Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Tatter... See Ya Later?
The bizarre saga of an apparent eviction at Tattersall Distilling—was it a hack that led to the disappearance of more than $100,000 in unpaid rent?—will conclude at the end of 2024, when the distillery closes its northeast Minneapolis cocktail room. Stephanie March at Mpls.St.Paul Mag caught up with co-owner John Kriedler, who shed some light on the financial stuff and confirmed that his company will leave town when its lease is up this year.
Per Kriedler's explanation, he was the victim of a scam: He wired their rent money to an account he associated with his landlord, but which was actually a false front. The money disappeared, and the situation is under investigation, but Tattersall's landlords still want them out—though they're willing to drop eviction proceedings and wait until the end of the year.
"Honestly we hadn't decided what we were going to do at the end of this year after a decade of being here, so this situation sort of made the decision for us," Kriedler told MSP Mag. "It's true our business model has changed, we're not using the space like we used to, but it's where it all began."
Tattersall still has the massive distillery/restaurant/event space that opened in Wisconsin three years ago, and while Kriedler says while they'll look for a cocktail space in Minnesota, it sounds like that'll be a long way off. “The only booze made by a union employee would be whatever is served in the Minneapolis cocktail room,” Mike Appletoft, an ex-Tattersall worker, told Racket in 2021 while describing alleged "retaliation" from management after the Minneapolis shop became the nation's first distillery to unionize in 2020.
The Collateral Damage of the Feeding Our Future Scandal
The Feeding Our Future scandal is objectively bad. Its perpetrators allegedly stole at least $250 million meant to feed hungry children during COVID-19; it has been called the nation's largest pandemic fraud; and, broadly speaking, it's an embarrassing indictment of the way our government gets aid to (or fails to aid) those who need it most. But it's easy to get lost in the scale of the scandal—the overwhelming corruption of it all—and lose sight of the actual people who were hurt.
Sahan Journal's Andrew Hazzard and Joey Peters (who've been doing tremendous coverage of FOF since it broke two years ago) have a great story out today on the scandal's human toll. We meet Deming Lai and Xiaoling Chen, a Chinese immigrant couple who had the unfortunate luck of buying a house that had been purchased by Haji Osman Salad—who made more than $16 million from the scam, according to a federal indictment, and had begun to put some of that stolen money into real estate. He sold the house to the couple at a marked-up rate, which Lai and Chen are still paying today. The story is long and a little confusing, involving the contract-for-deed sales that have targeted immigrant homebuyers in Minnesota (and are currently under investigation by the Attorney General's office). But it's an important look at the ripple effect corruption like this can have, and a reminder that these are not victimless crimes.
Lonely? You're Not Alone!
Minneapolis isn't the loneliest city in America; that would be Washington, D.C., according to a new study from "go-to digital resource" the Chamber of Commerce (not to be confused with the much more official-seeming U.S. Chamber of Commerce). Well, not in the spiritual sense—that's how it refers to the U.S. cities with the most adults living alone, a number that's on the rise, according to Census Bureau data. More than 37 million Americans live alone, making up 29% of U.S. households. Year-over-year, one-person households have increased by 1.1 million, and the pandemic appears to have accelerated the trend, with 2.4 million more people living alone today than in 2019. And Minneapolis? We're a solo-living city, coming in at No. 9, with 84,350 lonely livers representing 43.5% of all households. St. Paul, we love ya, but you're not nearly as lonely: 45,853 single households make up 36.2% of all households in Minnesota's capital city, making it the 54th loneliest in the nation.
MN Sushi Hits Depths of Wiki
One of the few remaining good things about the increasingly neo-Nazi-friendly website that is Twitter/X is the Depths of Wikipedia account. Annie Rauwerda started sharing weird minutia she found while browsing Wikipedia during the early days of the pandemic, and these days the account is a must-follow for lovers of fun facts and obscure info and images that are simply funny. (Is there now a Wikipedia page for Depths of Wikipedia? You bet!) We bring this up today because...
— depths of wikipedia (@depthsofwiki) February 26, 2024
Yes, Minnesota sushi made it to the big time on Sunday, prompting those among DOW's 856,000 followers to quote-tweet with everything from "god bless the midwest" to "🤮🤮🤮." You already know where Racket stands—revisit our recent roundup of local restaurants that serve MN Sushi (aka pickle roll ups, aka Lutheran sushi) here.
