The Band Box diner is a time-travel device. It’s also the place where Brad Ptacek—card-carrying former rock star (as bass player for Urban Guerrillas) and former top chef (nine years as executive chef at Caffe Solo)—will flip 16 strips of bacon like he’s keeping time back in the pocket behind a thrashing guitar, crisp you up some boiled red potatoes, crack some eggs, and pour you a fat old diner pancake that’s a little crisp and a little salty and plenty soft and fresh.
You could take that pancake on a plate and fly around the history of America offering a forkful to Archie and Veronica, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, Mork and Mindy, or anyone else you can think of from the last 100 years and say: Isn’t this a perfect diner pancake? Want some? And they would have to answer: Absolutely, absolutely, it is the perfect diner pancake. And yes, I would like my own. Then, with a heavy mug of coffee in hand, you can perch on a diner stool and enjoy that perfect cake because this is what we do in America!
That’s the Band Box!
Just south of core downtown, near the hospital, near the Bible college, in Elliot Park—a neighborhood that contains both Minneapolis’s historic skid row and some very glitzy downtown apartments, as cities sometimes will—the Band Box, with a history that reaches back nearly nine decades, is where you find the Tonys.
There’s Tony Horne—with a gravel voice like Louis Armstrong, who worked valeting cars and once brought in snapping turtle meat so the Band Box chef could make soup. There’s DJ Tony—who came up from New Orleans after Katrina. And Burnsville Tony—a Korean War veteran who said he was one of the Frozen Chosin, survivors of the frigid and deadly Battle of Chosin Reservoir, who only opened up about his past after decades as a Band Box regular. One day, he started talking, and a kid on the next stool used his phone to help Burnsville Tony find one of his army buddies, still alive in Germany. That’s the Band Box.
This is not a story about the excellence of a particular diner pancake, though they are, in fact, excellent pancakes. This is a story about diners, about Minneapolis, about Tonys, and about the legacy of the Band Box, a restaurant that tells you a story that’s getting harder and harder to find about what it means to be old-school Minneapolis.
Brad Ptacek, chef-owner, says he used to look out at the diner stools from his grill and see old-school Minneapolis at a glance. Robert Rosebear, an Anishinaabe sculptor collected by museums (his usual was Band Box eggs), trans Vietnam vet Paula Hare (burgers), a couple of former rock stars (afternoon breakfast), Smiley Face Ian (you know him by his smiley-face tattoos), the lady from the burn unit with her mom and the guy with the brain injury with his dad (it’s a quick walk to the hospital), and the woman from the upscale condos with the real money. That lady is the one who wrote out a $3,000 check to replace the Band Box stove after a teenage short-order cook let a grill fire rage without picking up the fire extinguisher. When Ptacek told her about it, she said, “You fired his ass?” Ptacek said, “No, he’s just a kid. Everyone makes mistakes.” So she wrote that check.
The Band Box is a place where people make mistakes and don’t get thrown out of the community. For many years, Namond, a homeless neighbor who lived up on the roof, enjoyed the benefit of meals while he kept an eye on things. “We’re on the edge of downtown—we get the edgy people,” laughs Ptacek.
Brad Ptacek is tall and lanky and has greenish-blue eyes. He’s been at the Band Box grill every time I’ve ever been there in my life—cooking since 1996, owning it since 1998. But I guess I’m just lucky, because he says he takes days off now. Ptacek hails from Babbitt, up north on the Iron Range, where he grew up an all-around artsy party kid, with plastic bags full of ice and beer in the center console of his parents’ wine-red GMC Jimmy, driving to theater practice and football practice and to his high school rock band’s bar gigs. But he wanted to get the hell off the Range, fast, so, upon high school graduation, he threw together a last-minute art-school application and landed in a dorm at MCAD.
“My buddy and I had a theory,” recalls Ptacek of those first Minneapolis years. “We’d go for the jobs no one wants. Because you have to get those, right?” His buddy landed: night janitor. Ptacek got: predawn baker. He figured he’d just stay up all night after playing shows—which he did, and it worked. Meteoric success ensued—he was a bass player in the wildly successful alt-rock band Urban Guerrillas, as well as a 19-year-old baker and lunch cook at Croissant Express in Uptown. And when his boss got fired for drinking all day at Figlio, Ptacek became the boss. He also added a gig as a catering chef, making grub for Sting, Ozzy Osbourne, Diana Ross, and everyone who came through town through three rounds of Lollapalooza. MCAD disappeared.
“Brad was a natural chef,” recalls Lenny Russo, who has been a key player in the Twin Cities restaurant world for decades. He hired Ptacek back in the 1980s for Blackberry Creek Market, an upscale grocery store and takeout specialist on Hennepin near 22nd Street. “He has an innate sense of rhythm, so it doesn’t surprise me that he can keep a whole short-order grill rocking. Drum and bass players make great cooks. He made these specials, take-home dinners—they were incredible. They sold out every day. But what was funny about Brad was he was kind of a rock star. In the afternoons, all of these girls would start standing in front of the counter, wide-eyed and staring. I think he was oblivious,” remembers Russo. “But you could smell the alcohol coming off him, so maybe it was the girls who were oblivious.”
