Demi, under Chef Alan Hlebean
6 meals, 15 months, 1 Chef de Cuisine change, and 2 meals that are master classes in cohesion.
Part 1: The chefs whose names you know aren’t the chefs making your dinner
When I was at Demi in late summer of 2024, a man asked who wrote the menu to one of his friends. “Gavin Kaysen,” he said. Part of the thing about me is that I listen at restaurants to the people around me and I can hear into an open kitchen if I try hard enough.
Upon hearing that, I wasn’t going to let that go unanswered, because to me it’s a matter of respect for the chefs in the kitchen to answer it.
“Actually,” I said, pointing over to Chef de Cuisine (CDC) Alan Hlebean, “It’s that guy, his name is Alan,” and then I pointed over to Sous Chef Mason McDaniel, “And that guy, his name is Mason, and another guy who isn’t here right now, he’s Jordan,” that’s Sous Chef Jordan Alberts who is often working during the day instead of at night. “Restaurants like this are often overseen by the chef/owner but run by a pretty independent staff if you don’t see that chef in the kitchen.”
That man leaned into his friend and said, “Pretty sure it’s Gavin,” and like sure you can trust the man who has never been to the restaurant before in his life or you can trust the girl with the goddamn notebook, up to you.
In this piece, I’m going to call them Alan, Mason, and Jordan, because that’s what everyone at the restaurant calls them. But this man who said this? It’s probably what most people think, too.
I had an entirely different piece I was going to write, but this man saying that in the restaurant made me write this one, because look, I’ve had men underestimate me my entire life even when I’m actually, obviously, factually right—and I get a bit of a blood grudge over it. And so the next dish that came to me, I asked Mason, “Whose dish is that,” and he said, “Jordan’s,” and I asked the next few to prove a point (not just about myself, but about the men in that kitchen) and then I started flipping back through my notebook and said, “Oh.”
What started as a bit of a, “You’re wrong,” turned into something more. I started mapping something—each chef at Demi’s style.
Buckle up buttercup, this piece is long, even for me, because it’s two pieces in one. If you’re reading it via email, it’s too long, and will send you to the blog at some point. And if you’re looking for a place to pause, I’ve broken it into part 1 and part 2.
TLDR? You should go.
From time to time, I tag a Chef de Cuisine (one more time, that’s CDC for short) at a restaurant on my Instagram to thank them for their food, leaving out the chef/owner. More than once, it has led that chef/owner to ask me why I didn’t tag them. My question is, “Are those your dishes?” Mostly, no. If you know about kitchens, you know this. But most diners don’t. And I was thanking a chef, in specific, for food they made—not even tagging the restaurant.
Kitchens are mostly run by CDCs. Sometimes they’re run by young sous chefs who are untested and cocky and who have everything to prove.
So when I talk about Demi and don’t talk about Chef Gavin Kaysen, people often look at me like I’m nuts, but it’s Chef Alan Hlebean’s kitchen now and was Chef Adam Ritter’s before his (now at Bûcheron with two other Demi alums, 3/4 of the leadership team coming out of this restaurant)–and I know that because each of their individual leadership, I felt Demi change in ways that might feel subtle to most people but that aren’t so subtle to me.
I also know this because, well, that’s just how kitchens are run.
But I also know that because I’ve only seen Chef Kaysen at Demi one out of eight times I’ve gone since they opened (six of those in the last 15 months) and if you’re not there during service, it’s not your kitchen–and that’s not a dig, it’s just a fact. A fact Chef Kaysen should be proud of.
Being able to step out of your kitchen is a sign that you’ve hired the right people. It’s a fact most successful restaurateurs will own if you ask. Restaurants live and die by their staff, especially if the restauranteur has multiple restaurants. Chef Kaysen cannot be everywhere at once—but accolades still go to chef/owners at the end of the day if those restaurants do well. And they should—partially—it’s their vision.
James Beard Awards are awarded to the “head” chef by whatever name that is (and it’s not always the same name which is a story for another time) or chef/owner, leading lots of chefs who actually made that menu unacknowledged.
I dated a man who was a finalist for a James Beard Award, except not his name, the owner’s name. He so deeply wants to be able to put “James Beard Award finalist” next to this name and I spent so much time with him scouring the menus from the year they were a finalist, trying to convince him that was his award, even if he had to put something weird like “Former Chef de Cuisine at RESTAURANT from YEAR-YEAR. RESTAURANT was a finalist for a James Beard Award in YEAR.” Which if you see this on a bio on a website (I’m sure everyone looks at the bios of chefs on their websites, not just me), that means that chef is at least part of the reason they got that award, but normally more than part of the reason.
“It’s your award,” I said to my ex.
It was his food with a hands off chef/owner in a kitchen he led with a bit too much of an iron fist if we’re being totally honest, but it was his. He doesn’t believe that. He doesn’t believe that even when we marked up the goddamn menus and every dish except some historical ones had his name on it.
I think the reason I care about this—the reason I’m writing about it—is that I’ve loved enough men in kitchens to see the way this culture hurts them.
Before The Bear, no one really thought it was all that weird that I like and date chefs as a woman for whom food is my entire life. Throwing giant dinner parties, once upon a time putting money I didn’t have in an envelope to eat at one of these places once a year and now setting up all my vacation around them, having no fucking idea how to flirt with someone other than sending them photos of food, squealing when I see the first of everything hit the farmer’s market—people got that, though my friends desperately want me to date an academic or accountant. Post The Bear, (I haven’t seen it—I’d rather watch 90 Day Fiance or Farmer Wants a Wife), people think it’s because of The Bear. But it’s not.
It’s because 1) if you don’t get fancy ass food, you don’t get me 2) half of what I talk about is food and I have watched enough eyes of men who have never worked in kitchens glaze over on dates when I talk about my desire to drive around Japan to find the last of the dying one man vinegaries and 3) very few men in other professions know what it’s like to push 100 hours on your worst weeks and someone who understands that understands something about my life that is hard for men who work 9-5 to get: sometimes work has to win.
So, it’s (bregrugingly) mostly chefs.
You’re about to get a lot of name dropping—but it matters.
Acknowledgement from the award stage isn’t the same as getting the award, you know? Very few people know the names of the Executive Chefs or CDCs or R&D chefs or Head Chefs or whatever you call it whose food got the James Beard nomination or award outside of the food industry and most chefs outside of the local scene for that restaurant don’t know this either. And in an ego driven industry, I understand why that stings.
