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Dishing with Stephanie's DishHost of Emmy award-winning TV show Taste Buds with Stephanie, Author of "True North Cabin Cookbook," blogger at stephaniesdish.com, radio host of "The Weekly Dish", podcaster at "Dishing with Stephanies Dish" and contributor on Fox 9s The Jason Show. Author: Stephanie Hansen - @StephaniesDish
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Dishing With @StephaniesDish: Stephanie Hansen visits with Chef Michael Lopata
Friday, 23 October, 2026
Get Reservations at Charlie’s RestaurantGet more information about The Minneapolis ClubOpen Seatings to the Public* Dinner Tuesday - Friday, 5 pm - 7:15 pm* Charlie’s Bar Open until 9 pmNon-members can join for cocktails at the iconic Charlie’s Bar until 9 pm or for full dinner service with seatings available Tuesday through Friday from 5 pm to 7:15 pmMake a Non-Member ReservationTo make a same-day reservation, please call us at 612-332-2292.ORIGINAL EDITED TRANSCRIPTStephanie Hansen (00:00.664)Hi, welcome to Dishing with Stephanie’s Dish, the podcast where we talk to people in the food space. And today I’m actually recording from the Minneapolis Club. I had a little internet trouble at home, so I’m a member here and, coincidentally, I'm recording today with Michael Lopata, Executive Chef and Director of the Culinary Program at the Minneapolis Club. Welcome to the podcast, Michael.Michael Lopata (00:21.117)Thank you so much. Good to have you here, literally and figuratively.Stephanie Hansen (00:25.352)Yes, thank you. I am glad to be here too. I hosted a really powerful event last week, I thought, about women in food. Fellow member Beth Dooley , who is a cookbook writer. She’s written so many great books. She was there. Joy summers , a food critic for the Star Tribune, and my radio partner, Stephanie March , the founder of the Salt Cure Recovery Fund for Restaurant Recovery. It was really just such a great panel. And we had a lot of opportunity to talk about food from the intersection of chefs, farmers, product producers, people that write about, and home cooking. And that day you made something so delicious. You made one of my favorite things. Did you know I love a beef short rib?Michael Lopata (01:16.955)No, but I wouldn’t trust you if you said you didn’t. So it was nice to kind of live in the center lane of the highway there, but also be able to put something out there. I’ve said for years, as long as I’ve been doing this, there are those corporate Monday-through-Friday lunches with chicken, mashed potatoes, and asparagus, and that fits the bill. But I wanted to do something a little bit more fun. I definitely want to touch on something that you said about the intersection of food and chefs, butit’s always easier when we’re cooking people’s favorite food. It makes my job and my team’s job so much easier. So I’m glad we I’m glad we hit that mark.Stephanie Hansen (01:50.763)it was so delicious. And I had mine packed up to go because obviously when I was speaking I couldn’t eat, and I was sitting down in a little side room kind of off of Charlie’s restaurant here, which is open to the public Thursday through Sunday. So, Thursday through Saturday, did I get the hours right?Michael Lopata (02:11.843)Tuesday through Saturday for dinner. Yep. Yep.Stephanie Hansen (02:14.732)People don’t realize they can come to the Minneapolis Club and eat this delicious food at Charlie’s. You also have a beautiful patio. It’s getting to be fall now, but the patio is lovely during patio season. yeah, I had a lot of great comments about the food that day, so well done.Michael Lopata (02:35.762)Thank you so much. I caught the very end of you and Beth and Joy and Stephanie andyou know, as soon as that food was out, we actually had an event on the second floor, but we’re rushing through it because I love listening to people talk about their passion. Whether I’m getting my oil changed and it’s somebody who just graduated from auto tech school and he’s excited about the next 20 years of his life, and I’m driving away thinking, I’m glad that guy loves cars more than I do. But it’s always nice to listen and exciting for me, especially because this is my passion. And this is what I’ve dedicated the last twenty-five years of my life to: listening to four just exponentially great voices in this in the Minneapolis food scene and beyond. Two quick things. I moved here from Seattle in January 2022. And then when you work at a place like the Minneapolis Club that has that rich history and that tradition, the expectation is, you knowThe ins and outs of Midwest food, you know the history of the club. And a lot of times I’m teaching Tuesday morning what I learned Monday night. So if I have to listen to you, talk to Beth, and have those experiences, it’s a win-win for me because I get to talk to somebody who’s passionate, and I also get to learn. And that’s that’s the best part about this job. So as I was listening to you all talk, I kept hearing, over and over again, everybody referencing what I say at all my interviews and all my wine dinners.The food tastes better when it has a story. And y’all were just telling the story of food for an hour. And I I didn’t want the day to end. I love hearing that. Every time you