If he’s being honest, Chris Montana never especially wanted to open a restaurant.
Well, if he’s being really honest, there was that window in high school when, unimpressed with the quality of barbecue in Minnesota, he thought about a little shop he’d call “Montana’s Ghetto Fabulous Rib Crib.”
But aside from those youthful daydreams, the Du Nord Social Spirits co-founder says he had little interest in the food business. So how did he come to open not one but two Minneapolis restaurants—Lagniappe and the adjacent Du Nord Cocktail Room—in the Coliseum building on Lake Street last year?
“We did it because we wanted there to be energy, and bars and restaurants bring people in and show people, the neighborhood… it can’t just be a check cashing place, you know?” he says. “You need to have a spot for people to come gather and feel like they own the space.”
Montana and his wife and co-founder, Shanelle Montana, had already done that (sans food menu) with their cocktail room at Du Nord’s distillery, the first Black-owned distillery in the country. Located just off Lake Street at 2610 E. 32nd St., that cocktail room, which opened in 2013, felt more like a neighborhood bar—a place to hang that was comfortably come-as-you-are and welcoming to all.
A lot changed during 2020. There was Covid, of course, and the murder of George Floyd and the uprising that followed, the nights Montana spent trying to keep the microdistillery from burning to the ground. But a lot has changed since 2020, too, and Montana feels some frustration with the enduring narrative about this Lake Street corridor.
“This part of town that people who don’t live around here think is on fire and dangerous, how do we get people to come here and get some ownership over a space again?” he remembers thinking.
So, he and Shanelle opened a bar and a restaurant. And good ones, too. I really enjoyed Lagniappe on a first visit and returned to the cocktail room more than once, happy to have another place in the neighborhood to swing by for a drink and a smash burger after shopping at Moon Palace or catching a matinee at the Trylon. Montana grew up in Minneapolis but lives in New Orleans now, and he brought up talented New Orleans chefs with him to create a memorable menu of po’boys and catfish and gumbo unlike anything else in the area.
They wanted to have a physical place where people could interact with Du Nord, but the restaurants both closed at the end of May, after just eight months. But Montana says the closure won’t change much for the business. The distillery is still there, just a few blocks away. Du Nord will continue to produce and ship its spirits out of Minnesota for the foreseeable future.
“I live in New Orleans, but it’s still the community that raised me; I still am a South High kid,” Montana says. “So I still want this area to come back.”
And there’s still the Du Nord Foundation, the charitable arm of Du Nord that the Montanas founded in 2020. This weekend, the foundation will present the second-annual Krewe Du Nord festival, which will take over the parking lot at the Coliseum building with music, dancing, and lots of food. (Lagniappe and the Du Nord Cocktail Room will make a sort-of reappearance for one day only.)
The foundation exists to foster BIPOC economic development, specifically with an eye on bringing more vibrancy to this Longfellow corridor. Montana sees Krewe Du Nord as a key part of that—not just as a festival for the neighborhood, but a “magnet” that will draw in people from other parts of the city and beyond. This year’s performers are the Soul Rebels, St. Paul & the Minneapolis Funk All Stars, Brass Solidarity, and Hipshaker MPLS, and there’ll also be food from Taste the Real ’Nawlins, Mr. Momo, and Big Bell Ice Cream.
It’s all about bringing some life and some noise to a neighborhood that… well, is still in need of a little boost.
“It’s not like life won’t come to this area, it will,” Montana says. “It’s just, if you want to have any kind of influence on what that looks like, if you want to have the Lagniappes instead of national chains or fast food joints or whatever else, well, then you have to intentionally inject some energy into it. Because that’s not necessarily going to be part of business as usual.”
That’s the idea of the Coliseum development, an ambitious plan, launched in 2024, to breathe new life into the 108-year-old, 85,000-square-foot building at 2708 E. Lake St. (Shanelle Montana is a co-owner of the building.) Montana hoped his restaurants might help anchor the space and be a catalyst for more growth, more development, more investment from those who could afford to. His hope now is that, when developers eventually seize on the neighborhood’s distressed properties, the area doesn’t end up populated with the same old national chains you can find anywhere.
“South Minneapolis, to me, isn’t cookie cutter,” he says. “Think about what used to be here: Midori’s Floating World and Gandhi Mahal and El Nuevo Rodeo. There was a little international scene going on … to bring back anything short of that, that doesn't have that kind of diversity and vibrancy, I think would be a failure.”
“That’s part of why I feel—I don’t want to say ‘OK,’ I mean I’m not happy with how this all went down, for a number of reasons,” he continues. “But I can say our goal was to try to inject some energy into this corner … and we tried. It was in line with our mission, and so I feel good about that. I feel good about the fact that we did it.”
