Jeanie Janas Ritter and Adam Ritter are the husband-wife team behind Bûcheron. | Photos courtesy of Bûcheron.
The best new restaurant in the country is a French-inspired eatery on a street corner in Southwest Minneapolis in a location that once housed a pizzeria that sold $1 slices.
Bûcheron, which is French for “lumberjack,” is so small that its narrow patio on the sidewalk out front about doubles its capacity.
That capacity was full on a recent Thursday evening, while a few would-be diners waited patiently outside the door. Servers and bussers busily took orders, removed and reset table settings. Chefs brought a steady parade of dishes to the tables themselves, including more than a few birthday desserts, complete with candle, as they carefully protected the flame from the wind.
The activity has been a common sight here, since Bûcheron was named best new restaurant at the James Beard Awards last month. And it’s certainly not something founders Adam Ritter and Jeanie Janas Ritter take for granted.
“It’s incredible,” Jeanie said. “I think all you ever ask for when you own a restaurant is for it to be full. And so it feels like the biggest gift and blessing we could receive. And we are rocking.”
Yet for the couple, Bûcheron’s success is more than just a blessing. It is the payoff from a massive, risky bet they placed on themselves more than two years ago, when they spotted the location on a walk near their home.
The interior of Bûcheron is small and intimate.
Adam grew up on a small farm in St. Wendel, Minnesota, an unincorporated township an hour and a half northwest of Minneapolis. He worked as a dishwasher at a bar & grill there, then moved up to line cook. “I just liked it,” he said. “This is what I want to do. I didn’t like the school stuff. It just feels right.”
“He was a little shit,” Jeanie interjected.
Adam moved to Los Angeles when he was 18 to attend the California School of Culinary Arts, and then moved to Las Vegas, where he worked at L’atelier de Joel Robuchon and then Joel Robuchon at the Mansion.
It was there he met Jeanie, at 4 a.m., during a session of late-night, $1 drinks and bowling at the Orleans Casino, a popular hangout for restaurant kids after work.
Jeanie was raised on a farm in LaPorte, Indiana, a city in the Northwest part of the state, west of South Bend. Jeanie loved cooking from a young age, and attended The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, and then went to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
“I loved to cook,” she said. “I was working at a banquet hall, and the owner’s son was going to school at the CIA, so I made up my mind that I was going to the CIA to become a chef.”
From Vegas, the two moved to California, then to Singapore and then to Chicago, working at a selection of restaurants like Chez Panisse, Cyrus, Restaurant Andre, Iggy’s, TRU and others. Jeanie, an extrovert, moved to the front of the house.
They ultimately decided to move back to Minnesota to work with Gavin Kaysen’s Soigné Hospitality Group. Jeanie led the front-of-house team at Bellecour Restaurant. Adam worked at Spoon and Stable and then on menu development for Demi.
That’s where they were when the pandemic hit. Bellecour would be a casualty of the event, which came at a particularly important time for the couple. “We found out that we were pregnant with our first son in March of 2020,” said Jeanie. “And then we did takeout and pivoted, and then we reopened the restaurant and changed everything, and then we closed a few weeks later.”
Demi, meanwhile, was a finalist for the James Beard award for best new restaurant. Kaysen was told to prepare a speech the night before the event. And then the event was canceled.
“I tell Adam that this should have been the second award,” Kaysen said.
The American Wagyu Steak comes from Feller’s Ranch in Southwest Minnesota.
All of which is to say that the Ritters have the chops and experience to open their own restaurant, and the complementary skillsets to make it work. Jeanie was dubbed a “front-of-house managing star” by a local magazine. Adam had proven himself as a rising star chef.
But after a life of late-night bowling and world travel and restaurant openings, the Ritters began looking for balance, and Adam himself was looking for career growth after their eldest son Jack was born.
The two began talking about starting their own restaurant as a way to both get that balance they were seeking and spend more time with their kids, and get the career growth Adam was looking for. And Adam has long wanted to create his own restaurant.
On a walk shortly after the birth of their second son George, they noticed that the Revival restaurant near their home was closed and available.
“That got the conversation started,” Adam said. “How are we going to get more time with the boys? That was part of the reason. Another part was what I said with Gavin. There’s no room to grow here. So let’s just take a leap. We stumbled on this place before it even went to the market.”
Opening a restaurant is risky. Most of them do not make it five years. And the location they were eyeing was almost a testament to that. For years it had been a pizzeria, Lufrano’s. But later it would house two highly regarded restaurants: Corner Table and then a fried chicken concept Revival.
Jeanie certainly knew the risk. “You’re out of your freaking mind,” she told Adam. “I just had a baby, you know?”
But they ultimately took a leap. They signed a lease and took out an SBA loan. They kept their full-time jobs as long as possible—Adam gave Kaysen a six-month notice. And they kept a tight lid on costs, spending only where necessary and doing things themselves where they could.
