaurant.
But it is lovely. Like being inside a modern woodworker’s handmade jewelry box, cherrywood everywhere, a dozen pale orbs of subtle light suspended here and appended there, the diffuse glow making everyone look fantastic as they hoist and swirl delicate stemware.
But. The menu, the menu. I frowned. Bread, wine, and a library of tinned fish—even truly great wine and truly great fish—a pantry, not a restaurant. Next!
And yet. Here I am, a year later, trumpeting my wrongness. Small Hours is not just a restaurant; it’s my pick for the best of our new class of just-born restaurants because co-owners Sam Cassidy and Sarina Garibović have pulled off something like cold fusion, inventing a whole new model for restaurant economics, marvelous in its innovative simplicity, important to share from coast to coast. What a surprising journey for us all!
Two big things changed in the last year. At Small Hours, the menu morphed as the team reworked operations this past summer to become more of a restaurant, adding a handful of entrées, sides, and desserts that make the place feel like you can burrow in for the evening, not just drink and snack and go.
The other big change, however, was on my side, as I spent a year watching prominent, much-loved restaurants and bars fall away due to current market forces—goodbye, Young Joni and Saint Dinette; you were so creative and accomplished. Farewell, Café and Bar Lurcat—who can forget you were chic enough for a date night for Lady Gaga? So long, old friends Market Bar-B-Que, Vellee Deli, Palmer’s, The Lynhall, Annie’s Parlour, and Tattersall’s Northeast cocktail room!
So many grievous losses. But what can be done?
Of course, nothing can ever be done, except what we do for ourselves as we talk, experiment, think, reinvent, and try to crack the code before us and, as facts on the ground change, try to crack the next code. Restaurant people are all aware of the ways the current environment has changed: a high minimum wage for all the seen and unseen workers, plus sick and safe time. Everyone supports these changes, but no one wants to charge $40 for a burger to make the math work. What now?
Of course, there will always be steak houses and fine dining, but also, restaurant models have always changed, of course. What feels “normal” today—a host at the door; a battalion of servers, prep cooks, and dishwashers—is only normal lately. Back in Shakespeare’s time, and for a few hundred years before and after, the majority of European food-and-drink-place staff was dedicated not to people but to the care and feeding of horses, because the main type of pub and restaurant was a coaching inn where people ate while changing or resting horses. And yes, the horse-free locals popped by, too. Fast-forward to 1939, and the dominant restaurant model was, of course, entirely different. In fact, The New York Times reported that the U.S. employed half a million soda jerks, out of a population of around 130 million, since the main type of American restaurant was very distinctly counter service. More recently, do you remember when there were hardly any coffee shops or food trucks or brewery taprooms or distillery cocktail rooms? Things change. And I think Small Hours has invented a similarly useful, fresh, and different model that may prove just as transformational and essential, a new shape of normal to fit into our national food mosaic.
Normal for Northeast’s Small Hours is when you pull open the door to find both co-owners, Cassidy and Garibović, on-site each of the five nights they’re open. Cassidy is a onetime cabinetmaker who hand-built nearly everything you see: the cherry bar, the cherry banquettes. Every time I’ve been to Small Hours, he stands in his cherry firmament like a starship commander at his command post, taking orders, pouring wine, shaking cocktails, and sending music sparking through various bits of high-end hi-fi equipment and vintage speakers. Lots of roles for one man, and Cassidy handles it all without looking like he’s doing much at all, thanks to the hub he built with a bar, a turntable, and an in-wall digital ordering system all at arm’s length.
Small Hours, by the way, is named for a song by British prog-folk-rock-alt sorcerer John Martyn, and if you happen to come in when the spot is empty, you might get a quiet and lovely few moments of Cassidy simply playing Martyn or another favorite, such as Alice Coltrane. That’s when you see the points of inspiration that Small Hours shares with so-called listening bars, like Tokyo’s Lion café, or the new generation of American hi-fi bars, such as Los Angeles’s In Sheep’s Clothing or Chicago’s Dorian’s.
Quiet moments, though, are rare here, since Small Hours really is meant to be a lively, conversation-filled wine bar. To more reliably experience the spot’s rich musical side, go later on Wednesday nights. That’s when various guest DJs of remarkable prominence cart in their own record collections to share with Cassidy and whoever else is around. Past local luminaries have included Dave King, of Happy Apple; Micky Alfano, of Night Moves; and Jack Torrey, of The Cactus Blossoms.
