So Long, Strip Club, and Thanks For All The Fish

Why is The Strip Club closing in July such a big deal? Please attend this digital wake and find out!

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Goodbye, Strip Club, & Thanks for All the Fish!

What’s the right way to say goodbye to a landmark restaurant? Honestly, we don’t really have any sort of protocol at all—some restaurants close abruptly in the middle of the night, some restaurants close by hosting weeks of friends-and-family goodbyes. Yet, just because we have no protocol doesn’t mean we are not ourselves changed and not ourselves experiencing the effects of these restaurants vanishing. This much is true, and also important: Important restaurants both truly impact our lives when they change, and also never really die, because their people, their lessons, their culture migrates to new spots and lives on in the work of former employees of every stripe, from chef to host. For instance, Goodfellow’s, once one of Minneapolis' finest restaurants, closed in 2005, but there’s a good argument to be made that it currently lives on all around us here in the Twin Cities. Former Goodfellow’s chef Jack Riebel now owns The Lexington and Half Time Rec, former Goodfellow’s host Patti Soskin owns the Yum Kitchen and Bakeries, and former Goodfellow’s prinicipal Wayne Kostrowski owns Franklin Street Bakery, one of the best commercial bakeries in town which supplies more restaurants than you can imagine, and he also invented the Taste of the NFL. Even if you just moved to the Twin Cities last year, you’re eating in a world influenced by a restaurant that vanished 12 years ago. I could tell the same tale of a score of vanished restaurants. Not to get too It’s a Wonderful Life here, but our culinary life in the cities would literally be unrecognizable without our landscape of restaurants which are in fact powerful and invisible ghosts. I bring all this up of course, because The Strip Club, inarguably one of the most important Minnesota restaurants of the last decade, is about to close, in July.

At first glance, you’d tend to think that the restaurant was important because chef JD Fratzke defined what grass-pastured meats and chef-driven slow food meant to us here in the North. This is true. You’d also think that The Strip Club is important because, in hindsight, it was the foundation of a St. Paul restaurant landscape that now includes different restaurants by co-owners Fratzke and Tim Niver, including Mucci's, Saint Dinette, and Bar Brigade. But actually, The Strip Club meant more than those things to the Twin Cities restaurant scene, and on the eve of the restaurant’s closing, it seems fitting to hold a sort of virtual wake, and let some former employees say a few words about the spot, and enter into the permanent record what the legacy is from this restaurant legend.

Dan Oskey, Tattersall Distilling

Dan Oskey got his start as a bartender at The Strip Club, and went on to fame and fortune—inventing flavors for Joia Soda, and then founding one of Minnesota’s leading micro-distillers, Tattersall (which is also the booming-est cocktail room). What did Oskey take away from The Strip Club? “The biggest thing that stood out was just the hospitality,” Oskey told me. “Town Talk [the founding cocktail bar where Oskey met Niver] was more about just having a good time and partying. It was wild and fun. Strip Club was different, at Strip Club it was more: We’re in Dayton’s Bluff, way off the beaten path, thank you so much for coming in! When people came in we were almost overly grateful—and we’re going to make you have a good time, you’re going to like this.” That (perhaps at first uncomfortably warm) hospitality became the culture of the place, and Oskey intentionally brought that with him to Tattersall. “It’s almost like a small town style—Tim would greet so many people at the door with a hug, and first you might think those people are family. But they were guests.” They became like family—Oskey guesses 25% of the guests at his wedding were people he first met as guests at The Strip Club. “Now I do that at Tattersall,” he says. “I remember seeing this couple, and going up to their table: You guys come here three times a week. I’m Dan, I’m one of the owners . . . Now I know them, everybody knows them, and when a new staff member comes on board they see how everyone greets those people and they’re like: Who are they? They’re regulars. It’s not a manufactured niceness, it’s part of our culture.” And it’s a culture Oskey learned at The Strip Club.

