Dan Rusoff and Joe Kaplan won’t name names, but one of the big-time musicians performing at the State Fair this year will be served local pork chops with peach cobbler for dinner before they take the Grandstand stage. Another is getting a shore lunch-style meal with Minnesota walleye.
As the owners of Eat Your Heart Out Backstage Catering, the duo feeds some of the biggest stars passing through the State Fair and other stages including the Armory in Minneapolis and the Somerset Amphitheater in Wisconsin.
They’ve cooked for Bob Dylan, Ludacris and Blake Shelton; they’ve made Cajun chicken and rice soup for Willie Nelson, jerk chicken sandwiches for Big Boi from Outkast and lavender panna cotta for Halsey.
“It’s the biggest gamble, meeting someone you admire, but so far it’s been good,” Rusoff said. “And in your own world, you get into the genres you like, but when you’re hired to give all these bands food, I’ve found a couple bands I didn’t know and liked or that I’d heard of but like more now, so that’s the coolest part.”
Eat Your Heart Out was founded in 1986 and has been catering State Fair shows since the early 2000s. Rusoff and Kaplan bought the company from founder Kathy Westbrook in early 2023.
The two met a little under a decade ago as cooks at Tilia, an acclaimed Minneapolis restaurant. Rusoff, who grew up in Apple Valley and had worked his way up from line cook to sous chef at Tilia, previously worked at Forepaugh’s in St. Paul and helped the food truck Chef Shack open its brick-and-mortar restaurant in Bay City, Wis. Kaplan’s culinary career began as a dishwasher in his native Hudson while he was home from business school, and he later cooked at Tilia and south Minneapolis French spot Grand Cafe. Meanwhile, he worked as a research tech in a University of Minnesota lab studying Kernza, a type of perennial wheatgrass, and led research and development at a food startup dedicated to the grain and other sustainable foods.
Besides backstage gigs, Eat Your Heart Out offers party catering and corporate packages year-round, with recipes pulled from bands’ favorite backstage meals. But the highlight of the year — and, frankly, the reason they agreed to buy the company, Kaplan said — is the State Fair.
“I love it,” Kaplan said. “I grew up going to the Fair at least once a year. I don’t get to see inside the Fair as much as I used to; this is kind of separate, removed. But I remember seeing shows at the Grandstand, so seeing it from the back is kind of surreal.”
Dan Rusoff, co owner of Eat Your Heart Out backstage caterers, gathers some fresh ingredients from the companies garden near their kitchen behind the Minnesota State Fair Grandstand in Falcon Heights on Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2025. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)
‘Keeps us on our toes’
Next time you’re at the Grandstand, peek over the top of the concert merch shack on the lefthand side of the stage (stage right, to be technical about it), and you’ll see a beige A-frame shed.
That’s where the magic happens.
Inside, there’s a fairly snug commercial kitchen and walk-in cooler, a couple restrooms with showers and a large dining room with a hot bar, cold food bar, ice cream machine and pizza oven. On a small patch of mulch just outside, Rusoff and Kaplan maintain a raised-bed vegetable garden, where they’re growing cucumbers, tomatoes, beans, and lots of herbs and edible flowers.
Unlike traditional catering companies that let clients select dishes from a pre-set menu, everything Rusoff, Kaplan and their team prepare is fully customized to each artist’s preferences with very little repetition. For every show they cater, they’re creating a new breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert menu from the ground up — and, given celebrities’ chaotic tour schedules, often with just a few days’ notice.
“It’s a regular occurrence that our menus are approved the day we need to start acquiring food,” Rusoff said. “You’ve got to be pretty versatile. Even if we have back-to-back shows (like at the State Fair), you can’t have the same menu two days in a row even if it’s different bands, because we don’t want the local crew to get burnt out eating the same thing. So it keeps us on our toes.”
Dan Rusoff, left, and Joe Kaplan, co owners of Eat Your Heart Out backstage caterers, in their kitchen behind the Minnesota State Fair Grandstand in Falcon Heights on Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2025. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)
‘Some just ask for the moon’
The process of cooking for bands begins with a document called a rider, which establishes an artist’s technical requirements, stage setup and backstage hospitality requests — like dressing room amenities and meals for both artists and crew — for the venue to arrange.
Many venues contract out catering to third-party companies like Eat Your Heart Out, which is where Rusoff and Kaplan come in: They’ll review the rider and prepare a budget estimate and sample menus to fulfill the artist’s food and beverage requests, which the artist’s tour manager can either agree to pay or offer to modify.
Riders vary wildly in their level of detail, Rusoff said. There’s not a template every band fills out, he said, and some artists are more flexible than others. But generally speaking, if the artists are willing to foot the bill, Rusoff and Kaplan will say yes.
“Catering requirements can be anything from a sentence like, ‘Hey, we just like healthy food’ to two pages of, “Mondays we eat this. Tuesdays we eat this. Wednesdays we eat this,’” Kaplan said. “Some just ask for the moon and beyond.”
Some riders are brief. At the 2023 Fair, for example, a folk-Americana singer (again, not to name names… but it was Brandi Carlile, who Rusoff reported was delightful in person and brought her family to hang out with the chefs in the dining room during the day) asked for grain bowls and left the specific details up to Rusoff and Kaplan’s creativity.
And others get much more specific, sometimes mind-bendingly so. One band’s rider called for Crystal Pepsi, which no longer exists. A heavy metal band at the 2024 Fair requested that, as soon as they came offstage, a large deluxe pepperoni pizza from Domino’s awaited them in their dressing room. An ’80s group playing the 2023 Fair stipulated that Rusoff and Kaplan could feed the crew but band members would only eat food prepared by a chef the group had hired to tour with them.
Another artist last year requested his dressing room contain two mood lamps, one bluetooth speaker, fresh hand towels, an iron, one bottle of honey, four fresh lemons, a hot-water kettle, two dozen large Solo cups, several very expensive ceramic bottles of reposado tequila and a container of Tums, among other things. For dinner, his rider provided a list of entree options — soul food, roast turkey, grilled chicken, spaghetti with meatballs, steak — and asked that side dishes include a hot soup, spinach salad, fresh vegetables, either mashed or baked potato and “options of cakes/cookies/pies.”
To illustrate how a rider request transforms into an actual meal: That artist’s ultimate dinner menu at the Fair included Italian beef and vegetable soup, a salad bar, a pasta bar with three sauce options and meatballs, Mediterranean chicken breasts, eggplant parmesan, grilled vegetables, roasted potatoes, tiramisu and yogurt bowls.
And they pull produce from the garden and lean on Minnesota food suppliers whenever they can, too.
“It’s nice to showcase a lot of local stuff during the Fair,” Kaplan said. “And some riders ask for stir fry, and that’s fine too. It kind of runs the gamut from pot roast to barbecue chicken to anything in between.”
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