Ptacek’s reputation grew, in all ways. The owner of newish and white-hot Caffe Solo posed a question: Dry out and become the executive chef?
There was a time in the early 1990s when Minneapolis’s restaurant scene was small and largely concentrated in a few blocks around 1st Avenue North and 5th Street, in what was then called the Warehouse District: There was the New French Cafe, a clever Caribbean spot named Chez Bananas, Pizza Lucé, vegetarian-friendly Cafe Brenda, Faegre’s, the Italian award magnet D’Amico Cucina, and Caffe Solo, where the ad agency creatives and artists went. Caffe Solo was the big time.
Ptacek went up to the Range to think—and came back sober.
Caffe Solo became a titan in the scene, with food based on elemental comforts like garlic mashed potatoes and local free-range chicken in a pan juice made with a stock of roasted bones. “A young cook has a dish with 20 ingredients; an old cook uses four,” he says now.
That 1990s food scene, now mostly invisible, still shapes Minneapolis. Russo, who ran Faegre’s, later founded locavore visionary Heartland, where line cook Sean Sherman got his first chance to play with a kitchen rigorously sourcing from within 150 miles, experiences that helped shape Owamni. Indígena by Owamni, America’s crown-jewel Indigenous restaurant, now in the Guthrie space that was initially built for Russo’s Cue restaurant when the new Guthrie opened in 2006, overlooks our crown-jewel Mill City Farmers Market, founded by Cafe Brenda’s chef Brenda Langton.
The Band Box, this little historic diner on the edge of the city, is also part of that Warehouse District legacy of the ’90s. Brad Ptacek, who ended up leading Caffe Solo for nine award-winning years, came away from it sick of working for other people and took refuge in Band Box. “I just like old, cool things,” he says now of why he was a Band Box regular himself back then. He liked it so much he approached Orin Johnson, the new owner at the time, with a proposition: Crazy thought, but what if I worked here for, say, $20,000 a year and a quarter of the business?
Orin Johnson was not a typical restaurant owner. A successful engineer, Johnson thought the secret to retirement might be to get a little apartment close to the old Metrodome, where he could wake up every day to eat Band Box breakfast and then walk over to see every Twins game. What could go wrong? He didn’t know he’d be stepping over passed-out men in the gutters. He didn’t know the owner of the Band Box was giving up and contemplating knocking it down.
These are the circumstances that inspired a retired engineer and Band Box regular to lead a community installation of porta-potties, buy his favorite breakfast spot, and start working the cash register at lunch.
All we need is a few more tables, Brad Ptacek told him. Get some real potatoes—easy, easy. This place could be profitable!
And thus, the Band Box secured its caretakers for the 21st century. Ptacek set to cooking with real red potatoes and real eggs and onions, simple bacon, a couple tricks up his sleeve, but not many, for a slim menu. The tricks include a dose of coarse cornmeal in the pancake batter to give them a little crunch. The first times I experienced that crunch, I assumed it was the particular slick and heat from a well-seasoned grill. Yes, said Ptacek, but the cornmeal amps up the effect by giving the grill various invisible nubbins to sizzle. The other chef tricks are mainly about the red potatoes: Boil them in advance; use a mandoline to cut the curling, fresh, potato-y perfect fries to order—fancy-simple.
There are a few holdovers from Caffe Solo on the menu: the sandwiches called Sloppy Bro, Lunch Box, and Dude Ranch. Order the Lunch Box, and it comes fancy cut and piled high with the fries up top, in the style the ’90s knew as: tall food. It’s fun, so visit it here: time travel!
And those additional tables Ptacek pitched as the secret to profitability? They didn’t happen until seven years later. Ptacek and Johnson were waiting for a grant, then waiting more. Then they hired architects Robert Roscoe and Karen Gjerstad. (The reason I think the rumor that gangster Kid Cann played cards in the back room of the Band Box can’t be true: There was no back room.)
One morning while they waited for the new tables, a customer ran home for his television and propped it on the counter—the regulars watched the second tower fall. One day while they waited for the new tables, Ptacek found a restaurant-wares collector who refused to sell him any of his vintage stools for the renovation. Then he realized who Ptacek was and knew the Band Box’s old-school, second-chance ways and let him buy a number of vintage stools that Ptacek reupholstered with snowmobile seat fabric, in a tribute to the Range. Next time you’re in, try to figure out where the original Band Box ends and the new begins—and you’ll see that the little red-and-white box isn’t only a time capsule; it’s a practical artist’s project by someone who loves old things and knows how to make old-looking art from new materials.
With the expansion, more change came to the Band Box: Orin Johnson left our world, and Ptacek fell in love with Heather Dalzen, a restaurant lifer and longtime fan of both bartending and bookkeeping who had honed her skills and passion at Acme Comedy Club, Sully’s, and the pizza pub Green Mill all through its 1990s era of growth. The two first met in 2004 at the Black Forest, another legacy pillar of the Minneapolis restaurant scene, then had a son, and now run Band Box sort of like a sober bar.