have a story for food, it always tastes better. And if you can relate it to those those certain aspects of of what people are eating and why they’re eating it, it’s always gonna make the food better. So really, really fun event, as you said, and it was just amazing to hear four people so passionate about what we do here. Bring some light to some things that maybe a lot of people don’t see and don’t know about the restaurant business.Stephanie Hansen (04:32.104)When you're putting menus together here, you guys have a pretty robust lunch business because you have a built-in clientele; obviously, a lot of events and people are here. The club is very active during the day. But how would you describe evening service, and what kind of food do you think is appealing for the evening guest? That’s a little bit different.Michael Lopata (04:56.786)Yeah, it’s it’s different. It’s a challenge, and that’s kind of what makes it fun. There are challenges and obstacles in this world, in this business, and in life. And I think challenges are what you overcome, and I think obstacles are the excuses you make to keep you from doing something. So when you’re when you’re at a private club, a lot of times you are able to do those fun events for the members. We could turn Charlie’s into a barbecue restaurant every Tuesday night in the winter. But if you have a family of four, like last weekend,It looked like a daycare in here because there was a child, like a kid focused event at at Orchestra Hall and we were slinging chicken tenders and mac and cheese and pepperoni pizzas. but you have to lean into that and say we are open to the public. There are a lot of places that you are not able to bring your kids into, we’re not able to bring your family to if you’re not a member. And and we wanna we wanna bring those people in and let them experience the club in the hopes that they can see all the things that that the club offers in addition to just coming in for dinner.On those nights during the week. So at lunch, you hit it perfectly. We have the clientele. We have Monday through Friday, the business, the lawyers, the politicians. Let’s get them in, let’s get them some lunch, and let’s get them back to work. So we don't have a lot of fireworks on our lunch menu, and you don’t need them. You want a salmon salad, you want a burger, you want it cooked right, you want it served fast, you want to get on with your day. Dinner is kind of our opportunity toTo kind of bring up some new things to do, like that braised short rib dish that you had. When that walks to a table with the smoked cheddar polenta that we did last fall, that’s a showstopper. And somebody’s asking, What is that? And I need that. I don’t even know what it is, but I want it. And so when we have the dinner menus that we change two or three times a year, it’s really an opportunity to reach out to people and say, This is the time to come in and it gives us time to flex our culinary muscle, or, you know, it gives us an opportunity to showcase.Something that we’re not able to do during that lunch crowd. And I think that’s the great part about the challenge of being open to the public and to the members: we have an opportunity to impress people every single day when they walk in the door, and that’s an opportunity that we lean into with dinner service for sure.Stephanie Hansen (07:02.72)You’ve been here since 2022, and in the Minneapolis scene, are there restaurants you love or that inspire you?Michael Lopata (07:12.814)Absolutely. when I first moved out here, I was the chef at a country club in White Bear. Loved my time there. I cook to support a golf habit. So anytime I can get out on the golf course is it’s a win-win for me. love my time there, but when the Minnesota Vikings call, you take that call and you go work for them. I’m a washed-up college baseball player, so there’s a natural fit between the first 20 years of my life working to become a baseball player and then the last 20 years of my life cooking. but I I tell everybody.you can only cook chicken tenders for Justin Jefferson so many times before you realize there might be a little something more to the culinary landscape and scene that you want to get yourself into. and so for me, when I came to the Minneapolis Club, I had the exact same conversation with the the GM that hired me. I was like, I I’m in a I’m in a world of hurt. I I know that I can cook, but I’m coming into a scene. I’ve spent so much time in kitchens, in restaurants, during training camp.During the hundred days of hell between Memorial Day and Labor Day, when your golf course is open, the pool’s open, and it’s a madhouse at the country club, I need a line item in my budget so I can go out and experience the Minneapolis food scene. More so, so I know what our members expect when they come to our restaurant. I want to know what Daniel’s doing at Porzana. I want to know what’s going on at Dario. A, I’m inquisitive, and I love food, but I want to see that this is the expectation for whatthis costs, or this is the expectation for what the menu should flow like so that it’s not that completely out of touch and out of the realm, and it doesn’t have this stigma of being a private club that nobody is welcome at. So that’s a challenge for us because we