Chef Jamie Malone's Grand Cafe Named Best in the Country

Congrats Jamie Malone! This is your life!

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Wowza—Jamie Malone's Grand Cafe was just named one of the best restaurants in the whole darn country by Food & Wine. AND, her amazing Paris-Brest dish was named Dish of the Year and graces the cover. Well deserved, and take a bow. But for those of you suddenly coming to Jamie Malone consciousness, we thought we'd present a gallery of her climb to the top, as experienced by local eaters. 

The rising-star part of St. Paul native Malone's career started in 2012, when she was cooking at Sea Change. I'll never forget chef Tim McKee texting me insistently and saying something along the lines of, 'This one's the real-deal, you need to know about her, get to Sea Change!' So I did, and he was right. I talked to her then about her love for Jidori chicken eggs, and what she learned working on the opening team of Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s brief-lived Minneapolis hotel restaurant. “I realized how refined you could be without being overbearing," she told me then. I asked her also about being a woman in an industry so notoriously difficult. “It’s been a non-issue. I grew up in a neighborhood that was all boys, and my first job was in a caddy shack. The one challenge is that it’s easier for people to call me a bitch than if I were a man. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about [New York City restaurant magnate] Danny Meyer’s [dictum of] constant, gentle pressure. It works both ways: it keeps me calm and sends a clear message of expectations.” What I remember most from Malone's Sea Change years was her beautiful chawan mushi variations, trembling Japanese-custards as delicate as clouds. In 2013 she shared her bacon chawan mushi recipe with Foodservice News—you guys, this takes me back.

I wasn't the only one bowled over, in 2013 Malone was anointed as a Best New Chef in America by Food & Wine, which everyone, including our own Andrew Zimmern, called well-deserved. As Andrew said at the time, "I am fascinated [with] Sea Change, a restaurant with superb food/service/ambiance, [it's] a major-league restaurant."

Yet then, Malone headed out on her own, announcing plans to start a restaurant called Brut with Erik Anderson, then Malone's co-chef, business partner, and life partner. When she struck out on her own, we thought it would be a good chance to get her obviously tasteful take on the Cities she'd lived and eaten in all her life—tzatziki cocktails and schupfnudels, she told us. On the journey to Brut, they helped open an Italian restaurant in Uptown, the briefly extant Scena.

Unfortunately, Brut didn't get off the ground, and so Anderson and Malone took over Minneapolis institution Grand Cafe—and right away the city, and our critic Steph March, were smitten. Over the next months life tugged the two chefs in different directions, Anderson got an offer he couldn't refuse at the three-star San Francisco restaurant Coi, and Malone fell deeply in love with the world she was building at Grand Cafe. "There's a sort of life in here between the walls, I think you feel that as soon as you come in," Malone told me at the time. "Brian Eno talks about ambient music as something that doesn't demand your attention, but rewards it. What I always envisioned here, and what it's becoming." Indeed Grand Cafe was doing the thing you want restaurants to do, starting with competence and growing into art; we quickly anointed it one of our 50 best restaurants in the Cities, and internally debated whether to put the mousse-filled egg on the cover of the magazine—in hindsight I wish we had, isn't it beautiful? The mousse was a sensuous joy, ethereal and earthy at the same moment. 

Malone kept adding grace notes to her lovely Grand Cafe, including brunch, with swoony deviled eggs. Remember back in 2012 when she told us she liked eggs? She really meant it. 

And that brings us to today! Top restaurant in the whole country.  What an honor, so richly deserved, we really couldn't be prouder. Congratulations, Jamie Malone—you're a good egg, and we lucky eaters thank you for all our lucky years of great eggs. 

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