Not long after a teenage Anoush Ansari arrived in the Twin Cities in 1978 to visit his sister, who was attending college in St. Paul, the Islamic revolution occurred in his homeland, Iran. He didn’t dare return. Over the next few years, he took a number of menial jobs, including that of valet at the old Blue Horse restaurant in St. Paul. Later, he took kitchen and service jobs at other local restaurants.
In 1996, Ansari became a restaurateur himself. Today, he and four partners run Hemisphere Restaurant Partners, which owns three downtown Minneapolis restaurants. Hemisphere recently branched out into the suburbs with Kabobi Fire Roasted Grill in Eden Prairie; in August, it opened Via Café and Bar in Edina. The group is now developing other concepts. Hemisphere’s revenues have grown from less than $1 million in 2003 to more than $5 million in 2006; they’re on track to double again over the next year.
Hemisphere has shown a flair for thriving in spaces where other restaurants have failed. In 1996, Ansari opened Atlas Grill, taking over the Seagull space on the first floor of the U.S. Bank Plaza, a location with poor visibility. He increased the lunch traffic with an appealing combination of fire-roasted meats and highly personal service. He also reduced the location’s dependency on the building’s slow evening traffic, focusing instead on special events, such as after-hours company parties. As of the end of August, Atlas Grill had booked 200 events so far this year.
In September 2001, Atlas was hit by a triple whammy—9/11, the loss of the building’s largest tenant, and a nearby street torn up by light rail construction. To boost cash flow, Ansari’s partnership took over a vacant space on the building’s skyway level, opened a spot there called Good to Go, and leveraged the Atlas Grill kitchen by serving the same freshly prepared, fire-roasted meats for eat-in or take-out lunches for the busy downtown-employee crowd. Good to Go became Ansari’s next hit.
In 2003, Ansari got a call from friend and local business luminary Irwin Jacobs, encouraging him to take over the shuttered Aquavit space in the IDS Center. By preparing what Ansari calls more “approachable food” (Kobe beef burgers, seared ahi tuna with kimchi) than what the more experimental Aquavit had served, opening a door to the street, and enlivening the ambiance, the new Mission American Kitchen and Bar has become a hot downtown lunch spot. Mission recently hired Doug Flicker, the acclaimed former chef at Minneapolis’s Auriga, to broaden its evening menu. Expect more distinctive yet “approachable” plates.