When I tell chefs about my favorite chefs, they often have no idea who those people are. When I was talking about Chef Michael Rafidi’s well deserved win for Best Chef at Albi earlier this year, I brought up his R&D Chef, Chef Patrick Pervola, to at least half a dozen chefs who didn’t know who he was, which left me clawing my eyes out like this Stitch gif, because who he is is Albi. Who he is is brilliant.
I don’t think I’ll go back to Minibar without Chef Sarah Ravitz at its head, but I will go to a restaurant I would never normally go to (Shinning Canning Company) after her departure, because I think she is a genius.
I don’t think it is an accident that in years of some big wins, certain chefs get promoted into roles like Chef de Cuisine. Chef Sashia Liriano of Friday Saturday Sunday and Chef Calvin Rudy of Mister Jiu’s as two examples. And while they didn’t win Best Chef Great Lakes—though they (and I’m using they intentionally here, it’s not “best chef” to me, it’s “best chefs” with an s) should have—Chef Gustavo Mejia at Esmé is another example of a restaurant having a very good year and promoting someone within their ranks. I think it means their chef/owners know they won partially because of them, especially with longstanding institutions like the above who won after many years of work.
And look, I didn’t like my meal at Atelier (Chicago, not Crenn), but the level of hustle I saw in Chef Scott Whyte (who is 25 and was running the kitchen solo with neither of the names you know in sight) put him on my to watch list. He was in the shits and acting with grace in an open kitchen doing his job like an octopus. If you’re in Chicago and you’re smart, you’ll try to poach him. The kid works really hard and he works clean. He’s got something good, even if he’s executing a vision that I thought fell really flat.
I also have my eyes on Chef Zach Castillo at Birch in Milwaukee, because I’ve never (and I do mean never) seen a kitchen team taste as much as his team did. Ever. They taste things they’ve already tasted. Then they taste them again. He asked a chef on his team more than once, “Have you tasted that?” This team will never send you an over reduced sauce. Everything you get tastes how they meant it. By the end of service, those guys have eaten a meal full of just sauce, I’m sure of it. The restaurant wasn’t full and so I lingered there, because watching them work was a bit of magic.
All of this is to say that this system of honoring chef/owners means sometimes really good new restaurants without the name recognition behind them don’t survive because they don’t get press–or chefs who are super talented in supporting superstar chefs but don’t want or can’t afford their own restaurants don’t leave legacies in name but in sweat alone. I write their names in my tiny little notebook. The honor goes to Varanya Geyoonsawat, John Evans, Patrick Pervola, just as much as Gregory Gourdet, Paul Smith, Michael Rafidi, respectively.
I am sure all of those winning/finalist chefs would say that is true to you if you asked them, but do you know them? You probably don’t.
You probably also don’t know when those chefs change, but you can feel it. When you tell me, “My favorite restaurant isn’t what it used to be,” I can tell you, most of the time: that’s why. The top or the middle of the brigade turned over and the restaurant gets better or worse. It happens all the time.
All this to say: the people who most often do the heavy lifting in restaurants usually aren’t the ones whose names you know.
I’ve had chefs come out of the kitchen and talk to me at a table and take credit for dishes I know they did not dream up, instead of nodding back to the team behind them saying, “That’s Samantha’s dish,” or whoever.
Demi doesn’t tag the chefs who concepualized a dish on their page (which is fine, most places don’t, you don’t need to), but when Alan shares those dishes on social media, he does, with fire emojis.
This is rare. It is special. I follow so many chefs and there are like three who do this regularly and mostly it is owners with their CDCs not CDCs with their sous chefs. I think chefs should be more forward about who concepted what dishes. And particularly, I think that famous chefs should lift up the chefs who work for them (not just their head chef, but down to the damn line). I think that their names should live on the menus they hand out and I think those chef/owners should be saying their names every time someone says they love their restaurant.
Part of my respect of Alan—part of why this piece exists in the first place—is that if you tell Alan you like a dish, he will point out who made it. It demonstrates his understanding that his vision lives and dies by the chefs around him.
But also, like I said, ears like a moth. Sometimes, I put my head down and really, really listen into the kitchen. A couple of times, I’ve heard Alan give feedback live to someone in the restaurant in a way that continued to demonstrate that respect. It was quiet, no one would have heard it but me, and it was respectful—chefs like to say that’s changed in kitchens, but I’ve seen enough yelling in kitchens over less that I know it hasn’t changed everywhere.
When Alan became CDC, after two extremely boring meals at Demi before his tenure in that role, I bit the bullet and I went back. I went back because once, when I told a different chef at Demi that I loved a dish, he said, “Thank you,” but a FOH staffer refilled my water, pointed at Alan, and said, “That’s Alan’s dish.”
Alan demonstrates deep respect for the staff at Demi—they demonstrate deep respect for him.
The meal I had in June of 2023 at Demi was bad enough that I told people for like six months not to waste their money.
I literally had one baby artichoke instead of lamb for a main and it was both very funny and also not funny at all and gave me a little bit of a grudge, though it was a great story on dates for a long time. I was so hungry when I left that time that I walked over to Red Cow to get a burger (and I’m not a “go to Red Cow to get a burger” girl). I left that meal hangry. I didn’t go back hoping to feel that way again. I wasn’t like “sign me up for one baby artichoke.” I hoped it changed.
I walked into Demi alone in the dead of winter of 2024 with a lot of hope. I had already written the piece I wanted to write about Demi. It was, “Don’t go.” I had written it based on two meals and I was going for one last time to confirm it.
I remember posting to my close friends story, “I want them to change my mind tonight.” I did. I really, really did. I gave it about six months under the CDC change before I went to really, really give it a chance once everyone was settled in.
I thought Demi both could and should be the best restaurant in the city. Sleek and sexy and well staffed, I think they should consistently knock if out of the park.
My first two meals at Demi though were not cohesive, deeply confusing on the veg substitutions, and the bits of meat I tasted weren’t enough to make me think that was much better. I thought it was boring. I thought it was poorly balanced. I thought the salt was all over the place. I thought the plating was mostly flat. The first time I went in the past 15 months was on a date with man who knows fuck all about food (never making this mistake again, let me tell you) and he asked me to try his chicken because he felt something was wrong with it—it had enough acid that I had a physical reaction to it. Maybe I’d come on two bad nights, but…
Chef after chef has said these exact words to me since I moved home, “I went to Demi once and I don’t feel the need to go back.”
