Small Space, Big Flavors: Welcome to St. Paul’s New Hey Bear Cafe

If you encounter a bear in the wild, it’s important to stay calm, stand your ground, and make some noise—say, “Hey bear!”—while making yourself as big as possible. 

The new Hey Bear cafe on Raymond Avenue in St. Paul might have missed that last part; at just 700 square feet, this is a shop that’s almost as small as possible. That footprint includes the 20-seat dining room and the kitchen, which you can peer into while you order at the counter—a grizzly could probably stretch its big, furry arms from one side to the other. 

That makes it all the more impressive when you hear just how much is coming out of it: biscuits, coffee cake, and scones are all scratch-made daily. The mojo pork for the Cuban, the roasted beets for the vegetarian sandwich, the pickles, the smoked scallion aioli, and even the corned beef for the reuben are made in-house.   

Hey Bear is owned by Shawn Person, who’s also behind Roundtable Coffee Works just down the block. And one thing he’s heard time and time again during the decade he’s spent running his coffee shop is that people really, really wanted a place nearby to grab a good breakfast sandwich. 

“I feel like the neighborhood’s really been craving something like this,” Person tells Racket. “We’ve done 10 years of market research, I guess.”

When the former Foxy Falafel space at 791 Raymond Ave. opened up steps from Roundtable, he decided to jump on it. He brought on kitchen manager Oskar Johnson and GM Betsy Fabes to help hone his vision for Hey Bear, which includes accessible pricing, scratch-made everything, and a generally cheery and pleasant vibe. Y’know, “a place that’s designed for the neighborhood,” Fabes says. 

The result is this tiny, takeout-focused cafe that caters to the folks who live and work in the St. Anthony Park neighborhood. The streamlined sandwich menu is available all day from open to close, along with tea and coffee roasted by Roundtable. 

“You can have a reuben at 8 in the morning if you want!” Fabes jokes, then reconsiders. “We actually do sell some reubens in the morning.”

And everything on the menu is less than $10, including tax. 

“My goal, literally, when I built this menu and priced everything out, was to get written up in Racket on the Best Budget Bites column,” Johnson grins.

You’ll be shocked to find that $7.50 can still get you a breakfast sandwich as good as this one, with its soft square of souffle-style egg blanketed by American cheese. I didn’t bring my tape measure, but it must have been close to three inches tall, thanks in part to the towering biscuit: soft, craggy, nicely salty—and of course, house-made.

“When we were talking about the idea behind all the sandwiches, the guiding principle, it’s: two napkins, no leftovers,” Fabes explains. “Nothing that’s aggressively messy, and the portion size is a reasonable amount of food for a person to have for breakfast for lunch.”

Hey Bear also serves up a killer Cubano ($8), with melt-in-your-mouth roasted pork, smoky ham, Swiss, and pickles pressed between pillowy soft bread. “I based it off the Cubano at Victor’s—it’s my favorite sandwich in the city,” Johnson says. His version is for sure a two-napkin, no leftover sandwich… if only because it’s so good you’ll finish it no matter how full you might be. 

The cafe’s compact size and small staff does provide some limitations. Eventually Johnson would like to introduce more seasonal sandwiches (there’s a case of collard greens awaiting experimentation as we speak), or rotate the scones more regularly—a tricky thing to do when there’s no designated baker on staff. 

The name “Hey Bear” is sort of an inside joke between Shawn Person and his wife, Megan; they started saying it during a trip to Denali National Park, where bears were everywhere, and they made a plan to retire up north in bear country, using the name for their post-retirement cafe. When Person ended up opening the cafe pre-retirement… well, the name was too cute not to use.

It’s been a hit—folks have been dropping in because “bear” is their term of endearment for their partner, or just because they like bears. While we chat, a young girl comes in with her mom in tow; she saw the cute, cartoony bear on the sign and had to know what was going on inside. (She’s slightly disappointed to learn this isn’t a Build-A-Bear situation, but she leaves with a Hey Bear sticker.) 

And hey, there’s always room for a sister cafe on the North Shore. 

“If we do ever retire, then we’ll have a second location,” Person chuckles.

Hey Bear Cafe
Address: 791 Raymond Ave., St. Paul
Hours: 7:30 a.m. - 2:30 p.m. Tuesday - Saturday