are a private club. We are a social club, but we want to be approachable, and I think with our new marketing pushes, getting people in the door is about letting them see what this club has to offer.But yes, any night that I can, I can convince my GM that I need to go out and see what’s going on at Oceanair, or I need to go to, you know, Manny’s Boucheron. I’m absolutely taking the opportunity to do that. Yeah.Stephanie Hansen (09:16.323)What is something you’ve put on the menu or cooked here that you didn’t think would go over well, but it was a hit?Michael Lopata (09:24.566)The bolognese in the middle of summer, I think, is very funny to me. But there’s a story behind it. The first restaurant I ever worked at was an Italian-owned restaurant owned by a second-generation Italian family, the Di Alessandro family. The first thing I learned to make was rigatoni bolognese. And you know, you put the mirepoix in the food processor, and you buzz it up; you put the pancetta in until it looks like cotton candy. And you know, I’ve been eating spaghetti and meatballs my whole entire life.Life, but I remember taking a bite of that for the first time. And I thought to myself, I didn’t know food could taste like this. I want everybody, at some point in their life, to experience what I did at 22: eating bolognese for the first time. So at every restaurant I worked at, it didn’t matter the season; when I lived in Hawaii, we had bolognese on the menu, and everybody was asking me, "What’s this bolognessi?" I have no idea what this is. But getting a bunch of Hawaiians to eat bolognese was one of my greatest accomplishments.But in the middle of summer when it’s ninety degrees out, nobody wants a braised meat dish. Nobody wants, you know, your crockpots on in the middle of June and July. But I always have an iteration of bolinas on the menu. Once our servers understood that story and could go out and talk to the tables about it, we started selling bolognese. You would think we were an Olive Garden in here with the amount of bolognese that goes out here in the summer. So I love things like that. When you can actually put the why behind what you’re doing.And even if it didn’t sell, you know, I know the chef, and he’s a pretty cool guy, but he loves his bolognese. So it was always gonna be on the menu regardless. But I’m glad we’re able to move it. It makes me feel better.Stephanie Hansen (10:54.775)Is there something you cook that you can’t stand cooking?Michael Lopata (10:58.406)Mushrooms. I don’t get I don’t understand you know, and and this is a very funny conversation between my my wife and I is a lot of times as as I’ve I don’t want to say all chefs because there are definitely some that probably don’t wean this way, but we cook the food the way that we wanna eat it, with the way that we want it to taste.I love acidic food. I probably put way too much lemon juice, lime, or vinegar in my food. I have five different vinegars at my house, and they don’t show up. It’s because they’re all making their way into the pot by the end of the dish. But I have a propensity to make food the way that I want it to taste. Things like mushrooms, I know that no matter what I do, they’re not gonna be good. I don’t want them. I’m not gonna eat them. So I just get out of the way, and I cook it fine, and I seize it fine, and I’m saying, somebody’s gonna like this, and they end up being the great dish of the whole thing. And it’s like,Guys, I put four hours into this thing over here, and this is the love of my life. And they’re like, Yeah, but your stuffed mushrooms are great. I was like, Guys, it’s Borsin and mushrooms. Of course it’s good. So there are some funny things about cooking. It’s like sometimes the harder you try, the more it’s like golf, the law of diminishing returns. Sometimes you just gotta get out of the way of the food, cook it, do the right thing, do right by it, and it’ll reward you.Stephanie Hansen (12:08.429)Now you are in a club setting, so things like the holidays, Easter, brunch are big deal. You know, a lot of chefs hate cooking brunch and hate cooking that. Have you just embraced it and made it your own?Michael Lopata (12:23.452)I think yes and no. You know, I love my sleep on Saturday and Sunday mornings as much as the next guy. I love, I love being at a golf course and not being in the kitchen. But you know, I tell everybody this when they’re complaining about their job. It’s, you know, this is the job we signed up for. And, you know, if my idea of of working at the Minneapolis Club was that I wouldn’t be doing member events, that I wouldn’t be doingThanksgiving buffet, and then I’ve grossly underestimated A my intelligence and B my career path. So then if you lean into it, if you embrace it, and you understand that we have an opportunity in these club settings to cook for the people that are paying us to be there. You know every every day they’re they’re they’re making us an extension of their living room. They’re making us an extension of their kitchen table. Andonce you go out and get to know members and you talk to them and you realize they just want a place to hang out and they’re proud of the food that we’re doing. And I tell some of my cooks, a lot of the time, just because these guys, just because our