I used to agree. I wrote an entire piece agreeing with this sentiment. I reviewed that piece while writing this piece and it feels like a completely different restaurant I’m talking about. Now I tell people who tell me they don’t need to try Demi again, “Go back. You have to go back. I’ll go with you. I’ll pay for your drinks.” And I’ve been saying that since I went back in early 2024.
I literally went through all my Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge matches looking for people I said, “Don’t go,” to and telling them I was wrong.
And they were, I am sure, like, “Why did this crazy lady reach out to me about this?” One of them used that opportunity to ask me out but he had already told me his favorite restaurant was Le Bernadin and that’s just, honestly, not my husband. My husband would have an answer to that that goes beyond prestige and tells me a bit about who he is beyond, “I like very small French dishes made with ring molds.” I would honestly rather date a man who has a good reason for why The Wienery is his favorite restaurant, but I digress.
That’s how committed I was to telling people I changed my mind—I risked being “that weird lady” to tell people to go back.
Look, Demi is never going to be my favorite restaurant. My favorite restaurants are either a little bit whacky (Mint Mark, Schwa, Cook Weaver, Ilis) or Indian (Indienne, Adda, India Street Food, Chai Pani, Thattu). But Demi should be a restaurant firing on all cylinders and I know about enough about food to put my personal preference aside to see magic when it is there.
So when I was sitting in Demi in the dead of winter and I was a few dishes in and it felt different, I put my notebook down. I watched, I ate, I listened. I gladly killed the piece.
I wish I had more to tell you about that meal. I really do. But I was not writing. I was so deeply moved I was just experiencing the moment and watching the kitchen. And that’s a memory that’s mine to keep. That meal from early March of 2024, in many ways, is a memory I’ll hold onto forever, both because it reminded me that restaurants change and because it blew me away. I lost the menu for that meal in a Chicago airport (and I never lose menus) and so I can’t even go back to that. I just have the memory.
And I know, I know, that’s what most chefs at this level are trying to do. If not a legacy in their name, they’re trying to leave a legacy on the plate. I just think they deserve more than that—I think they deserve for you to know their names.
Part 2: On Cohesion, a Masterclass at Demi
The thing about tasting menus is that they put the guest in complete control of the chef.
There are times when a guest might order the three worst dishes on your menu a la carte, which of course it is a chef’s fault for putting them on the menu, but if you leave that meal feeling like the restaurant is bad, you might be confusing restaurant with dishes I ordered. Tasting menus are different–if a guest leaves that feeling like the meal wasn’t good, it usually falls on the chef.
I eat a lot of tasting menus, more than the average person might in a lifetime in a year. I’ve had about 50 so far this year, most okay, some terrible, some gorgeous.
As a person who eats that many tasting meals (which is a very different experience than someone who concepts them), I’ve learned that most meals live or die on story, theme, or cohesion. You can have good dishes back to back to back on a tasting menu but if they all feel disjointed, the menu doesn’t land.
I’ve had meals where they start you high with salt on the amuse then back down until you’re six dishes further in, meaning you’re jarred when your next course is left relatively bare in a way you might not be if you weren’t hit with a salt bomb first.
I’ve had meals where it feels like we’re spinning our wheels until course three, like the first few dishes are throwaways or classics from the restaurant’s past that feel like they live in the last decade and then all of a sudden you’ve jumped 10 years.
I’ve had menus where we’re jumping countries unintentionally: France to Japan to Spain. Like you can see the different chefs that made the menu and their influence, with no underlying thread.
And I’ve had meals where I can’t find any thread that holds the meal together–there’s no narrative coming from the team and the dishes are so scattered, it can’t be the food holding it together. I mostly can tell by looking at a tasting menu online if it’s going to be cohesive on food alone.
One of my exes told me the best meals are always meals someone cooks for you in their home, but not me. My favorite meals are tasting menus done to perfection, where you are guided through a vision that feels crystal clear and united.
Before Alan took over the kitchen at Demi, I felt like the menus didn’t tell stories that made sense. Sometimes, the story was just Minnesota seasons, which honestly isn’t enough for me when your meat comes from wherever (more on this later). A mushroom pate wrapped in a bright red shell on a spoon to designate Minnesota and seasonal flavors that are not all sourced locally (I asked) doesn’t do it for me. “Bougie” alone doesn’t do it for me. Knock off Thomas Keller meets Daniel Boulud really doesn’t do it for me (no offense).
When I went back to Demi after Alan took over the kitchen, my first meal left me speechless, because it was the most cohesive meal I’ve had in my life. I mean that.
I’m a nerd about food. I scoured over other menus at home, ones that I felt were some of the most cohesive of my life, and against the meal I had that night which was based mostly around the orange coming and going like a thread through the meal, I couldn’t find one meal in my life that I thought was more cohesive. Dirt Candy comes close, focusing on themes for each menu in a way that I think is gorgeous. Indienne comes close, too, with a level of cohesion and progression that always leaves me a little bit emotional (and by a “little bit emotional,” I mean I cry every time I go there because it is so beautiful). And Nightingale’s tomato dinner is, well, about tomatoes, and so it also comes close.
The thing that struck me about the first meal that I ate at Demi under Alan (March 2024) is that it was cohesion with a lighter touch.
The element that mostly tied the meal together was an orange coming in and out of dishes like it was natural for the progression of the meal and the season for orange to just be there. But the thing that struck me more than that is that it was an orange that tied the meal together and I didn’t leave feeling like I had eaten a lot of orange, you know?
I didn’t feel like I’d eaten a meal that was actually a mimosa. I felt like I had a meal with a thread through it. I felt like the use of orange throughout the menu was subtle, soft, and supported other parts of the dishes. The orange wasn’t the star—it was a consistent supporting character. I know that’s hard–I also know it’s rare. It was also visually cohesive in the way past Demi menus had not been—and you can see on the four dishes below, the visual cohesive is both in plating but here it was also on color (orange).
I know perfect when I see it, even if I’d rather you give me something a bit more cutting edge (that’s not Chef Kaysen and so it’s not Demi and there’s nothing wrong with that, that’s on preference). It didn’t matter if it was “my” type of food. It was pretty close to perfect.