Adam Eaton, chef of Saint Dinette

Adam Eaton is the founding and current chef of Saint Dinette, before that he had cooked at La Belle Vie for five years. He ended up putting in a year at The Strip Club waiting for the Dinette space to open. “The thing I took away was the culture,” Eaton told me. “JD is a very vulnerable person, very open, and he pushes the staff to open up too—which really breeds trust in the kitchen. I’d show up at work after two days off, and JD would say: ‘Let’s sit down, let’s have a cup of coffee. Did you have a good time? What did you do? Let’s just process this all.’ I never had anything like that before, he’d check in with everyone and want to hear the good and the bad. We were building a relationship other than a work relationship, and in the end that's what really led the kitchen to running like a well-oiled machine, just a lot of trust and honesty. It’s hard to put into words, but it was about connecting with the people you’re working with. At the end of the day, you can teach anyone how to cook—what JD excels at is getting the most out of people, getting them to open up and trust the person next to them, getting them to feel like they are at a place they want to work, and that will take care of them. That kind of family-feeling can be hard to create in a restaurant, so to see it done intentionally . . . I couldn’t be more thankful or grateful, and it’s definitely something I’ll try to do for the rest of my life.”

Chris Uhrich, chef-owner of Mucci’s

Uhrich came to prominence cooking at Heidi’s in South Minneapolis, known for its modernist cuisine. He, too, cites the culture of The Strip Club as the main thing he’ll carry forward as he runs Mucci's Italian, but was also deeply changed by the farmer-driven food culture JD Fratzke created. “I think I was just basically done with spheres and powders when I showed up,” says Uhrich now, “but at the time, the simplicity and the quality of the ingredients were huge to me. JD cared so much about the products. He wanted to know where they came from, who produced them. It was the first time I had worked for a chef that cared that much about what he was serving. I do the best I can now, and I don’t know if I do as good a job as JD, but right now we get a half pig every few weeks from Hidden Stream farm, and that’s something I picked up from JD for sure. I’m mentoring a new sous chef right now, it’s her first rodeo, and I feel like I’ve got JD in my head all the time,” in terms of communication, and culture. “I try to create the thing he created—a feeling of belonging.” 

Justin Sutherland, chef Handsome Hog

Chef Justin Sutherland’s Handsome Hog is one of the most raved about barbecue spots in town, and he is known for rising to prominence cooking modern French at Meritage under Russell Klein. Sutherland spent about a year in the kitchen at The Strip Club between gigs, but actually remembers The Strip Club more as a customer. “I think for a solid six months I never missed a Sunday brunch,” Sutherland told me. “I remember the first time we walked in off the street, the hospitality was just undeniable. I remember it now just as Niver’s face smiling at you—it’s just an extremely appealing experience to walk in to. Everybody got the same treatment. He was so happy to see you, to see everybody. In the kitchen it was kind of the same thing. I called JD my Yoda—he had this Zen Buddhist tranquility about him, and commanded this huge work ethic without ever raising his voice. He was the first time I saw that, being able to command a kitchen and be a strong chef and be an awesome person. I remember thinking between Niver and JD, they were who I wanted to be when I grew up. When I get to a crossroads while running my kitchen, a lot of times I find myself asking, 'What would JD do?'"

Molly Clark, founder Taking Stock Foods

Molly Clark and her business partner Maddy Kaudy launched a bone broth company in 2015 that grew from their work together in the kitchen at The Strip Club, starting when Clark was just out of cooking school. “I was an intern, Maddy was doing pastry, line cooking, butchery—everybody did everything there. I learned a lot of skills from her, and JD, and Chris Uhrich—it was a small group, very tight. One of the things I learned from JD was about the story of food. He’s a bookish chef, in a beautiful way, and a lot of his recipes have a real backstory to them. I’ve taken a lot of that and applied it to what I’m doing now. For the main bone broth we make, we spent so much time doing R&D, reading chefs from all over world, how they approach broth. JD would hand me books all the time about all manner of subjects; it was remarkable to watch him develop recipes based on books he’d just read. Nothing was off limits. He made me a lot more curious about the story behind food, not just where you’re sourcing your ingredients from, but why you are. If you can answer the ‘why’ behind a dish, that’s a big answer. I don't know if I knew there was a 'why' before I worked with JD, now I don't think I could cook without it.”

That's all, folks. 

I don't have space to cover all the rest of the folks who have passed through this significant restaurant. As a writer, I wish I'd had the time and sense to write a story like this for other significant restaurants as they left the scene. If you're reading this before July 1, remember that they're not closed yet—there's still time to get one last meal in, before they really do walk off this particular stage to their new roles. If you're reading this after July 1, just know The Strip Club was a wonderful place that added so much to all our lives in Minnesota, and its work lives on. So long, Strip Club—thanks for all the fish! (And all the steaks and cocktails!)

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