With music, there must be wine! Especially here. Score one of the reservable Small Hours tables, and you’ll find on each a preset stack of menus, including a list of around 150 full bottles of wine and a small array of by-the-glass pours. This is the career triumph of Small Hours co-owner Sarina Garibović, who is well-known in local wine circles. She’s famous from her work founding Twin Cities Somms, an organization supporting local sommeliers, and also for working at Restaurant Alma, training for Crave restaurants, and consulting with her company Ženska Glava, which has been the secret superpower behind several excellent local wine lists, including the one at Herbst. Here at Small Hours, Garibović’s first owner-operator bid at her own spot, she pours her most favorite favorites. These are from low-intervention and ancient regional producers, primarily European, but you’ll also find a few dozen options from North America’s West Coast. Small Hours’ owners don’t choose to call themselves “natural wine” purveyors because they want to leave the door open to winemakers and drinkers who don’t identify with the movement. That said, they offer what is essentially a natural wine list, free of producers who chase that critic-pleasing international style of flavors that are often achievable only by fiddling with sweeteners or other additives. Garibović favors wines of place and heritage. Maybe you’ll find the only by-the-glass white of the night is an Albariño with a mineral, kale-ish center and a plush, vinous texture, like the Dandelion from Nanclares y Prieto. Or perhaps you’ll find an American red such as California gem Madson’s Pinot Noir, transparent, meaty, and strawberry-edged, in a particularly rare marriage of the feral and elegant.
Or if you order well enough, you could get not just wine but lifelong bragging rights! Garibović pulls strings to get a lot of “highly allocated” wines. This phrase refers to wines that are in such demand distributors can only allow any venue to purchase a small amount, and future allocations depend on that venue’s ability to sell the product and market the winery in the process. So-called allocated wines are where you see wine most vividly as a business of relationships and earned trust, and you can find these wines at Small Hours, often, surprisingly, on the by-the-glass list.
Or, if you don’t know what you’re looking at, just ask Cassidy for a recommendation. “It’s so crazy,” marvels Garibović, of her wine-newbie partner. “If you ask Sam for a recommendation, he’ll say: ‘I like this and this and this.’ And I’m like: ‘How do you just beeline for the most highly allocated wines I am pulling every string and hustling to get in here? How do you know?’” “They’re just good,” shrugs Cassidy.
Good, too, is Small Hours’ pricing. The spot keeps to the three-times-wholesale model that most restaurants once used, but which many have abandoned in today’s difficult economy. Sometimes the prices are even better than that. I once spied an Oregon red from Hiyu Wine Farm selling for a mere $15 above what you would have paid a wine distributor, if you could have found it at all. “We just want people to be able to drink what we love,” says Garibović.
The two co-owners met because they have many mutual friends, and Garibović, a restaurant-lifer married to former Bachelor Farmer chef de cuisine Peter Lutz (now pursuing a second career in ecology), was looking to do her next thing, while Cassidy had a lead on the Small Hours storefront. They spent months meeting and talking through ideas of hospitality and restaurant sustainability, on both the human and economic sides.
Like many in hospitality, Garibović was laid off during the pandemic and gave a hard rethink to everything she thought she knew. “I was really asking myself, ‘At what point does hospitality become exploitative?’ Perfectionism, urgency, and a demand for inauthenticity can really be a toxic combination when that’s your every day forever,” she says now. “For a long time, it was a point of pride for me to say, ‘If a guest shows up pissed off, I can turn it around.’ I was a manager who told other people, ‘That’s our job.’ Now I don’t feel proud about that. At some point, that kind of hospitality is actually asking you to put part of yourself aside and betray yourself.”
Her time away from the industry brought her to a different lens through which to consider hospitality, and now she takes as her inspiration the kind you find in actual homes. “What we do at Small Hours is: We welcome you into our house,” says Garibović. “We’re offering you things that we think are really good and we think you’ll like. Music and wine and food. But hospitality has to be real on both sides. When you go to someone’s house, you don’t say, ‘Wow, I wish you had a better house. I wish you ate different food and were a different person.’”
Personally, I love where this new rethink landed—the food and all of it.
The bread is from Baker’s Field, the local miller and local grain farm supporter that bakes just a few blocks away. I say now, as I have always said, that this is some of the best bread in North America. Nutty, fragrant, and rich, it just feels luxurious to have baskets of this fresh bread on your table. With your bread you might have a pretty, flower-bedecked radish butter or perhaps a European cheese brought into the U.S. from the deeply connected local importer Great Ciao. Most recently, that cheese was the French Bûche de Lucay, a goat’s milk cheese made in a long log and sliced like a jelly roll so you get a big disc that’s like a tangy chèvre in the middle and a creamy Brie at the edges. They serve it with a generous scoop of Italian pear mostarda imported from Mantua, the sweet and mustard-spicy jammy condiment giving you all the dimension and flavor of a chef-made appetizer with all the labor of popping open a jar.