members are paying monthly dues, doesn’t mean they have to be here. They are coming here because of what we’re doing. And there are people here that are excited about the food that we’re making. That said, I’m glad we do one Santa Brunch a year. I’m glad we only have a couple of, you know, buffets where we’re here on the weekends and holidays becauseAt forty two I am married with kids and and I do enjoy my time away from the club. But I would much rather and and I cannot emphasize this enough, I’d much rather be here Thursday morning on Thanksgiving than at a restaurant until one o’clock, two o’clock in the morning, you know, shutting down a shutting down a bar and a fryer while all my buddies are out at the bar drinking. you know, I missed out on a lot when I was when I was doing this for the first little bit and pretty I I like I like where I’m at right now.Stephanie Hansen (14:07.214)Who taught you how to cook?Michael Lopata (14:14.0)Alton Brown. I played baseball on an athletic scholarship through college, and I had elbow surgery. And you know, we had the party house in college, and after everybody would go home, I would be falling asleep watching TV, and the Food Network would be on, and it was Alton Brown circa two thousand two, two thousand three. And I was just like, This is interesting and I would watch it, it would be like my every night. and then when my baseball career came to acrashing and burning failure. I just said, you know what? I’m gonna work at a restaurant for a summer, and I’ll figure out what I’m gonna do with the rest of my life. But this is a summer job, six months at most. This is the longest summer job of my life, Stephanie. And I don’t know if anybody’s ever had a 25-year summer job, but you know, fast-forward to that restaurant, I was still paying student loans. I couldn’t afford to go to culinary school. My first wife and I, we had just gotten married. We were poorer than poor.And so I would go home, and I’d read cookbooks. I’m just here for the food by Alton Brown. I would watch Good Eats, and I tell people that that was my culinary school. Then the chefs at those restaurants took time out of their day to show me how to hold a knife and how to cut a vegetable. I remember looking at a lot of applications, and it always said culinary school required. You know, you need to have graduated from a culinary school. And I always felt that I was at such a disadvantage.But now what I like to see is that as those jobs are getting posted in 2026, there was a big, big shift: culinary school is no longer required because there are a lot of people that don’t have the means and the ability, whether it’s financial or time, to go to culinary school and make that sacrifice. And I told my son, who was thinking about doing this, is like, do not; we’re not paying for you to go to CIA on the chance that you might want to cook. Go work in a restaurant for two years, see if it’s what you want to do, and then we’ll make that sacrifice for you. So Alton Brown cookbooks, Thomas Keller, French Laundry, Bouchon Bakery, all those books, the books that tell a story, and then they have the food. I just read those cover to cover for the stories, and that was my culinary school.Stephanie Hansen (16:19.287)Yeah, I love cookbooks too. You and I have something in common: I didn’t graduate from college. I came from a family that was busy with a lot of kids. And I started college, and after about six months I was making more money being a cocktail waitress than I was doing anything else. And all of a sudden I was like, Well, I’m just gonna lean into this. I started doing events and working in the nightclub businessThen I started working in restaurants, and I always just liked home cooking and started doing it more, read a ton of cookbooks. And I think I got most of my cooking knowledge from cookbooks too. What are some of your like that you still have on your shelf that mean something to you?Michael Lopata (17:07.558)yeah. You know, as I said, the Thomas Keller series, obviously Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, is it there’s not a single recipe in there. But if you don’t if you don’t put down that book and you don’t want to jump into a kitchen on a Friday night, I I just I don’t know I I don’t know what else you could do. You know, if you don’t read that book and want to be in a kitchen, then this world is just not for you. But there is a Francis Maum in the Feast of Seven Fires.Is a phenomenal cookbook because he takes something so basic, which is the thought of of actually burning food. It’s something we all do. Like we do it all the time. And most of the time it’s, well, we’re gonna throw that away. We’re gonna, we’re gonna start over. And Francis, he takes this approach to food where it’s like taking it past the point of being comfortable. And I remember reading that cookbook, and I’m thinking to myself, okay, we burn croutons all the time.Bacon, pine nuts, and croutons are the three things that we all burn. There’s probably some bacon; if you smell bacon, it’s because we’re burning it on the third floor right now. But one day we burned some croutons, and my prep cook was about ready to throw them out. And I said, do me a favor: let’s take a very sweetened, you know, creme anglaise, throw