In 1977, two friends who liked to eat out decided to open a restaurant. That was the extent of their expertise. Phil Roberts and Pete Mihajlov traveled a lot for work and eaten well in other cities. When they got back to Saint Paul they grew increasingly frustrated with the restaurants they found here, so they did something about it.
On a handshake deal, they opened Muffuletta at 2260 Como Avenue in Saint Anthony Park, naming it after the New Orleans sandwich. By Roberts’s own admission, they had no idea what they were doing. But what they had was good taste and a clear vision for a European-style bistro that would give the neighborhood something it didn’t have. Quiche Lorraine. Fettuccine Alfredo. One of the first outdoor dining patios in the Twin Cities. An immaculate wine list. Bread with olive oil for dipping at a time when that was still a novelty.
Muffuletta became the kind of restaurant that a neighborhood builds community around. In that dining room, Roberts would later say, there had been marriage proposals and divorce discussions, funerals, birthday parties, and people out on a Tuesday for no particular reason. The sunny deck became legendary, the mac and cheese became a fixture, and the beer cheese soup was added to the menu in 1977 and has never left.
There was one near-miss for the restaurant. In 1979 or 1980, after a trip to California and a dinner with Wolfgang Puck at Spago, Roberts came home determined to reinvent Muffuletta as the Spago of the Midwest with exotic pizzas, chrome bowties on the wait staff, and lots of California cuisine. Diners didn’t like it. Revenue fell by nearly half before a longtime customer cut through the noise with a simple request: I want my Thousand Island dressing back. The lesson stuck, interesting and unusual was ok, but anything “too weird” wouldn’t be tolerated.
For forty years, Muffuletta trained and launched chefs who went on to shape the Twin Cities dining scene in ways still felt today. It proved that a neighborhood restaurant could hold a standard and hold a community at the same time.
The restaurant closed November 11, 2017. The lease was up just as Como Avenue was about to be torn apart by construction. In all honesty, they’d held on longer than made financial sense. It had been kept open for purely emotional reasons.
Recipes from Muffuletta
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