I went back after Alan took over because I know that when the top of the brigade turns over, so does the –vibe–. It’s why it’s hard to judge restaurants by reviews written more than a year ago, mostly, you’re reading a polaroid of a snippet of time that has passed. Mostly, especially with restaurants that have frequent menu changes, you’re reading a review of a totally different restaurant. Are there exceptions? Sure. But I’m glad to report that Demi is not one of them.
Under Alan, Demi got so. much. better. Here’s a snapshot into my theory as to why and how, told over one meal: The Whitney WC Menu, Summer 2024.
On Menu Design: told through broth and canapés
A huge reason that Alan has locked in cohesion is how he balances himself, Jordan, and Mason.
Chefs often have their own definitions of their food that are a little bit right and a little bit wrong.
An ex of mine once told me “Demi isn’t my kind of food” when his kind of food is homemade ranch turned into a foam—and so it’s like yes, that’s never going to land at Demi, but when I asked him, “Are you saying you aren’t doing fine dining?” He said, “Not really.” He was doing fine dining, though. Their food lives in the same world and I was left staring at him baffled saying, “Your baby is a tasting menu.” To which he responded, “At the bar only,” like that doesn’t make it fine dining.
Kind of right, kind of wrong. And he’s not alone.
One time a chef told he was vegetable forward when what I think he meant was “good with vegetables,” because there wasn’t one dish that read vegetable forward to me, the vegetable lady.
Another time, a guy I briefly dated was so much of a tweezer chef that he accidentally put his tweezers in his shirt pocket more than once on a date told me his style was, “Good home cooking,” to which I said, “You have tweezers in your pocket right now.”
And one time a man told me his vibe was French when his vibe was 100% Chinese inspired with a French twist.
Kind of right. Kind of wrong.
Chefs, I think, sometimes learn the true definition of their food partly through critics, though they would hate to admit that. It means that chefs who aren’t driving the vision never hear an out of the kitchen perspective on their food.
I say all this to say that whether these chefs define their food this was or not, here’s how I see their food—and our definitions are probably different.
Jordan’s food is delicate and often surprising.
There’s often at least one element in his dishes that makes me pause to think. On some fine dining menus even within the same lineage of Demi, Jordan’s dishes wouldn’t fit—I’m thinking mostly of restaurants that rely on butter, truffle, and salt instead of inspiration, which, you’d be surprised, it’s a lot of them.
Jordan’s dishes are often the most fun dishes on the menu, at least to me. I’d eat an entire menu of his top to bottom. There’s a rule in poetry that every five lines you have to surprise the reader and that’s how I think of Jordan’s dishes on this menu.
Bookending his dishes on the meal means you get moments of surprise throughout the night. Opening on a broth of his means you’re opening on well thought out flavor, and I say that as a person who doesn’t normally like broth. I love the broth at Demi—and I really, really enjoy Jordan’s. It’s subtle and you can taste everything listed in the broth (not true everywhere).
When I saw the corn and caviar dish on Instagram, I posted to my Close Friends story, “Okay, that’s it, I’m going back.” I knew I was going back, but didn’t know when. And I wanted to try that corn pudding with caviar. I knew this dish was coming, because Alan told me when I was in the restaurant that Jordan was working on it it a couple of months before it hit the Instagram, which I think might be a sign that after a while of me eating at Demi, Alan was paying attention enough to know what I like.
Could I go in detail about flavor notes? Sure. But what I want to say about it is that I told Nicolas, a server at Demi, that I’d steal everyone else’s and give them cash for their corn and caviar dish and I meant that. It was my second favorite dish of the night. Perfectly executed, delicate, which is how most of Jordan’s dishes are, and why I think having his dishes in the first few and last courses really, really works.
Mason gets salt.
Now you might be like, “Every chef gets salt,” but 1) I’m so sorry but so many of you do not get salt 2) Not every chef who gets gets salt like that 3) one time I dated a chef who woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me, “I’m worried I don’t add enough salt to my plates,” and like babe okay yeah let’s talk about it, but it’s 4:00am.
Mason’s dishes take salt all the way to the edge, which is a jargon term that essentially means if you added more, you’d ruin the dish. Most chefs will choose to give a lot of space between themselves and the edge so they won’t over salt things. Mason is confident enough in his ability to salt a dish that he doesn’t do that—and that’s a level of boldness and skill I appreciate and rarely see in restaurants. I’m writing this actually trying to recall dishes that made me say something (positive) about the salt this year and can find very few—most dishes are salted just fine, very few are salted perfectly.
If you had a dish of Mason’s halfway through with no lead up, we might lose cohesion on the menu. But up top, you get it in a flavor bomb of gougère at the end of your second course, so you’re ready when his second dish hits your palate. Mostly, I think gougère is a throwaway, but I don’t think that at Demi.
I think it sets you up for dishes that are going to cut through the menu like a thread, mostly in the center of the menu, which feels like the right place for those dishes. Put too much of Mason’s dishes at the top and Jordan in the center and you have a balance problem—but swap that order and you have a meal that has a salt progression that works.
If I see a dish on the menu with the word “preserved” in it, I know it’s probably Alan’s.
The fava bean tarlet in the canapés reads like Alan on the plate but also on the menu (preserved kumquat). Alan’s food is technical. It’s obvious that of the three, he’s both leading and spent the most time in kitchens. He doesn’t throw in techniques for the sake of it, but you do see a lot of complexity in his dishes. I’ve been trying to think of a word for his dishes other than magic. I could say balanced, but it doesn’t do it justice, and I could say technical but that also doesn’t do it justice—technical is often boring, like cracking an egg perfectly and filling it with a perfect custard and topping it with a truffle is technical and so damn boring.
I think the phrase that I feel encapsulates his dishes is well rounded and inspired. You can just see that Alan has worked hard and been around enough kitchens to develop a style that feels like his, that he is somehow able to weave into a restaurant that is not his. And that’s a skill that’s really hard, too. Executing someone else’s vision is not a skill every chef has—and executing someone else’s vision without losing yourself is something that I think is harder.
His dishes are also beautiful. Mason and Jordan’s dishes are often plated well, but Alan’s dishes appear to consider plating from the ground up, like as he’s conceptualizing a dish it’s not just about flavor, but how he’s going to build that dish on a plate influences what he chooses. Whether he does that or not, I don’t know, but that’s how it feels.
