Last Saturday night was cold, snowy, and dark. Still, Uptown was alive. The air smelled not of Axe body spray, but of onions and cheese. Folks weren’t yet flocking to Reign—it was too early in the evening for that—they were crammed inside a sub shop for its VIP opening.
That’s right: Cheba Hut, the stoner-forward Colorado-based sub shop, is officially open. Outside, a speaker played a mix of gentle rasta tunes and bubbly house music. Inside, the air was hot and oniony as folks pounded beers and Red Bulls between hugging friends and standing in line for garlic bread.
There was reason to celebrate, as the path to opening has been messy. In 2022, a franchisee announced plans to open Minnesota’s first Cheba Hut in the Asher apartment complex at 1125 Lagoon Ave.—just in time for legalized weed. Then came renovation delays, failures to pay rent, and an eventual eviction. In August of 2025, new franchisees Nick Reckinger and Matt Alexander stepped in and took over the project, and here we are.
Cheba Hut gets its name from “cheeba,” an old term for weed, but there’s no THC to be found here. This is a chain born in a pre-legalization era, one where businesses could only wink at you by referring to their toasted subs as “toasted” subs—even if they are just toasted subs.
This branding does get a little sticky, sorry, “sticky,” when it comes to the modern weed era. Here in Minnesota, we have places that will sell you food, drinks, and candy laced with THC. We even had a THC restaurant, Hi Flora, at one point. So it didn’t surprise me that, on both of my recent trips to Cheba Hut, I heard some chatter about whether or not the food here will get you high. It will not, and not having that option kinda makes the branding feel dated.
You can get drunk at Cheba Hut, however. They have a full bar and a specialty cocktail menu serving brightly colored, collegiate-coded drinks with names like “Hash Can,” “Dirty Hippie,” and “Buzzed Bong Water.”
Inside the set up is reminiscent of a Subway, a cool Subway. The self-serve drink station reads “cotton mouth cures,” offering Pepsi products and a pic of Ice Cube over the ice dispenser (stoner kiddos: I actually just recommend water). There are also a variety of Kool-Aid flavors available. The walls are festooned with stoned animals and slightly altered corporate mascots: a tree with red eyes, hip-hop pigs and crows, a Pillsbury Doughboy fishing on the Mississippi.
It was way too busy for food at Saturday’s VIP party, so I opted to pick up a bunch of items to go on Monday, Cheba Hut Uptown’s official opening day. With the stoner branding, I was expecting subs heavy on cheese, mayo, and grease. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the focus here seems to be less of a gut bomb and more balanced.
The subs are crunchy and toasted (think Pizza Luce bread), while the veggies are fresh and doused with vinegar-forward dressing. The A-Train was a mix of melty cheese, marinara, garlic butter, and crunchy green peppers, while the Power Plant was a salad in a sandwich, with plenty of dressing and hummus to make it satisfying.
While nothing that I tried blew me away, I also wasn’t disappointed. You can get subs in 4-, 8-, and 12-inch lengths (referred to as “nugs,” “pinners,” and “blunts,” of course). I went for the 4-inchers, which set me back about $7 each. That’s about what a Subway meal deal goes for, but this is much better. The bread is real, the dressing is saucy, the fixins are fresh, and this is a style of sub you don’t see everyday in Minnesota. So while Cheba Hut won’t “give” you the munchies, they will give you some satisfactory munchies… if you pay them first.
Cheba Hut
Location: 1118 W. Lake St., Minneapolis
Hours: 10 a.m. to midnight Sunday through Thursday; 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. Friday and Saturday.
