In 2019, the St. Patrick’s Association approached Peter Kenefick about donning the green jacket of Mr. Pat, the king of the city’s Irish community’s St. Patrick’s Day parade.
Kenefick is a busy guy, organizers worried: Alongside a career as a financial adviser, he also owns Grand Avenue restaurants Emmett’s Public House and Saji-Ya and is an avid wintertime platform tennis player. Would he have time for it?
“I said, if you ask me, I’ll be all in,” Kenefick said. “And I was. I went to every button blitz, every event, every old folks’ home. Everyone goes, ‘Peter, no one else has done that; you’re not required to do that.’ Well, I said I would be all in!”
Kenefick was crowned as the 89th King Boreas at the St. Paul Winter Carnival’s Royal Coronation on Jan. 23.
And he has every intention of going full-throttle as Boreas, too.
Even before his identity was unveiled to incoming members of the Royal Family and the public during the coronation, Kenefick said in a mid-January interview, “the word that’s already spreading to all the candidates is that this Boreas is going to be the ‘all-in king.’”
‘Turn that big ship back around’
Kenefick grew up on Norfolk Avenue in Highland Park, the oldest of five siblings in a third-generation St. Paul Irish Catholic family. He helped put himself through college by taking odd jobs doing roofing and gutters and selling shoes at Powers Department Store, he said.
He started as a financial planner in 1980 with two $1,000 retirement accounts in his portfolio, and today, he leads a team at UBS Financial Services in Wayzata that manages $1.6 billion in assets, he said.
Also early in his career, in the mid-1980s, Kenefick took over the Grand Avenue building that housed Saji-Ya and Esteban’s, the Mexican restaurant where playwright August Wilson once told the Pioneer Press Dispatch he wrote much of the Pulitzer-winning play “Fences.” Esteban’s closed in 1985, and Kenefick brought in friends Steve Goldberg and Mike Andrews, of J.D. Hoyt’s Supper Club in Minneapolis, to open Dixie’s on Grand in its place.
By the time Emmett’s Public House opened, on St. Patrick’s Day 2015, Kenefick said the single-story building was reaching the end of its life. He wanted to replace it with a five-story apartment building with restaurant spaces on the ground floor, but zoning codes capped new structures at three stories tall, so he’d have to petition the City Council to rezone the site. The proposal proved more controversial — and some residents’ reactions more vitriolic — than he expected, he said, and council members only very narrowly agreed to the rezoning by a 4–3 vote.
The new building, Kenton House, opened in 2024 and, though Dixie’s was not included in the redevelopment plans, the building is now home to Saji-Ya, Emmett’s and Razava Bread Co.
Grand Marshall Peter Kenefick, waves to parade goers during the Grand Old Day parade in St. Paul on Sunday, June 2, 2024. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)
From Kenefick’s perspective, the fact that similar development plans are in the works for the former Billy’s on Grand building a few blocks down at Victoria Avenue, and that he was invited to be grand marshal for the Grand Old Day parade in 2024, are both vindications of his vision for Kenton House and Grand Avenue more broadly.
“Grand Avenue is changing, there’s no question,” he said. “I played a small, small role, but I did stick my neck out with my dear partners, who are gems, and we are helping turn that big ship back around. But (five years ago), Grand was not grand.”
When the Kenton House project was still in early stages, Kenefick loaded all the architects and designers and project managers onto a bus and drove them around town. He had them get out in Frogtown and Lowertown and Cathedral Hill and look carefully at what gives a building a “St. Paul feel.”
“We want to hang onto the past and, what I’ve always said is, also have discussions about thoughtful development,” he said. “Don’t just put up steel and glass. Does it look like it belongs? Look at (Kenton House) now — there are trees taller than the building. It looks like it’s been there forever. And you come downstairs, you meet neighbors on your walk — it just has that small-town feeling we’re trying to achieve on Grand, in my opinion.”
‘Who doesn’t need some kindness?’
Friday night, after Boreas’ identity was unveiled and Kenefick met the Royal Family, he handed each member a signed sheet of paper.
In one corner is his Boreas crest, containing a Celtic cross, lions and the logos of his restaurants. Lining the edges of the page are illustrations reminiscent of medieval manuscript marginalia. The sheet is titled “The Royal Family of Boreas Red LXXXIX Code of Conduct,” adapted from a passage by Virginia historian John Walter Wayland.
“Each member of the Royal Family is the one whose conduct proceeds from good will,” it begins. “Who … speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deeds follow their word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others rather than their own.”
To Kenefick, being an ‘all-in king’ doesn’t mean he feels the need to make every decision — quite the opposite, he said. He characterized his approach as one of horizontal leadership where, rather than top-down hierarchy or strict seniority, the focus is on sharing decision-making power, facilitating more personal relationships and demonstrating a broader culture of mutual respect.
“It’s just knocking people off their stereotypes a little bit, in a fun way,” he said. Within the Royal Family, “I’m going to remind them that I just happen to have this part. But I’m not the boss. We are the bosses, and we’re going to lead as a team.”
As Kenefick tells it, all this goes hand-in-hand with his Boreas motto, “Respect Reigns and Kindness Rules.”
“We can’t control how cold it’s going to be. We can’t control if the float breaks down. We can’t control if we get the flu. The only thing we can control is our attitude,” he said. “So we’re going to bring positive attitudes. Because you tell me, from little kids to retired people or to senior living, who doesn’t need some kindness right now here in Minnesota?”
Fast Facts: Boreas Rex LXXXIX
Who: Peter Kenefick
Hometown: St. Paul; now lives in his wife’s hometown of Edina
Family: wife, Ruth — their 46th anniversary is on Feb. 1, the last day of this year’s Winter Carnival — and their two children and four grandchildren. His son’s family lives in Florida, and he joked: “I have it backward. I have grandkids living in Naples and grandma and grandpa living in Minnesota. We’re reverse snowbirds.”
Occupation: Senior vice president at Kenefick Bolstad Kottke Wealth Management, a UBS financial advisory in Wayzata, and owner of Emmett’s on Grand and Saji-Ya
Favorite hobby: Playing platform tennis, an outdoor wintertime sport also sometimes called paddle tennis that, yes, looks like pickleball but is different
Boreas motto: “Respect Reigns and Kindness Rules”
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