And so, when I think about cohesion, I think that these are actually three very different chefs and putting them all together could be a disaster if you don’t do it right. There is a world in which you hire miniature versions of you or you hire people and tell them to match your vision to get over that problem.
But I think the reason this menu feels cohesive is that you really do feel and see three chefs in the kitchen building the menu together and you have someone at the helm who knows where to put each one of those chefs so that the menu reads as a whole.
On Transition: through tomato salad and cheese
Different people have different theories about where tasting menus transition from one part of the menu to another (for people who don’t eat a lot of tasting menus think of how you move from savory to dessert, that’s obvious, but there are more subtle turns in tasting menus).
There are actual formal “standards” for how to build tasting menus, but I eat a lot of weird tasting menus that break the rules and have had to try to figure out where the threads are across all restaurants—not just those borrowing from the same script as everyone else.
So I think of it like this.
Opening bites (amuse, canapés, broth)
Transition 1 (your first non-bite sized dish)
Savory (normally, you’d think of this as a progression of fish, chicken, red meat, with a pasta somewhere, but in 2024, lots of menus don’t follow that structure)—sometimes an intermezzo is in here, too, but not often, though when I get an intermezzo in here it’s usually fucking fire
Transition 2—for me this is either (intermezzo, sorbet, granita, ice, far too often in 2024: juice—why? stop it, knock it off, please) or (cheese and I lump your traditional palate cleanser from the above dish into dessert if it comes after)
Dessert (pre-dessert, dessert)
Surprise! (gifts out the door—the most I’ve gotten was 6 different one last thing moments at a restaurant and it felt like a Minnesota goodbye which is not a compliment—at Demi this is the little sweet treats and the rice krispy)
I think that cohesion relies a lot on hitting those transitions.
Transition 1
The first dish you get outside of the opening bites sets the tone for the meal, in my opinion, more than anything else. I think this should be your thesis or your anchor, not necessarily your best dish (though often it is).
When Alan brought the tomato salad to me, I (very quietly) lost my shit. Calling it tomato salad and not something like tomato granita feels humble to me, but also deeply undersells the technical skill in this dish—and the fact that a granita appears in the first transition on a menu, and not the last, made me feel really delighted.
All summer, I’ve been saying I want tomato granita. All summer, I have been lacking tomato granita. I was begging someone, anyone, to do tomato granita. As soon as I saw it, I knew it was tomato granita—and I knew it was Alan’s.
Alan’s plating is distinctly beautiful. There’s a world in which this dish doesn’t look pretty but eats well, but Alan has plated this dish in a way that it reads for the eye, too.
I’ve never had a dish at Demi that I looked at and said, “That’s a bit of me.” Demi—and Chef Kaysen—have a style of food that isn’t the food that excites me the most, but that doesn’t mean it’s not beautiful food worth eating.
I’m never going to get a weird ass corndog at Demi and that’s fine, but I want fine dining chefs giving me weird ass corndogs, if I can choose what I’m eating. Or, I want you to give me meat from a less desirable animal or cut (the dairy cow meatballs at Myriel, the pig bladders at Ilis, or the pates at Mint Mark) and tell me that story—Demi won’t ever do that, that’s not their style, but that’s my shit. So normally I look at dishes at Demi and say, “That’s lovely,” but this one I was like, “Oh hell yeah.”
This dish hit my seat and I couldn’t even eat it right away. Tomato water and its sisters are notorious for not having a lot of flavor (I had a fermented tomato water earlier this year that tasted like nothing), but this had so much flavor. It was my favorite tomato dish of the summer, one of my favorite dishes of the year, my favorite of the night. Fresh, bright, inventive. It’s not the first time I’ve had granita at Demi before, but it’s the first time I thought a granita at Demi was daring.
I felt it right then, on dish three, which is normally when I can feel it. I knew then that meal was going to blow me away. I knew that Alan was opening the meal on, “This is what we can do.”
Transition 2
Demi does cheese really well. It’s part of why I tell people to splurge for the longer format menu on Friday and Saturday. Most restaurants give you boring cheese dishes that you could actually make yourself, but the cheese is always very thoughtful at Demi. This one was no different, with preserved strawberry and nasturtium pesto, alongside burrata and sourdough focaccia, it read as an ode to the end of summer. I’ll let you guess whose it is, based on the preserved strawberry, and the plating.
On Pairing (and a gripe about meat): told through Kohlrabi and Roasted Fennel
Demi pairs N/A drinks the way I want restaurants to pair drinks. On element.
The peach and foie gras dish (I got kohlrabi, but more on why in a little bit) was paired with a peach and leaves tea. The roasted fennel had was paired with a ginger-fennel tea. These are the kinds of pairings that I want to drink. I wrote a whole theory about pairing, told through my beautiful dinner at Schwa, where I paired the drinks myself out of a teeny tiny hotel room in Chicago without my full bar. This was the theory: pair on actual element (fennel to fennel), not how you think of pairing wine.
I think that Demi has one of the best N/A menus in the country.
Over 2023 and 2024 alone, I’ve come close to 80 n/a pairings, most of them abysmal and very sweet. When I go to a meal where the N/A menu is that bad, I ask someone in the restaurant if anyone has ever sat down with the N/A pairing in full with the tasting menu and drunk the entire drink for every glass. Most of the time, they’ll tell you no. Just give me a Diet Coke if you can’t do N/A cocktails. I’ll be fine. But giving me something like that takes away from the food, it doesn’t add to it.
The N/A menu is headed by Jessi Pollack (Beverage Director at Soigné Hospitality) and supported by Sara (lead server) who makes banging pre-dinner drinks for me on the fly. I think the menu works really, really well throughout the meal and adds something to your experience. Often tea based, with smart N/A wine/liquor additions, not too sweet, it’s one of the few times where I think to myself, “Oh, that makes the dish better.”
But back to food. When I saw the peach and foie being prepared, I was a little sad I don’t eat foie. I don’t eat foie even in most restaurants whose sourcing I trust, because I think there are ethical issues with foie. My thing, my biggest thing, is care for the animals we raise for food. I was vegan for a decade and I’ve eaten a lot of meat at Demi—a menu on my own and bits from the men who have been my dates next to me. The last time I went to Demi before this time, I ate meat, and I kept asking where the meat was from. I got answers like this: Australia, Alaska, lamb from Oregon.
