In October 2023, Abraham Gessesse became the new chef-owner of Hyacinth, the 7-year-old Italian restaurant on St. Paul's Grand Avenue. Just a year and a half later, Gessesse was named among the semifinalists for a James Beard award for the first time.
That timeline might make it sound like there was a dramatic change—that Gessesse stormed into Hyacinth with bracing new ideas, ready to make his mark. But if anything, what’s notable about the change in ownership (and the accolades that followed) is how much of itself Hyacinth has maintained. If anything, walking in on a Friday evening in early April years after my first visit, I was struck by the similarities.
“I’m definitely an idea guy, but I don’t have the motivation to try to impose on Hyacinth, on what Hyacinth is,” Gessesse tells Racket. “I’m really about trying to make it the best version of itself.”
Gessesse’s family is from Ethiopia, and they arrived on the East Coast as refugees. (“My mom is very East Coast—she still says, ‘capiche?’”) He was born in Boston and raised in Minnesota, and didn’t speak much English until he started going to school.
“It’s a bit weird, being a Third Culture kid… I didn’t speak English, I wasn’t, at that time, ‘American,’ as much, culturally,” he says. As the years went on, he found himself living between two words. On one side, there was the world occupied by his parents and his community, anchored by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, a strong force there he likens to the Catholic Church in Italy. On the other, there was post-hardcore punk music and death metal.
Gessesse says he could have been a full-time musician, but he found food instead. He studied culinary arts at the Hubert H. Humphrey Job Corps, a free career training program from the U.S. Department of Labor, and in his mid-20s, remembers making a list of all his plans for the future. “I put down a 10-year plan that would end in me owning a restaurant—somehow it worked out,” he says.
Gessesse bought Hyacinth from founding chef-owner Rikki Giambruno in 2023, but he already knew the restaurant well; though he would leave Hyacinth and cook elsewhere for a while, he was the first line cook hired for its 2018 opening. And part of the hesitancy to bring dramatic change is that the restaurant is always changing. Since 2018, it’s been in an ongoing state of evolution, its menu shifting with the seasons and over the years.
“I’m just continuing that,” Gessesse says. The perfect cacio e pepe bucatini ($24/$36) showcases the rewards of that kind of slow, almost imperceptible growth. It’s a dish Hyacinth’s chefs have been refining almost since the restaurant began: grinding fancy peppercorns with a mortar and pestle, toasting them in olive oil, making a sauce with just the lightest hint of butter, enough to coat the noodles and help the peppercorns stick. “We keep the sauce simple, but we apply as much technique as possible to it to bring flavors out of really simple things,” Gessesse explains.
But while he loves traditional foods, he emphasizes that he’s not a traditionalist. Gessesse’s approach takes traditional dishes and adds something a bit more contemporary, with a more modernist flair and a little style. So while a soft and salty circle of flatbread ($10) with burrata ($10) is about as simple and classic as it gets, there are also fried castelvetrano olives stuffed with mozzarella, which would make an ideal State Fair food (complimentary), popping as they do like briny cheese curds. “I think Hyacinth has always had kind of a homey dimension to the food, but we’ve allowed ourselves more, over the last few years, to dive into that a bit more,” Gessesse says.
Then there’s the lamb bolognese with berbere ($24/$36), a dish Gessesse added to the menu within recent months and the first Ethiopian-style dish he’s brought to Hyacinth. Dotted with fresh ricotta and bursting with berbere’s warmth and richness, it’s the cacio e pepe’s foil—the rewards here are in its newness, its richness, the distinct depth of the traditional Ethiopian spice blend. But Gessesse hesitated a bit in adding it to the menu; he says he’s always taking the long view, focusing on where the quality will be in 10 years, not just a year from now.
So how then, and to what extent, do you put your own stamp on a restaurant versus letting it be itself? One way Gessesse is doing so is with popups like Injera Circle, which held its first event in February. “It’s a way for us to explore and discover our Ethiopian heritage, really learning how our families have cooked and applying it and finding our own voice within it,” Gessesse says of the collaboration with fellow Ethiopian chef Yon Hailu.
The resulting Ethiopian fine dining experience is something you can’t find anywhere else in the Twin Cities. (Injera Circle II will take place on April 27; reservations are available here.) And that’s just one of the popup collabs through which Hyacinth’s chef explores culture and food; there’s also 3rd Culture Cuisine (happening next on May 4), which brings Jook Sing’s inventive Chinese-American cooking to Hyacinth for a special coursed event.
When it comes to the future of Hyacinth, Gessesse is focused on maintaining the sense of trust and care the staff all share. You can probably expect more events and cultural collaborations, but other than creative flourishes on the menu here and there, don’t expect too much to change. Gessesse is playing the long game.
“There’s one thing I realized that helped us out a lot: It was just taking a filter off of one of the lights,” he laughs. “I thought about that for like, a year straight, and then I did it. And it’s made such a tremendous difference.”
Hyacinth
Address: 790 Grand Ave., St. Paul
Hours: 5-9 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday
