During every job interview, Greg Awada, the owner of Zamboni’s on 7th across from the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, asks potential applicants a make-or-break question: Can you commit to working the weekend of the Minnesota State High School League hockey tournament?

For many restaurants and businesses in the orbit of the Xcel, where the tournament takes place, this is the biggest weekend of the year.

Every March, more than 100,000 people come through the arena’s doors for the tournament, a spokesperson said. That means an economic impact of about $1.8 million on local food and beverage establishments, retailers, hotels and more, according to Visit St. Paul, the city’s convention and visitors bureau

This year, the Class A tournament kicked off Wednesday and the Class AA contest started the next day. Both conclude with high-stakes championship rounds on Saturday.

And for nearby restaurants, that means butts in seats.

‘More than we had hoped’

Zamboni’s on 7th — which recently expanded into the larger next-door spot formerly held by Eagle Street Grille — opened early for breakfast during a few tournament days. On Thursday, the restaurant was full and buzzing for about 12 straight hours, starting at 9 a.m., Awada said.

“It’s our first time through in this bigger space, and the business has been phenomenal,” he said. “More than we had hoped.”

The Apostle Supper Club, on the other side of West Seventh Street, saw higher-than-expected reservations for both Thursday and Friday nights, owner and chef Brian Ingram said. He’s even noticed a bump this week at Hope Breakfast Bar, a restaurant Ingram owns about a half-mile down the road — probably helped by higher-than-normal temperatures that encourage walking, he said.

“It’s great for the St. Paul Grill, but it’s also great for the hotel,” said Gerry Goldfarb, the vice president of lodging for Morrissey Hospitality, the parent company of the St. Paul Hotel and St. Paul Grill. “I couldn’t believe how many people were coming down for breakfast.”

Restaurateurs know to plan for the hockey tournament weekend boost, of course. As restaurants become more established, managers come to know what factors to look for when predicting what event nights — both during the hockey tournament and year-round — will look like.

At Zamboni’s, Awada said, this weekend has been an all-hands-on-deck call for staff. And on other concert or game nights, he anticipates about two to three hours of increased business before an event starts and another wave of maybe an hour or two afterward.

Over at the Apostle Supper Club, which has been open about a year and a half, Ingram has found that the nature of the event has a significant impact on how his dining room looks.

“It’s been a learning curve for us,” he said. “Big concerts and Wild games, we do incredibly well. But some of the smaller events can actually hurt us.”

Often, during big events at the Xcel Energy Center, parking rates around the stadium tend to increase, and some of the Apostle’s regular customers stay away on those nights to avoid inflated fees, he said. Major concerts and games bring an influx of arena-goers that can offset or even out-earn those average nights, but the math doesn’t always work out during smaller sporting events like volleyball and wrestling, he said.

Ingram is working with the owners of the nearby parking ramp, as well as a couple local hotels and businesses, to try to come up with a solution to the parking issue, he said. But even so, he said, the arena’s impact is a net positive.

“All the growth you’ve seen on West Seventh has really been based on Xcel and what’s going on there,” Ingram said.

Hockey fans converge on the Xcel Energy Center in downtown St. Paul for semifinal games of the State Boys Hockey Tournament on Friday, March 8, 2024. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

The X factor

It’s not only this tournament weekend: Generally speaking, proximity to the Xcel Energy Center is good for business year-round, restaurant leaders said — an especially vital boost in the era of remote work.

Take Cossetta, for example. The Italian market and restaurant, started over a century ago, landed on West Seventh well before the stadium was built. And while its fortunes don’t necessarily rise and fall with hockey and concert schedules, owner Dave Cossetta said, the influence of the X has been critical in expanding the restaurant’s customer base during the past few years, when downtown St. Paul employees who previously worked nearby are no longer regular lunchtime customers.

“All the tournaments and events that come into the St. Paul area, I thank (former mayor) Norm Coleman every day for building the Xcel there,” he said. “This is nationally known, the high school hockey tournament. It’s a big deal.”

Lower downtown foot traffic is certainly felt along West Seventh, both Cossetta and Ingram said, making event evenings more important.

When Ingram was planning the Apostle, he wanted to serve lunch, but ultimately realized there wasn’t enough of a daytime customer base to sustain it, he said. And on West Seventh, Ingram sees people end their nights much earlier than they would before the pandemic.

Downtown

However, deeper into downtown itself, the situation may be reversed for some restaurants.

Tomme Beevas owns the Jamaican restaurant Pimento, whose St. Paul location opened a few months ago. He doesn’t see a ton of pregame business on hockey nights, he said — but certainly sees political types and other office workers eating lunch and holding happy hours.

This is a surprising contrast to Pimento’s Minneapolis location on Eat Street, Beevas said, which is frequented by folks who are “coming in to chill, or they’re grabbing Pimento on their way home.”

Another surprise: Pimento, open till 2 a.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, has become a late-night dancing hotspot.

“Our St. Paul party numbers are better than our Minneapolis party numbers!” he said.

Even so, Beevas sees the potential of the Xcel Energy Center and is actively working to bring hockey fans and concert-goers into downtown, he said. Because the restaurant is located adjacent to the Victory Ramp, he’s hoping people will park there and eat at Pimento before heading to the X or on their way back.

“We need to break into the hockey market a lot more,” he said. “Some folks are creatures of habit. I can guarantee, by changing your pregame ritual, it doesn’t bring bad luck to the Wild!”

Frederick Melo contributed to this report. 

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Yoán Moncada pulled a double into the right-field corner during the second inning of an April 2 game against the Houston Astros last season at Minute Maid Park.

The Chicago White Sox third baseman doubled again — this time pulling a grounder that just stayed fair down the first-base line — in the sixth inning. Batting left-handed again, the switch-hitter capped the day by going the other way with a two-run home run to left field in the ninth.

Moncada had a strong start to the season, going 8-for-18 (.444) with two homers and four RBIs in the series against the Astros as he built off his All-Tournament Team performance for Cuba during the World Baseball Classic. Then came the back issues that led to two trips to the injured list.

“During the first half of that season, it was painful, stressful,” Moncada said through an interpreter Thursday at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Chicago in Bridgeport. “I couldn’t do anything. I wanted to do stuff and help the team but I couldn’t. It was a really tough time for me.”

He was out from April 11-May 12 with lower back soreness and again June 14-July 25 with lower back inflammation.

Moncada rebounded after returning from the second IL stint, slashing .280/.323/.430 with two home runs and 12 RBIs in August and .298/.344/.560 with six home runs and 12 RBIs in September.

“Once I started getting better and stronger, I felt much better and I felt good,” Moncada said. “That was why I was able to finish the way that I did and that’s how I feel right now.”

The 28-year-old is aiming to use that late-season bounce back as a springboard for 2024.

“He feels great, the back feels great, he’s motivated,” manager Pedro Grifol said. “He’s going to get to spring training early on the 31st of January or first of February, which is a great sign and he’s going to put himself in a position to have a great year. We need Moncada.

“He’s motivated to having a full season under his belt, which is good for him.”

Moncada slashed .260/.305/.425 with 11 home runs and 40 RBIs in 2023. After appearing in 144 games in 2021, Moncada played 104 games in 2022 and 92 in 2023.

His offseason work has included strengthening his abs, back and legs to “get all that core really strong,” he said.

“The way I’m preparing myself for this coming season is to play 202 games,” Moncada said, when asked about attempting to play as close to 162 games as possible. “That’s an exaggeration, but that’s how I’m preparing myself.

“I want to be healthy. I want to be on the field every day.”

Moncada said he is motivated and excited because he’s healthy.

“That’s the only thing I want — if I’m healthy, I know I can do a lot of good things in the field,” Moncada said. “I’m excited right now to get to spring training and start working.

“I think God has saved something good for me. Hopefully we are going to see that. Hopefully I’ll be able to be healthy and really show and really display all I can do on the field.”

Moncada’s best season was in 2019, when he established career highs in several categories, including OPS (.915), doubles (34), home runs (25) and RBIs (79). He signed a five-year, $70 million extension in March 2020 — a deal in which the Sox hold an option for $25 million in 2025 with a $5 million buyout.

The solid defensive third baseman knows he’ll be fielding questions from reporters about the future.

“I would love to stay with the White Sox if they want me here,” Moncada said. “I’m very thankful for the White Sox for the opportunity they have given me after I was traded from the Red Sox (in December 2016). They’ve been treating me very well. I like the organization, I like the city, I like the fans. I would like to stay here.”

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BOSTON — Microsoft said Friday it’s still trying to evict the elite Russian government hackers who broke into the email accounts of senior company executives in November and who it said have been trying to breach customer networks with stolen access data.

The hackers from Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service used data obtained in the intrusion, which it disclosed in mid-January, to compromise some source-code repositories and internal systems, the software giant said in a blog and a regulatory filing.

A company spokesman would not characterize what source code was accessed and what capability the hackers gained to further compromise customer and Microsoft systems. Microsoft said Friday that the hackers stole “secrets” from email communications between the company and unspecified customers — cryptographic secrets such as passwords, certificates and authentication keys —and that it was reaching out to them “to assist in taking mitigating measures.”

Cloud-computing company Hewlett Packard Enterprise disclosed on Jan. 24 that it, too, was an SVR hacking victim and that it had been informed of the breach — by whom it would not say — two weeks earlier, coinciding with Microsoft’s discovery it had been hacked.

“The threat actor’s ongoing attack is characterized by a sustained, significant commitment of the threat actor’s resources, coordination, and focus,” Microsoft said Friday, adding that it could be using obtained data “to accumulate a picture of areas to attack and enhance its ability to do so.” Cybersecurity experts said Microsoft’s admission that the SVR hack had not been contained exposes the perils of the heavy reliance by government and business on the Redmond, Washington, company’s software monoculture — and the fact that so many of its customers are linked through its global cloud network.

“This has tremendous national security implications,” said Tom Kellermann of the cybersecurity firm Contrast Security. “The Russians can now leverage supply chain attacks against Microsoft’s customers.”

Amit Yoran, the CEO of Tenable, also issued a statement, expressing both alarm and dismay. He is among security professionals who find Microsoft overly secretive about its vulnerabilities and how it handles hacks.

“We should all be furious that this keeps happening,” Yoran said. “These breaches aren’t isolated from each other and Microsoft’s shady security practices and misleading statements purposely obfuscate the whole truth.”

Microsoft said it had not yet determined whether the incident is likely to materially impact its finances. It also said the intrusion’s stubbornness “reflects what has become more broadly an unprecedented global threat landscape, especially in terms of sophisticated nation-state attacks.”

The hackers, known as Cozy Bear, are the same hacking team behind the SolarWinds breach.

When it initially announced the hack, Microsoft said the SVR unit broke into its corporate email system and accessed accounts of some senior executives as well as employees on its cybersecurity and legal teams. It would not say how many accounts were compromised.

At the time, Microsoft said it was able to remove the hackers’ access from the compromised accounts on or about Jan. 13. But by then, they clearly had a foothold.

It said they got in by compromising credentials on a “legacy” test account but never elaborated.

Microsoft’s latest disclosure comes three months after a new U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rule took effect that compels publicly traded companies to disclose breaches that could negatively impact their business.

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