The boquerones are a similar joy—the best of the best, fresh from the container. Fat Spanish white anchovies, and plenty of them, all lined up on a platter with good olive oil and strips of preserved lemon. The pâté is house-made and French-country perfect, just lots of all those different bits of pork, united in a gelée, served with first-rate mustard and little French pickles. Herbed olives are simple and appealing. The green salad is house-made with a fresh herb dressing tossed on fresh lettuces—in season, Small Hours sources vegetables from the nearby urban farm on California Street. Does this sound like a simple dinner party served by the smartest good cook you know, the kind who somehow whips up something for 10 people out of a pantry, seemingly effortlessly? That’s absolutely the essence of Small Hours.
The two entrées, both sized and designed to feed two people, are likewise simple, likewise good: The kitchen has the sort of oven that’s essentially a glorified multichambered restaurant toaster convection oven, allowing them to offer an herb-marinated chicken, roasted and served on bread soaked in jus, or a fresh-herb salsa verde–slathered whole branzino filet. Each tastes like good, chic home cooking—hearty, uncomplicated, and fresh. These entrées are not cheffy or flashy; they’re just satisfying and elegant next to wine. A few vegetable dishes will fill up your table nicely, like roasted broccoli rabe or simple blistered shishito peppers or a creamy and simple plate of a few Hasselback potatoes. Tasty, simple, comforting. A none-too-sweet chocolate mousse with a bit of good whipped cream and a crisp berry pavlova round out the meal.
Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned the tinned fish! Small Hours offers some three dozen sorts of tinned fish, some of it the rare, hard-to-find stuff that Instagram influencers—or some say “tinfluencers”—seek out for bragging rights. Perhaps you’ll choose Norwegian blue mussels with fennel, salmon with sea buckthorn from the Faroe Islands, Portuguese mackerel, Canadian plant-based faux fish, or a pâté of American cod and parsley? Whichever, the entire inventory is happy to sit on a shelf, safe as houses when a Minnesota blizzard makes everyone cancel their dinner reservations or the power goes out. Tinned fish is an important economic safeguard. It is also, of course, one of this moment’s cultural fascinations, with many internet natives obsessed and just as many analog natives mystified. “We got this furious Google review: ‘They just give you the room-temperature can on a plate,’” recalls Garibović, amused. “Uh, yeah. That’s the whole point.”
Of course, everyone knows that local restaurants have never grown their own olives or caught and cured their own Spanish anchovies and wasabi-tinted Japanese fish eggs. Opening containers is not wrong—in fact, that’s the very essence of a wine bar. I’ve eaten out long enough to be highly skeptical that everything should be house-made: House-made ketchup, ham, and salamis are rarely as good as what you can source. Obviously, American food culture has often erred on the wrong side of this equation: We can all agree there’s nothing more depressing than packets of so-called Italian salad dressing made with nothing but tears of defeat and seaweed stabilizers. But leaning on a well-sourced pantry and a good local bakery is different.
Because here’s the most shocking news I heard all year, and the real reason Small Hours is my restaurant of the year: This restaurant runs on a staff of three, usually Cassidy, Garibović, and a third person.
That’s all! Forty-some seats, three people. Two owners, one more, and that’s all.
They don’t have a four-burner stove with a hood and a chef in the back; they don’t have a pastry chef squirting gels on things and getting sent home early on slow nights; they don’t have a human dishwasher or a lobster tank or any of that. They pay a cook to come in during the mornings and make a handful of things: the single salad dressing, a few herb sauces, the pâté, the chocolate mousse, and meringue for the pavlova. The cook marinates the chicken and fish and places each serving for two people in individual pans to roast. Then they clean up and go home. The two owners pay the additional person to plate food, run food, clear plates, and keep the guests’ water glasses full, and you order from Cassidy or Garibović as they stand behind the bar.
Are some grace notes of hospitality lost? Perhaps. Of course, in my life, I’ve had servers that made me feel cared for and seen. But I’ve also had plenty who do nothing but ask if I’m familiar with small plates and try to goose their tip by recommending only the most expensive everything. (Small Hours doesn’t have tip lines on its checks.) Is it odd to have a counter-service restaurant with fine glassware and a $600 jeroboam (that is, a three-liter bottle) of Italian wine? I’ve never seen it! But I haven’t seen anyone come up with a sustainable new restaurant model in a while, either.
So ask yourself: Do you have a three-person restaurant dream that could be made into a three-person restaurant reality, with a good local bakery and a wine list?
Sometimes food is about focusing on the transcendent bliss of a particular sip or bite, and that’s wonderful, because life is hard and moments of happiness are essential. Small Hours certainly offers those transcendent moments. But restaurants also must be sustainable, for the people running them and the community around them. Some part of sustainability is meeting the moment—the moment in the life of the owners, the staff, the customers, the economy, and, dare I say, the world.
Our particular moment is being met in a creative economic and significant gastronomic way by Small Hours, and that, in itself, feels worth noticing as my restaurant of the year—and certainly worth raising a glass of something rare and special in a room like a jewelry box, when the jewels are a new future. 2201 NE 2nd St., Mpls.