“I like the characters,” says Dalzen. “You think you’ve seen it all. You’ve never seen it all. I’ll see one of our customers out holding a sign on Franklin, I’ll give him a couple bucks; I know we’ll get it back. That’s the world I want to live in, where people have your back.”
“We’re barflies,” says Ptacek. “I like talking to people. Or just hanging out making stuff.”
And that’s how Ptacek and Dalzen became the most recent caretakers of Minneapolis’s oldest diner.
The diner was born in 1939 when Harry and Bert (short for Bertha) Weisman changed their name to Wyman to seem less Jewish and opened a tiny restaurant based on the technology of natural gas, new to Minneapolis in 1934. (Before the 1930s, food here was mainly cooked with coal or wood and was cooled by ice in iceboxes, all of which was such a hassle that well-off folks all had cooks and the less-well-offs and singles largely relied on meals from their boardinghouses.) Municipal gas, though—that was a game changer.
Originally, a “band box” was a little hatbox-like container used to carry clean collars and cuffs home from the cleaners during the era when shirt collars and cuffs weren’t typically attached to shirts. In Minnesota, it came to mean: someplace cute, tiny, and clean, arranged around one fiercely hot flat surface for cooking. Despite the Great Depression, there were soon 15 Band Boxes around the Twin Cities, and they were part of a founding generation in Minnesota that developed the cohesive diner cuisine and culinary culture you know well today: pancakes, eggs, burgers, and American fries—all cooked on a flat-top gas grill.
Speaking of American fries: “Home fries” are what much of the country calls chopped-up potatoes crisped to serve, maybe cooked with onions and peppers but maybe not. In Minneapolis, many of our oldest diners have always called them American fries. That’s what you’ll see on the menus at the Egg and I, Keys, and Milda’s.
“Someone came in the other day and said, ‘Why American fries? Is that like freedom fries or something?’” recalls Ptacek. “I didn’t even know what to say. They’re American fries. That’s what they’re called. It’s what they’ve always been called. I guess this is a post-COVID thing?”
Ptacek also has seen a shift, post-COVID, in our egg orders. Today no one has heard of basted eggs (splashed with butter or oil so the whites get cooked), and everyone wants sunny-side up so they look good on Instagram. “It’s the age of photography,” says Ptacek. “I guess Instagram tells people how they like their eggs now.”
But the Band Box might outlive Instagram, if the metric is visual storytelling power.
I was sitting on a stool at the diner one day, thinking about how I might be homing in on my personal Band Box favorite—probably a patty melt with extra caramelized onions. Though perhaps a grilled cheese with added bacon and tomato. Or it could be a pancake with fries—if that’s not the order of a lunatic? But how can I choose between Band Box’s slightly curling french or chunky American fries? My internal arguments ended suddenly when an artist reached over my shoulder to hand Ptacek a plastic bag.
It was full of stickers the artist had printed of a drawing he made of the Band Box. “It’s Minneapolis to me,” said the artist. I took one. It’s cute!
Do you know the word synecdoche? It’s big in poetry. It means a little thing standing in for a whole, like the way the word Hollywood or the sign stands in for all filmed entertainment. Similarly, the Band Box is, for many, visual shorthand for all of Minneapolis.
In 1992, The Magnolias’ album cover for Off the Hook shows the band loitering outside, the essence of Minnesota’s nationally famous garage-rock scene.
In 1992 and 1994, in the Mighty Ducks movie and the sequel D2, the Band Box stands in for something essential about Minneapolis. The famed poop-purse prank in the original film begins in the street just north of the Band Box; look for the red and white and you’ll catch it. In D2, the “getting the band back together” montage has kids Rollerblading straight through the Mall of America, across the Stone Arch Bridge and the Hennepin Avenue Bridge, through St. Paul’s Irvine Park, past the Lake of the Isles Peavey Fountain, and right up to Emilio Estevez, who has been waiting for them out front of the diner, as if he’s welcoming them, and himself, to all their hearts’ home—the Band Box.
In 2007, Brother Ali shoots the video for his hit “Take Me Home” with significant scenes in and around the Band Box. What is “home” for someone in Minneapolis? The final shot is two little kids walking past the Band Box at sunset. Then there’s a cut to them all grown up, and they are still walking past the Band Box.
In 2027 or 2031 or 2039—will you be the one making art at the Band Box, as you selfie or photograph your kid with a pancake? When you look at the image you made, how will you know it’s now, and not when the Mighty Ducks or The Magnolias were outside or Brother Ali was coming in the door?
What visual cues do you have? What edible ones? None, I’d argue. Time is frozen, and time extends forever forward, at the Band Box.
If you sit on a diner seat that’s older than you, if you talk to a neighbor-stranger because they’re just so close that it would be weird not to, if there’s a punk-rock star keeping time at the flat-top, if there’s an infinite supply of timeless pancakes and potatoes and Tonys—isn’t the Band Box as close to time travel as we’re ever likely to get? 729 S. 10th St., Mpls., 612-338-3339
Dining and Cooking