So I asked someone in the kitchen why they didn’t source from here (it wasn’t Alan, he was in the dish pit). He told me, “We value quality over locality.” If I had been anywhere other than where he was working, I would have said, “That’s bullshit,” because honestly I think that’s a wee bit offensive to local farmers. Instead, I said, “Got it,” but I know I physically winced.
I have a problem with this. A big problem with it. I went on a date to the farm that Demi gets their lamb from (excellent move for me, by the way, taking me to pet baby sheep on a humane farm). I have no ethical problems with this farm. It’s a beautiful farm. But…
Restaurants like Demi are asking the national food scene to see Minneapolis as a place where fine dining is thriving and just as good as the coast and then they’re going and getting their meat from somewhere else (in this case, the coast), not investing in local farms here to do that.
For me, restaurants come second. Farms come first.
I have gripes with the fact that if it is true that the lamb here is not as good as the lamb in Oregon (the lamb here is as good at the lamb in Oregon and I’d do a blind taste test from I get my lamb from—Lamb Shoppe—with Anderson any day with anyone who claims otherwise), Soigné Hospitality hasn’t worked with a local farmer to raise animals the way they want them to be raised and butchered the way they want them to be butchered.
You might think is asking too much, but chefs with much less pedigree than Chef Kaysen do it all the time because they care about local food systems. I had one meat dish from here. One. And I asked where the meat came from on every dish, getting three different answers for one single dish when I asked three different people in a way that I had to confirm via email that I had the correct information.
Demi’s menu demonstrates a lack of care for local meat farmers—and I take issue with that. I do. And again, that’s beyond the chefs in that kitchen. But sourcing one thing from Wise Acre (a lovely farm but honestly, not my personal favorite if we’re talking about consistency) is not enough for me, personally, to think you care about local meat farmers. It’s not.
I spend my weekends going from farm to farm to farm trying to find the best meat in the state raised the way I want them raised for just me, myself, and I. Most chefs here do not know the names of the farms I frequent who have the desire to do the things they claim they want to do and it makes me incredibly grumpy. I spend a lot of time with small, local farmers. I wish Minnesota chefs spent more time with them, too (and hey you might be like we do!!! but I ask those farmers if you do and y’all don’t—going to Peterson and Wise Acre is not the same as going around from farm to farm).
It makes me so grumpy that I stopped writing about my meal and wrote almost the entirety of this piece about local farms while sitting at Demi the last time I was there.
I know it’s harder. I know it is harder to source from multiple farms or have a dish that you can only have for a few dinners because you can only get this cut of meat for this period of time. Demi is never going to be the restaurant that does super limited runs of things like that, but Demi can (should) source lamb locally. I know all of the ways it is harder—and still, I think restaurants not doing it who complain about how everyone looks over Minneapolis saying it is not good as the coasts in terms of fine dining needs to ask why they don’t act like that about our farmers, too.
If you don’t think our produce and our meat is as good as somewhere else, work with local farmers to fix it. Get your scallops from wherever, but get your goddamn lamb from here.
I honestly would put in my dietary restrictions at Demi, “I’ll eat vegetarian unless it’s local meat,” if that wasn’t the most annoying thing in the world (no octopus, no squid, no veal, no foie is a restriction I gave once with a sincere apology for being annoying).
So I’ll eat vegetarian at Demi every time I go, except caviar, because hey, obviously, I’m a girl who loves caviar.
Anyway, my gripe with the meat sourcing aside, the foie and peach I’m sure was gorgeous, but so was the kohlrabi. Going from tomato to peach to squash feels like the best of late summer moving into early fall. And I have a thing for well done fennel. Both dishes were beautiful, even if the chefs would have rather served them with meat.
And that is a feat—most restaurants with cohesive menus kill cohesion when it comes to substitutions. Demi does not (anymore, under Alan). I think their vegetable dishes are beautiful. Head to head, sometimes, not just me, but the man I’ve been with, thinks they’re better.
On Pacing: told through Pasta
Demi paces solo diners like solo diners and while you may not think this has something to do with cohesion, it does. Meals that drag have no ability to feel cohesive. Tons of time between dishes where you’re sitting and staring into a kitchen feel painful enough that you can’t find the thread. This is why I think that restaurants who seat and pace everyone all at once are usually making a mistake.
People who eat in groups eat slower and are paced slower. They’re talking, enjoying the last bits of their dishes, lingering on drinks.
I’ve been to restaurants that pace everyone in the room at the same time, but also, who wait to clear the plates of the slowest eaters in order to feed everyone else. This is how I wound up in a four hour tasting at Alinea paced with a goddamn six top on a birthday, clawing my eyes out on an almost four hour tasting menu aaaaalone. I was there longer than you sat in the theater for The Lord of the Rings.
This is also how I wound up at a restaurant I genuinely love where the people next to me didn’t eat the last bits on their plates consistently. So the server kept asking, “Can I take your plates,” and they kept saying, “We’re still nibbling.” And instead of leaving that person behind or just dropping another plate on their table, they chose to accommodate that group during service, meaning everyone else was hung up for an additional 90 minutes (I’ve been multiple times to this restaurant and I know 3.5 hours isn’t normal).
In my opinion, it’s bad hospitality to let the people who are eating the slowest drive the experience of everyone else. And I feel that way, because I mostly eat alone.
I bang out tasting menus when they aren’t timed. Get me in, get me out. I’m here to eat not dilly dally.
Most restaurants pace solo diners so terribly that I often wonder if chefs have ever eaten their meals paced how they pace them, because I think if they did, they’d change it. But not at Demi.
I arrived to the people on my left ahead of me and halfway through (at pasta, dish 6) was the moment I passed them. Later, I passed two other tables who was seated before me, too. That means six courses in, the restaurant flipped the order of the dishes they were firing. Then two more times, they did it, too. Now you might do this in your kitchen, but as a woman who sits in tons of tasting menus, I can assure you most restaurants do not. And what it means is that Demi is paying attention to the people in the room—a level of attention that I think makes the menu better.
But look, Mason’s pasta? It’s an umami bomb every time. It’s gorgeous. I wrote in my teeny tiny notebook, “I would come back for this menu again.”
Demi rotates the menu frequently, but if I ate this in a couple of weeks again, I’d be happy. And I’ve done that two times exactly in my life (Indienne, Jeune et Jolie), because most of the time, I want to see how your menu progresses with the season. But when I got this pasta, I didn’t want that. I wanted to stop time.
