Saint Dinette, the creative French-inspired Lowertown bistro, will close once its lease expires in March 2025.
Don’t call it a funeral, owner Tim Niver said: no flowers, no mourning. Part of why he’s giving plenty of notice is because he wants to give the restaurant a proper celebratory send-off, he said. After all, he told his staff this spring, nearly a year in advance.
“It’s better to really live and love this one out,” he said.
Owner Tim Niver at Mucci’s Italian Restaurant in St. Paul on Friday, April 8, 2016. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)
Niver, who opened Saint Dinette in 2015 with J.D. Fratzke and Brad Tetzloff, also runs Mucci’s near West Seventh and hosts a podcast exploring issues affecting the restaurant industry. Closures are sad, he said, but it’s not inherently bad to recognize when the tires are running out of air.
“It’s sad because there’s memories that were made there, but those don’t go away,” Niver said. “A thing that’s an entity to you, kind of like a living thing, ceases to exist other than memory. But we f—ing rocked that restaurant, and it’s such a good restaurant. It’s always been. I’m proud.”
The primary reason is financial, Niver said — not that the restaurant is underperforming, exactly, but that the business expenses that skyrocketed during Covid have not adjusted back down as the economy has improved, so his menu prices are unsustainably high.
If inflation is improving such that stores like Target can drop prices on thousands of products, Niver asked, why are food distribution giants like Sysco and U.S. Foods not doing the same? The restaurant’s ingredient costs have increased about 8 to 12 percent just over last year alone, he said.
Or take insurance: Because this country lacks an organized, centralized health care coverage system, Niver said — which “would bring a collective joy and ease to the majority of the population” — small businesses are on the hook when insurance companies raise premiums for the sake of their own profits.
“I’m wondering if they really realize what they’re doing by keeping prices as high as they are,” Niver said. “I think they’re trying to get us to succumb to this as the new normal, and I can’t. I run a neighborhood restaurant and I’ve got $30 entrees — there’s a point where it just doesn’t work anymore.”
The other challenge, of course, is that downtown and Lowertown have transformed since before Covid.
To replace lost revenue from workers’ lunches and dinners, downtown areas need to find new ways to draw people in from elsewhere, he said — and it’s not sustainable to rely on just one or even a few businesses to do that alone.
“I don’t want to pin it all on the city, but the city needs to understand that a fervent business community is a fervent economic community as a whole,” Niver said. “People don’t just show up to do nothing. They don’t show up to go somewhere and not be entertained. But somehow, I’m doing all the entertaining, and the city is like, ‘Oh, he must be doing alright.’”
Saint Dinette joins several recent restaurant closures in St. Paul that have come at the end of a lease term — Tavern on Grand, Salut Bar Americain, Foxy Falafel, to name a few — which Niver said makes sense. The end of a lease makes a complex decision simpler and more feasible, he said; you don’t want to find yourself insolvent one day with years left on a lease.
And as costs keep increasing, that fear also means restaurateurs, at least in Niver’s orbit, are becoming more hesitant to sign new leases and open new restaurants at all, he said.
“You have to be smarter, more limber to what happens in the moment,” Niver said. “But things (shouldn’t) have to hit rock bottom for there to be some sort of fire lit in people to understand, maybe we could’ve maintained this all along with a little bit better attention.”
Saint Dinette: 261 E. 5th St., St. Paul; 651-800-1415; saintdinette.com
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