some, throw some sweetened condensed milk in there. Let’s completely overdo the sweetness to counteract that bitterness. Let’s do a burnt crouton, a burnt bread pudding, and put it on the dessert menu.And we did a bourbon caramel. Like, we’re kind of trying to cover up the fact that we burned it, but we’re also embracing the fact that you can have these flavors, and when they’re built correctly and on each other, you have something greater than if you had just toasted that bread nicely. So any cookbooks that kind of change the way that you think, I’ll never cook a Linea food. I know that. I know that what a Linea and next and everything that’s going on down there is so far above and beyond what I could even comprehend. I wouldn’t even understand the dinner if I went there. But justforcing you to to think about food in a different way and giving you the opportunity to say, Nobody’s really inventing anything, but at the same time, everything is brand new at the same time. And it’s really, really fun way to to kind of read through cookbooks for sure.Stephanie Hansen (19:12.523)Yeah. And molecular gastronomy, I mean, that is like a whole thing in and of itself that I I’m glad it’s there. Grant Atchatz is amazing and Alinia is wonderful, but I don’t think that’s for me and necessarily how we’re supposed to cook to feed our bodies every day. I think that’s like a specialty thing.Michael Lopata (19:34.171)Absolutely. And I think there is a world where there are restaurants that you go to once or twice a year, once or twice maybe in your lifetime. I have still not gone to the French Laundry, but I know that if and when I do, it will be one of one, maybe one of two. The Minneapolis Club, you know, from a purely financial standpoint, we won't still be here six months from now if our members come once a week. If our members are coming once a lifetime. I mean thatExcuse me, that just doesn’t work for our model and us. Now we do have very fun nights. Daniel Olsen, our maître d', has a cabaret dinner, and we go for broke. We play, we do a baked Alaska; we go old school with tableside Caesar salad. But we’re not doing that every single night because that’s not what is going to be, you know, long-term success for Charlie’s.Stephanie Hansen (20:26.852)Yeah.Michael Lopata (20:28.014)And that is knowing your place and knowing what you are and knowing what you aren’t. Everybody wants the shelves with all the awards and all that stuff. I I always say I’m just trying to get home to my dog at the end of the day and I want to watch some football and and and and that is that is exactly, you know, what this club and what this opportunity provides for me. but if you had told me that at forty-two, when I was twenty-two, watching all my clipboard chefs walk around, I’d be like, my god, that’s guy’s just a washed-up sellout corporate chef, and he doesn’t know how to cook andI know candidly there’s probably some guys in the kitchen that when I come down online they’re thinking the same thing, but you know, perspective is free and it’s a wonderful thing and and this is this is where I am and and this is this is what I what I’m looking for as as as an opportunity at at this point in my life and and it it all just kinda checks the boxes for me.Stephanie Hansen (21:13.689)Well, thanks for spending time with me today. I want people to re-experience the Minneapolis Club. I have real fond memories of being here as a kid at Easter time, at the Christmas buffets. my mom and dad used to come here for dinner. So I’m a fairly new member, more recently. It’s been lovely to be back in these rooms and to experience your food. Thank you so much for everything you’re doing for the club. I think people are really excited about the Minneapolis Club. It feels fresh and lively.Michael Lopata (21:42.566)And that’s the goal, right? We have a hundred-and-eight-year-old building, but we’re modern. We’re doing Pilates; we’re doing what we need to do to attract that membership. But there are also those, you know, those homages to the past and the things that you can remember when you were here with your grandparents or your parents, and we want to kind of live on both sides of that equation. And you know, we’re really trying, and I appreciateyou saying that and appreciate you, you know, being a part of this and coming and having that speaker series. It’s always my hope, and I always say it after every dinner, that my cooks are better for what you allowed them to do today. I hope people left the room with a better understanding of, you know, what our business is and what the industry is and what y’all have dedicated your lives to and your professional lives to making people aware of what is, you know, what is really a really hard business. And you know, we do it the best we can, and we try the next day again.Stephanie Hansen (22:33.921)Yeah. Thank you for what you’re doing. I appreciate you and I’ll see you soon. You’re up third floor.Michael Lopata (22:38.406)Sounds good. I’ll d I’m I’m one floor above you. I’ll come down and see ya. Thank you so much, Stephanie. Bye.Stephanie Hansen (22:43.297)Okay. All right. Bye bye, Michael.Stephanie Hansen's @StephaniesDish Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stephaniehansen.substack.com/subscribe
