Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Satisfying to Whom, Exactly?
Back in 2022, Racket's Jay Boller spoke with Urban Wok's Reuben Moore about the planned restaurant at 48th & Chicago in south Minneapolis. At the time, Moore said Urban Wok, which had already had a "coming soon" sign up in the window for many months, was set to open that April, making it the third location for the small local chain.
The sign stayed up for a few more years, but Urban Wok never did open. (The increasingly dusty signage became something of a neighborhood punchline.) And then, earlier this year, a new sign went up in the window, this one advertising something called "Satisfy Eats." A clunky and sort of alien-impersonates-human name, sure, but hey... at least something would be going into that prime corner space!
Except it hasn't. A local Instagrammer reported that the restaurant was planning a June 1 opening. Didn't happen. That date was pushed back to June 21, according to a note that's still posted on the Satisfy Eats homepage, but the restaurant still isn't open... despite the site saying the the Vietnamese spot is open today until 8 p.m. (Per our Google Lens searches, the dishes pictured on the website come from stock photography—it's not even their food!) A month ago, folks on Reddit began to wonder if Satisfy Eats would ever open, and that chatter started up again today. We've gotten calls and emails from curious and/or disgruntled readers wondering if something will actually go into that godforsaken space.
It doesn't look good: When we called the restaurant earlier this afternoon, the phone just rang and rang before eventually disconnecting. From a customer service standpoint and an ingratiating yourself to the neighborhood standpoint, not super satisfying! This is Cheba Hut all over again...
High School Softball Players Get No Respect
"Minnesota softball has a Title IX problem," reports Maggie Mertens in this excellent and infuriating Defector story.
We open on a 2023 game between Washburn High School and district rival Southwest—a game that started late, when the umpire's schedule needed to be accommodated, and ended early, when an adult slow-pitch league showed up and essentially kicked the young women athletes off the field. (Not exactly the point of the story, but as an adult softball player... what the fuck, guys?)
Unfortunately, this sort of scenario isn't uncommon in Minneapolis high school softball. Writes Mertens:
Such a scene would not have been shocking to anyone well versed in Minneapolis high school softball leagues. One of those people is Jeanne Lawless, who had been struggling to find her daughter a stable place to play softball since she was in the fourth grade. The biggest problem was always finding a field to play on.
“There were no fences, or no protected dugouts, it’s never chalked for softball,” Lawless said. “There’s never scoreboards, there’s never lights, there’s never any of those things.”
Mertens details the struggles parents and athletes have faced, from trying to convince the Park Board and Minneapolis Public Schools that this is a problem worth fixing to a U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights complaint that, thanks to the Trump administration, will probably never be resolved. (Trump has laid off hundreds of OCR employees and closed more than half of the country's OCR offices, including the office overseeing Minneapolis.)
"The federal government has publicly pointed out one big concern with softball in Minnesota: It is now investigating the state’s Department of Education and State High School League after a softball team that advanced to the state tournament included a trans athlete," Mertens writes.
More Baffling Becka Thompson Behavior
Back in May, we wrote about Minneapolis City Council hopeful Becka Thompson's "quotable campaign," a phrase we did not mean complimentarily!
She's called her critics "indoctrinated college students" and compared them to Hitler Youth. She’s claimed that it’s "racist" to say “MAGA has no place in Minneapolis.” Most notoriously, Thompson’s comment that she “might not have the right haircut, or the desired amount of melanin” for the job made the Daily Mail. (“Melanin is a natural pigment that determines the color of skin, hair, and eyes,” the U.K. tabloid helpfully explains.)
Thompson did apologize in May for the remarks implying that her Bengali-American opponent, current Ward 12 Council Member Aurin Chowdhury, was elected because of the color of her skin. But then earlier this week, Thompson, who has really been posting through it, shared a video in which she said Ward 10 Council Member Aisha Chughtai won because she's a “nice, young, you know, ethnic woman” who pretended to be more moderate than she is. If you don't want to watch the rambling, hallucinatory-seeming 10-minute TikTok, the relevant section has been clipped here.
So far Thompson has not apologized for these remarks, instead going on a yet another bizarre TikTok rant (the woman does love her TikToks) about how the video was a deepfake (???) made by Wedge LIVE!'s John Edwards, whom she then goes on to disparage at length. The running Scooby Doo GIF is a nice touch.
“Don’t you find it curious that the single, lesbian, public school teacher, working mom who survived domestic abuse and has dedicated her life to children of color is being attacked by a straight white man and people are taking the straight white man’s view of events?” Thompson asks the Strib's Deena Winter, who reported on the candidate's latest racist remarks. (Thompson has filed complaints against Edwards and independent journalist Taylor Dahlin with the Campaign Finance Board; these claims were dismissed.)
Edwards counters Thompson with the obvious: “People are taking the view of events that she’s providing in her own campaign emails and videos.”
Willmar's Halal Food Shelf
Hey, how's about some less blood-pressure-raising news here to send us off? For MPR News, Sarah Thamer reports that a new halal food shelf in Willmar is "helping fill both empty pantries and overlooked needs."
Open since July 25, the Community Connector Services-launched food shelf specifically addresses food insecurity within the Muslim community. "The need in our community is urgent and growing. Traditional food shelvfes often don't offer halal certified options,” Executive Director Abdifatah Mohamed tells Thamer. Second Harvest Heartland, which is supporting the shelf, says Willmar is a "focus community" with specific needs and barriers. The new food shelf served 40 families during its first weekend.
Correction: A previous version of this article misidentified the targets of Becka Thompson's racial remarks. We regret the error.