Arugula orecchiette, mushroom ragout, parmesan foam, lemon focaccia breadcrumb, all perfectly salted, what more could you want? But it also was a perfect bridge between the kohlrabi and the roasted fennel and the dishes that came after it, like it was transition in and of itself, a break from meat (in my case vegetable) mains to set you up for two courses that hit you with a different level of depth than the first courses did, moving away from brightness into richness. It was done in a way that I think is masterful.
But to me, this dish also reads as Mason. Alan often tops his dishes with flowers or something else that requires tweezers and looks delicate. Mason tops his dishes with blankets of something. Foam. A sauce. Chips. Vegetables. His plates look windswept and layered. He’s surprising you with part of a dish you can’t see from above.
On Depth: told through grilled eggplant and roasted turnip
When I had my first bite of eggplant I said, “Shit, it’s too bitter,” out loud. Sometimes, I say things and cannot help myself. But then I ate another bite with my pairing and it wasn’t too bitter—it just had to be paired. This is a way in which the pairing elevates the food. Grilled eggplant cut through with preserved cherries (you should know whose dish this is now), served with charred eggplant puree (I’m a girl who loves eggplant on eggplant or fennel on fennel, I’m literally hosting a dinner that is just garlic on Sunday, etc), served with roasted chanterelles. The menu had turned after pasta into something really deep and complex.
Serving this dish after the fennel, it would have been too harsh. It would have been too bitter, the cherry would have been too rich. Part of cohesion is setting someone up for the next dish.
I also had a really beautiful moment with this dish, where the man next to me who also had the temperance pairing was told that our drink makes people “the life of the party” because of some of the adaptogens in it. He said very quietly, to no one it seemed, “I’ve never been the life of the party in my life.” I laughed and said, “Me either,” me with the drink almost done, him with it almost starting. “If it starts happening for you, let me know, I’ll get ready to party,” he said. And we laughed, in this fancy restaurant, because Demi is one U shaped table.
A few of my followers on Instagram came from Demi. They saw me there, then saw my pink hair post myself somewhere else, then were like, “Hey I sat next to you!” It’s a fun experience to share these moments with strangers. This was my favorite pairing of the night, because it was, as the best pairings are, part of the dish. This dish was Alan’s, you should know that by “preserved cherries.”
The next dish I had was roasted turnip. When it came out, I didn’t eat it right away, I pulled up a photo on my phone for reference. The dish looked like it had a blanket on top of it, much the way a cauliflower dish from Alinea in Spring of 2024 did. This was Mason’s dish—and his take on this theme was better.
Teeny, tiny potato chips, a side of potato salad that he could put into quart containers and sell for the fourth of July, making turnip the star, a teeny tiny pave you can’t see from above. Every time you put your fork into a dish like this, you get something different. It was lovely. I think ending savory on Mason’s salt forward dish is the right choice.
I rarely get truffle because otherwise every meal I have at fine dining restaurants would be truffle, I can source truffle myself for way cheaper and put it on things I want to put it on (mostly, eggs and fries and in butter I can give to my friends), and if it’s not good without truffle, that’s on you. But I got it this time.
Both of these dishes have truffle, but here is part of the distinction between these two chefs. Mason will shave the truffle in front of you, but Alan placed the truffle himself. I have rarely been at a restaurant where the chef places the truffle themselves because people love the see truffle shaved on a dish, but I love that he does this, because it feels like Alan.
I saw him putting the truffle on with tweezers and I said to myself, “That’s a chef who wants it to be perfect.” I admire that so much. I respect that so much.
You can see that in those dishes, distinct plating styles that work together.
On Dessert: told through, well, dessert
I sent Alan photographs of desserts from past menus with the hunch that I knew who made them based on how they ate. There’s always one on the menu that is Alan’s and one that is either Jordan’s or Mason’s.
Jordan, Mason, and Alan all do dessert. And not just chef dessert (carrot cake, cookies and ice cream) but dessert.
Normally, you have pastry chefs coming in and doing the dessert on menus like this. The reason for that is that they have a specific set of skills and are, for the most part, better at dessert than the chefs cooking your savory dishes. But dessert at Demi is beautiful. Dessert at Demi is masterful. And it’s cohesive in a way most dessert menus are not.
I’ve been in restaurants with beautiful savory plates that feel cohesive and the transition to dessert that has been like someone changed the channel.
Earlier this year, I sat at a menu where every single dish had one element from the dish before/after it (i.e. if it had cherries in the first dish, the second dish had cherries and eggplant, and we’d see eggplant in the next dish, on and on), but when we got to (four courses) of dessert, that cohesion wasn’t there. Now, that’s honestly a management or vision issue that the CDC couldn’t land that on pastry, but it was apparent they were two separate visions.
Another time, I had a dreadful meal in which every single sauce was over reduced (I was last seating at a two turn restaurant) and when I got to dessert, it was so delicate and beautiful it felt like getting water after you forgot your water bottle on a run. It was just so refreshing and that’s not the way you want dessert to feel.
But dessert and pre-dessert at Demi is always beautiful and cohesive, this time no exception.
I didn’t know I needed finger lime tajin in my life, but apparently I did. Jordan’s sheeps’ milk yogurt and mango semifreddo felt like both the right bridge between Alan’s cheese course and his dessert, but also felt like a call back to some of his more delicate flavors you get in the beginning of the meal. The dish read as silky and these three dishes together (cheese, pre-dessert, and dessert) all had a thread running through them: dairy of some kind as one of the stars. That read very Minnesotan to me, even with the mango in the dish.
The final dish, cornbread financier, sits within a moment of cornbread in restaurants that I’m writing a separate piece about—cornbread is so in right now that when a cat was dropped off at my house, I named her Michelin Starred Cornbread as a joke and now that’s just her name (I call her Miche, but when she’s trying to eat garbage I do say, “That’s not very Michelin Star of you.”) I’ve had so much cornbread of any variety, ranging from fried to standard to turned into a ball of some kind to sweet. This is one of the best ones I’ve had—and I think it reads, again, as a very Minnesotan take on cornbread.
Buttermilk bavaroise, blueberries, whipped sorghum molasses, lovage ice cream (I want a pint of that and I am not joking), it took you out of the meal the same way your meal began: with a dish where you can taste every single element distinctly.
Demi, in general, rips out some fun flavors in dessert. Mandarin sorbet with lemongrass and markut lime leaf (Alan) with sunchoke bravoise (Jordan) or greek yogurt sorbet with madras curry (Alan) with sorrel semifreddo and buckwheat crumble + amaretto ice cream (Mason), from two other menus.
Their desserts read like the desserts of extremely talented chefs who do pastry just as well as savory. They’re never too sweet. They’re never disjointed.
Dessert is so beautiful that whenever I get a rice krispy at the end, I want to bang my head into the table.
The rice krispy treats that end your meal feel trite and overdone. I’ve been counting–I’ve had 16 desserts inspired by a chef’s childhood in 2024 alone. It feels like a throwaway–it feels like you’ve phoned it in. It also doesn’t feel true to the spirit of this particular restaurant, where basic rice krispies are obviously out of place.
Every time I have them, I’m quietly begging for a twist. Seasonal rice krispies would still hold true to Chef Kaysen’s childhood, but would fit into the restaurant.
Give me rice krispies with sweet corn or cranberries or even keep them the same year round but add miso or brown butter or make wild rice rice kripsies. Something, anything, that fits what Demi has become.
To leave the restaurant on that note, to me, cheapens the experience of Demi. Your last bite is not a memory of the skill of the chefs but a narrative of the owner that even you can make at home.
And look, I love story, I do, and if it was Chef Kaysen’s menu, it might fit the story, but when the story that Alan and his team is telling you is one of cohesion, seasonality, and camaraderie in the kitchen, basic rice krispies don’t cut it–especially after their beautiful, well thought out, always slightly surprising desserts. I honestly am sad that you leave that meal on a rice krispy and not the skill of the chefs in the kitchen. Because the chefs there are so damn good.
Even if Chef Kaysen wants that to stay, I just really want him to say to his team, “Hey, this is still my vision, and you’re here to execute my vision, and it still has to be a rice krispy, but you can fuck with it. If you want.”
I’m like 99% sure if he said that, they’d fuck with it. I’m begging you to let them fuck with it.
Like come on, do you want to end on this?
Or this?
Because look, Chef Alan, Jordan, and Mason all can do dessert. Not just chef dessert but like real ass dessert that rivals some of the best desserts I’ve had this year from chefs whose whole thing is pastry.
And if you have a team like that? I want to see what they are going to give me at the end of the meal.
Because it’s rare to have a team of chefs who can do dessert, but it’s more rare that each and every one of those desserts is straight fire. And they are.
It’s some of the best dessert in the city partially because it’s made by the same team making all your savory courses. When I say the meal is cohesive, I mean down to the damn dessert.
On Feeling—and the smallest error
Before my tasting menu at Demi, I was sitting at an Indian restaurant that ties up the toilet paper with Saran Wrap (not joking) and I was blinking back tears asking my friend, “When will it pass?” I meant the wall of heartbreak I was feeling after the end of a really beautiful relationship that just wasn’t right. “I can’t believe it hasn’t left me yet,” I said.
I can point to the moment it left me, though. It was eating the fennel dish with bright dollops of butternut squash and saffron broth. Orange. Just really, a beautiful plate.
I loved the fennel dish. I really, really did. I loved that the saffron in the aerated broth (I love an aerated broth, I just do) matched the dollops of squash. I loved the way the fennel tasted. I thought it was beautiful on the dish and I thought it ate beautifully, too. But I don’t just eat a whole dish, I taste every element. I actually do this backwards of most chefs I know. I eat everything together then I go element by element.
When I got to the aerated broth, it needed salt.
I am assuming the broth itself didn’t need salt. When you aerate things, sometimes you need to add more salt, and so I think the broth maybe needed to be slightly over salted before it was aerated. Minor, sure, and I wouldn’t include it if I didn’t have a point.
You can roast me for saying the aerated broth needs salt but it did. It needed salt. It’s the only thing in the damn whole meal that needed salt. I know because I paid attention to every element asking if they were perfect or if they needed something. That’s how I eat. My brain is a bit broken. I don’t know how to eat any other way. To me, it’s a sign of respect to pay attention to that level of detail, because chefs pay attention to that level of detail.
The meal was perfect. It was one of the top 10 of my year so far and if this wasn’t part of the whole story of that night for me, I’d leave it out and forgive it. But it is part of the night for me—part of why this meal was so special.
As I was thinking about how the aerated broth needed salt and how silly it was of me to even give a shit about that, I realized the man I was heartbroken over wouldn’t have wanted to hear that thought. He wanted to eat next to me and have me say all the things I loved about the food even if it was just okay. If it was gorgeous and I said something like, “Baby, I have something really annoying to say,” I know how he would have looked at me: like he was so absolutely, totally annoyed. He would have asked me, “What’s good enough for you,” and he wouldn’t have understood me when I said, “This dish is good enough for me.”
If it’s that how you want to eat with me? Me quiet at the table. Me not voicing an (informed) opinion. Me not telling you about the universe I think the food lives in or geeking out about mini cucumbers and squealing over tomato granita and us laughing at how I am a little nit-picky and able to spot the one thing that needed salt and it’s an aerated broth…
So fucking for real, if that’s how you want to eat with me, I’d rather eat alone.
Because 1) eating at Demi often moves me and I want to tell you about it. And 2) because my brain is kind of broken—I can’t just look at dinner as dinner anymore. I can’t eat a dish and not process what it needs. I’m sorry, this is who I am now.
If that’s the kind of woman you want, find someone—anyone—else. But if you want the woman who can spot perfect and talk to you about it, that’s me.
At Demi, I realized that the man I was heartbroken over would rather I had said of that dish, “It’s perfect.” And hey, he’s a good man (he is a really good man) and wanting to turn off your brain after work is really, really fair.
But I want a man in my life where if I say, “The aerated broth needs salt,” he looks at me the way men look at women they love when they say something slightly insane and in a fine dining restaurant doesn’t care who hears him, starts to laugh, while he hits me with his napkin and says, “Who says that?” Not because he wants me to shut up, because he loves that part of me.
So the heartbreak broke all at once, the way heat often does in the south. It was there on my way to the restaurant where I teared up a little bit that I didn’t have someone to share my unfiltered notes with and on the way home, I played country music about trying again to fall in love and it was gone.