“We pulled a lot of long days and extra hours,” Jeanie said. “Adam used to come in here and scrape chicken grease off the floor before going to work at Demi.”
They had a friend turn some of Revival’s old benches into the front bar. Antiques from around their house provided some of the décor. Their construction team finished work early, enabling them to start hosting friends-and-family events starting in December 2023.
By January of last year, their risk, Bûcheron, was open for customers.
Jeanie accepting the James Beard Award.
Adam calls the menu “French Midwest.” It is French-inspired, with American and Midwestern flavors and touches. The Cookies and Cream, with milk sorbet, cocoa macaron, vanilla custard and lemon verbena, is a French dessert but with a very American cookies and cream flavor profile.
But the menu also reveals their travels and experience. There’s the Hamachi Crudo with watermelon, Fresno chili, basil and rhubarb salt that shows off their Asian experience. Or the Green Gazpacho with Dungeness crab, crayfish, green tomato, cucumber, radish and mint.
The menu features a lot of local ingredients. The maple syrup for the Maple Old Fashioned comes from a farm in the city’s western suburbs. The rhubarb for the Rhubarb Elderflower Spritz comes from Adam’s uncle.
The cherries used in the Foie Gras Terrine come from Door County, Wisconsin. The American Wagyu Steak comes from Feller’s Ranch in Southwest Minnesota.
At the same time, there are items not exactly readily available in landlocked Minnesota, such as oysters from Glidden Point Oyster Farms in Maine, which are shipped to the restaurant once a week. “I was in Boston eating at a place and I found these oysters and I was like, ‘Oh we’ve got to use those,’” Adam said.
“We want the people who live here to come in here and get something you can’t get from here, too,” he said. “It’s finding a balance of using local for the people coming from out of state, but then the people who live here, we’re bringing stuff in they can’t get anywhere else.”
The restaurant is cozy and intimate. A diner may talk with several people from the restaurant during their visit, from the servers to the bussers to the general manager to the chefs to the Ritters themselves. “It feels like a dinner party,” Kaysen said.
That dinner party quickly won plaudits from local reviewers and was soon one of the tougher reservations in town. “We had little anchor points with pieces of press that really helped, which was great,” Jeanie said.
But they had some soft weeknights. And in August of last year it was slow. “August was so slow that we told everybody on our team to plan your vacations in in August,” Jeanie said.
Slow nights, uh, should not be a problem this August, not after the Beard win. “We’re paying for that one now,” Jeanie said. “You know, we get to learn every single day.”
Which is to say they were surprised to have won the award. When Bûcheron made the long list of best new restaurant semifinalists, they thought, “Oh that’s cool,” Adam said. It was a bigger shock to have been named a finalist. And then they won.
They drove to Chicago for the awards. “The next morning when we got, like, two hours of sleep after winning the awards in Chicago, we got in the car and started driving back, and by the time I looked at my phone, it’s eight o’clock in the morning,” Jeanie said. “I had 250 texts just on my phone. It took me hours to get through those.”
One person not surprised was Kaysen. Several of the people the Ritters recruited to help run Bûcheron, including General Manager Tyler McLeod, Chef de Cuisine Cory Western, Sous Chef Ricky Flor and Bar Manager Will Gobeli, worked in one of his restaurants, after all.
But Kaysen also believes Bûcheron has what it takes to thrive. “The secret sauce to most success is consistency,” he said. “The food is delicious. It’s warm and hospitable. They have a small dining room, a controllable atmosphere and environment. And they’re coming from a great pedigree.”
As for what they do now, eventually they want to add another restaurant to give their talented team opportunities to grow. “It’s not happening tomorrow,” Jeanie said. “We’ve got to live through the summer.”
They’re also realistic about what they need to do to remain relevant. Cities around the country are loaded with restaurants that were thriving one minute and ended up closing the next.
Bûcheron’s own location is testament to this, as both Corner Table and then Revival were hot restaurants before they closed. Another Minneapolis restaurant, Young Joni, whose chef, Ann Kim, is a Beard Award winner and which was busy almost every night, is closing this fall over a lease issue.
The Ritters understand all this. And they’re already talking about ways to keep Bûcheron relevant.
“We’ve had the conversation with friends and colleagues,” Adam said. “What do we do now to stay relevant or push forward from this? That’s what you’ve to do in restaurants. It’s a special thing for a restaurant like the French Laundry that made it 30 years. They’re constantly changing sets and their team is making different moves. That’s exactly what we have to do to survive.”
For now, though, they are enjoying all the activity.
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Restaurant Business Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Maze is a longtime industry journalist who writes about restaurant finance, mergers and acquisitions and the economy, with a particular focus on quick-service restaurants.
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