When South Lyndale Liquors moved a few blocks down Lyndale Avenue in 2023, it was big news. Not only did the new shop take over a massive, 19,500-square-foot space, but it also added a deli and sandwich shop.
That was exciting for folks in a section of deep south Minneapolis that had long been—let’s face it—a sandwich desert. It was also… kind of funny. As the Racket staff sunk our teeth into the new menu, we laughed at the fact that yet another local liquor store was slinging some of the best sandwiches around.
With a few notable exceptions (Lu’s, Clancey's, Kramarczuk's), Minneapolis is not exactly known for its sandwiches. Oddly enough, many of the city’s best sandwiches are those available from local liquor stores. (Yes, fine—from the delis and cheese shops adjacent to local liquor stores; we know the laws.)
Why would that be? To find out, we decided to talk turkey, so to speak, with the folks behind Surdyk’s, France 44, Lake Wine & Spirits, and South Lyndale Liquors.
It Starts With Surdyk’s
You can’t talk about Minneapolis’s liquor store sandwiches without talkin’ Surdyk’s—you can’t even talk about Minneapolis’s liquor stores without talkin’ Surdyk’s. “We were the 11th liquor license in Minnesota,” says Taylor Surdyk, who today runs the store with his sister, Melissa. It was his great-grandfather, Joseph, who opened the shop in 1934, which means Surdyk’s celebrated its 90th anniversary last year.
Back in 1979, the shop moved from its original home at 201 E. Hennepin Ave. to 303 E. Hennepin Ave., where it stands now. That’s when the Surdyk family found themselves with an opportunity.
“There was a part of the store that they were building that they didn’t really know what to do with,” its fourth-generation owner says. “My grandpa actually wanted to put in a tape rental store kind of thing.”
At the time, that would have been a smart idea, and some of Racket’s more nostalgic staffers wouldn’t necessarily mind having a place to rent a movie and buy a six pack in 2025. But Surdyk’s dad had traveled throughout Europe, which introduced him to a style of cheese shop and market that didn’t really exist in the Twin Cities. With the wine business booming, he thought that might be a better bet than a video store. “Which, thank god that happened, because obviously we wouldn’t do as well with a Blockbuster,” Surdyk says.
Surdyk’s began to stock locally made and direct-import cheeses and goods from Europe, along with artisan products like spreads and breads. “And when you put those together, they make a great sandwich,” Surdyk says. Thus, the sandwich menu was born.
Today, the menu is a mix of hot and cold, breakfast and lunch. Sandwiches like the Minneapple Melt ($12.49)—which combines roast turkey, Le Châtelain double-crème brie, crisp apple and red onion, and lingonberry mayo—have been around as long as Surdyk can remember, its origins lost to time.
Along with the liquor store, the deli’s shelves have grown fuller over the decades; these days, you could leave with a sandwich and a set of raclette dishes, or a fondue pot, or house-made mac and cheese, or the fanciest foil-wrapped butter you’ve ever seen.
To Surdyk, these are complimentary goods: wine and cheese, sandwiches and beer. “We like to say that we sell a good time—we sell celebrations,” he says. One of his favorite sandwiches is the Ficelle ($8.49), a long, skinny, and deliciously simple sandwich made with butter and arugula and either prosciutto, ham, or salami. It’s not unusual to see someone wandering the liquor store, Ficelle in hand.
“You can hold it in one hand, and we have a paper wrapped around it, and you can kind of eat it with one hand as you drive or as you’re shopping,” Surdyk says.
France 44: The Three-Ingredient Method
France 44’s Benjamin Roberts has a hunch about why it is that in Minneapolis, liquor stores and sandwiches go hand in hand.
“I think it starts with cheese, honestly,” Roberts says. Though of course he’d say that—he’s the “cheesemonger in chief” at the 44th & France cheese shop. “I think a lot of the wine shops here, especially because you can’t sell alcohol in grocery stores, have this sense that they could be more of a one-stop-shop destination.”
It’s hard to have a standalone cheese shop without offering sandwiches to go with it, he explains, although this is apparently something of a hotly debated topic within the small, independent cheese-shop community.
For Roberts, though, it’s something of a no-brainer: “Sandwiches are just really important to our business model here.” As a whole-animal butcher shop, France 44 has incredible meats, and the cheese case is full of some of the finest wedges from around the world. There’s really no better way to showcase all that than on a sandwich.
“Our ethos here is, we actually make every single thing except for the mayonnaise from scratch,” he says. The sriracha, harissa, chutneys, jams—all are prepared by the France 44 team, along with the pastrami, the smoked turkey, and the ham. (The mayo? It’s Hellman’s.)
When Roberts started making sandwiches at France 44 roughly 17 years ago, his goal was to make the best sandwich possible with just three ingredients: a meat and a cheese that the shop was selling at retail, along with a condiment made in-house. “If I can’t impress you with a prosciutto and brie and olive oil sandwich on a nice piece of bread, then maybe I haven’t done well enough sourcing those products that I sell,” he remembers thinking.
Over the years, the shop has introduced more complicated combinations of ingredients. Sandwiches like the France 44 Club (made with Ferndale Farms turkey, Berkshire bacon, comté fleur, avocado, tomato jam, red onion, romaine, mayo; $17), of which they sell a “terrifying” number, according to Roberts, have joined more pared-back originals like the House Roast Beef (Red Barn cheddar, pickled red onion, grain mustard; $15).
“We have a surprise sandwich ($14), and that’s been a great way to impress people with the quality of the ingredients that we have here and reward people for being adventurous,” Roberts says. It also lets their staff get a little playful and show off their creativity behind the counter.
“We sell so many of those, well beyond what I ever could have imagined,” he continues, and some regulars have favored staff members they’ll go to because they know they like their sandwiches. “That’s kind of fun, because I don’t know that Minnesota’s necessarily known for its adventurous eaters.”
A Taste of New York (and Italy) at South Lyndale Liquors
If you work at a liquor store sandwich shop, as France 44’s Roberts does, it’s very rare that you need to go shopping at another liquor store, or sandwich shop. “But I have gone out of my way to go to South Lyndale and get a sandwich there,” the cheesemonger in chief admits.
The cheese shop/sandwich shop/deli at South Lyndale Liquors only opened in 2023, but owner Dan Campo says the desire to bring good sandwiches to the city goes back decades. His parents opened the liquor store back in 1975, a few years after they relocated to Minnesota from Brooklyn, and he remembers his mom picking up a deli slicer and declaring, “We’re gonna do sandwiches!”
She envisioned something like the small shops scattered about New York, which sold wine and beer and had a great deli. “Of course, it never happened,” Campo says; that deli slicer would sit in the basement for years. But he remembers visiting the East Coast as a kid, and the delicious sandwiches he’d eat on those trips. “The seed got planted for me early, as a little boy,” he continues. “To me, it was always kind of a natural thing, and something I aspired to. I just couldn’t pull it off in the old location.”
The old location, you may recall, did not have a single square foot of space to spare, and so the deli dreams stayed, like so many bottles of beer, on ice. But making the move a few blocks down Lyndale Avenue a year and a half ago more than doubled the liquor store’s footprint, giving Campo the space he needed to open a deli and sandwich shop at last. (Plus, that dreaded old parking lot is a doggy daycare's problem now.)
“Minneapolis… it’s kind of a sandwich desert, in so many ways,” Campo says. Culturally, he reflects, the Midwest is more of a “supper” or “dinner” place. The “quick sandwich thing” is more common on the East Coast, where you’re more likely to catch a train into the city for work, get a quick break for lunch, then catch a train to head back home. The daily commute, the shape of the workday, the walkability of the cities—it all lends itself to sandwiches.
And not just any sandwiches, but good, fresh sandwiches on delicious bread. So when Campo met Matt Bickford, former co-owner of destination sandwich shop Be’wiched Deli in the North Loop, he knew he wanted him to be culinary director of the new food program. Bickford has designed a sandwich menu that sings: the mortadella ($15.95), packed with sweet peppers, fluffy ricotta, crunchy pistachios; the roast pork ($14.95), with a side of savory brodo for dunking.
Many of South Lyndale’s best sandwiches have their roots in Italy, not unlike the Campo family. Bringing these sandwiches to Minneapolis, Campo says, was like slotting in a missing piece in his cultural upbringing.
Especially should you choose to pair one with a pinot grigio or a Sangiovese from the adjacent liquor store.
Lake Wine & Spirits Cheese Shop: Fancy Sammies at Daily Lunch Prices
Ask folks about their favorite sandwiches in Minneapolis, and the first three shops in this story tend to come up a lot. The cheese shop at Lake Wine & Spirits falls more into “hidden gem” territory—all the better for you to saunter right up to the counter and place your order.
At Lake Wine & Spirits, the wine and spirits came first, followed by the Cheese Shop, which opened in October 2010. Not long after, they added sandwiches. (Sensing a pattern here?) “It felt like a natural addition, just like the cheeses felt like a natural addition to the liquor store,” says Michael Spears, who's been managing the cheese shop for about six years.
The menu was a collaborative effort by the staff, and has evolved into a pretty stable lineup of favorites like the longtime best-selling Heidi-Ho pork and mozzarella sandwich ($9.95). Spears’s personal favorite, the Sean ($9.95, and the closest to a classic Italian sandwich), is another best-seller, along with the Lucky Lady ($9.95, and starring a truly excellent lingonberry-horsey mayo).
“Nobody wants to see their favorite gone,” Spears explains, and I get it—were the Cuban Mishap ($9.95), an untouchably delicious riff on a Cubano with pork loin and a creme fraiche Dijon sauce, to disappear, I would be pamphleteering and starting petitions to bring it back. But Spears has also been adding sandwiches seasonally—right now, that’s the Reuben—to keep things fresh.
Spears says he gets why the liquor store and sandwich shop compliment one another so well. “You’re coming into a liquor store, usually you’re getting together with somebody—they have something going on—might as well pick up some sandwiches while you’re here, too,” he says. Besides, a funny thing happens when people walk past the cheese shop on their way into the liquor store: “If they’re not hungry, they’re about to be hungry,” he laughs.
And perhaps you’ve noticed those pre-millennium prices? It’s not unusual to spend $14 or more on a sandwich these days, but most of those at the Lake Wine & Spirits Cheese Shop are under $10. (Best Budget Bites territory!) Spears says that’s not an accident; they like that the prices make Lake a place that’s welcoming to regulars and people from the neighborhood.
“People come in and keep coming in because they love it here,” Spears says.
