The protests on 7th Street West in St. Paul last year started small, but they prompted some pointed feedback. Across the street at Mancini’s Char House & Lounge, several of the people walking from the parking lot to the building gave a quiet but unmistakable response: thumbs down.
This wasn’t exactly a surprise. One St. Paul native dubbed Mancini’s “the supper club most likely to be chosen for cop retirement parties.” Even people who loved the place were leery of those sorts of associations—not least the protesters across the street.
When St. Paul natives Jeffrey Austin and Emily Goodhue co-founded the West 7th Gardeners of Resistance in early 2025, fascism was on the rise and they wanted to fight it. Their organization, a subset of the activist group Indivisible, was an offshoot of the West 7th Community Garden, which sits on a triangular plot of land that Austin owns next to the Eyes All Over optical shop on 7th Street West and Dousman Streets.
In April, the Gardeners of Resistance began holding demonstrations on that corner. “There were usually one to six people that stood out there, all summer and into the fall,” Austin says.
Once Operation Metro Surge began this winter, participation swelled. Held every Sunday between 3 and 4 p.m., at 7th and Smith Avenue, the protests have become a neighborhood staple, garnering enthusiastic honks by passing traffic (and the occasional middle finger), with a tuba player huffing along to a boombox playing protest songs. “At one point we had 150 protesters over there,” Austin says.
As for Mancini’s? Well, Austin and the restaurant’s co-owner, Pat Mancini, had long maintained cordial relations, but Austin says politics “never came up” between them.
Then, late last fall, as the Gardeners of Resistance were discussing how to handle potential ICE raids with a number of area businesses, Austin met with Mancini. “We’ve got immigrant staff here, and we want to protect them,” the restaurateur told him. “I think that was maybe an opening for him,” Austin says.
During a late-January protest—the coldest of the year to date—Austin was surprised to see his neighbor show up. “All of a sudden, there’s Pat Mancini,” Austin says. “He intentionally came there. He walked right up to me. He was kind of emotional. And he said, really briefly, ‘You know, there was this call-out on social media about Mancini’s being an ICE institution.’
“And he said, ‘I’m not ICE. We’re not ICE. And our neighbors are being harmed. I’m very concerned about what’s going on in our community, and we want to do something to help. What can we do?’
“So, it was his impetus, which kind of blew me away,” continues Austin, who along with Goodhue would soon start working with Mancini on a fundraiser. “I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve got some ideas. Let’s talk.’”
Within weeks, they would collaborate on an event, the Gathering for Good, that raised $35,000 to aid their neighbors in need—on a Wednesday night during a crippling blizzard.
Nothing about this story seemed likely, until it did.
When Mancini’s announced the Gathering for Good, which took place on February 18, a lot of people were shocked to learn about it, including myself.
When I posted my immediate response on Facebook, I quickly received some kindly worded pushback from an older friend who knows St. Paul, and West 7th in particular, far better than I do. Mancini’s was a community hub, she explained; I should not be surprised at all. I soon saw this same basic exchange—What the hell? followed by Not so fast—happening elsewhere.
“We support our local fire department, our first responders, and our local police,” Pat Mancini says. “So, there could have been some mix-up. People maybe confuse that with being pro-ICE, I guess.”
Sitting behind his office desk, the 65-year-old Mancini, who runs the restaurant with his brother John, exudes genuine warmth—you don’t thrive in hospitality without it. He learned the business from his parents, who’d founded Mancini’s in 1948. (The “Char House & Lounge” was added later.) Pat has worked there 48 of its 77 years in business.
“I spent a lot of time here as a kid watching a small little tavern grow into what it is,” he says. “Our family grew up in Highland Park. My dad grew up here on West 7th. We’re ingrained in the city, from school to business to everything we do.”
Originally, Mancini’s had a capacity of 80 in the restaurant and 30 in the adjoining bar, Pat says. Over time, the family acquired the surrounding houses, expanded their business, and paved a parking lot. Today they sit close to 600 people.
The Mancini family immigrated to the U.S. from Fragneto l’Abate, Italy, and Nick and then Pat grew up on McBoal Street, a two-block lane right off 7th Street West between St. Paul Children’s Hospital and the High Bridge. Initially, their restaurant served 3.2 beer and had a small dance floor. By the mid-’80s, it was one of the Twin Cities’ biggest supper clubs. The expanded lounge would even welcome Tony Bennett as a headliner.
Mancini’s reputation has come the old-fashioned way—quality, longevity, diligence. “It’s very classic and loved, like the Jax or Murray’s of St. Paul,” says Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl, the longtime food critic for Mpls.St. Paul Magazine. That publication recently inducted Mancini’s into its Restaurant Hall of Fame. “Founded in 1948, offering complimentary relish trays and garlic toast ever since, like god intended, Mancini’s is one of our most famed Minnesota treasures,” reads the blurb in the March issue.
The restaurant’s juicy, open-hearth-grilled steaks are justly famed, and the baked potatoes served in foil have a vintage touch that goes perfectly with the velvet-lined walls and convivial atmosphere. But Mancini’s secret weapon is that thick-cut garlic bread—white and dark rye, next to each other—cooked on the same grill as the steaks, giving the toast a smoky kick that you simply don’t get elsewhere.
When Nick Mancini died in 2007, he’d already sold his sons the business. The Pioneer Press obituary noted, “He readied customers for dinner with a handshake at the door, a sly grin, and often a free drink. He was hard-pressed to forget a name. His advertising plan was simple, gratuitous attention.” Nick was fiercely loyal to his customers, once telling a friend: “My advertising budget is I buy drinks.”
That ethos remains intact with Nick’s sons. When I told an old friend from high school who is active in anti-ICE circles that I was working on this story, she relayed a memory. My friend’s mother has dementia; she and her stepfather handle care. “Two years ago, we showed up at Mancini’s with no reservation on Mother’s Day,” she said. “Pat went and got us a table, put roses on it, and comped the meal.”
Mancini’s short distance from the State Capitol has made it a go-to for dignitaries looking to impress visitors—and to raise funds. “Being in the capital city, I am very close to all the legislators and people in Congress,” Pat Mancini says. “From senators to house of representatives on a national level to our local politicians, I always see them.”
Along with politicians Mancini’s has hosted the infant-care nonprofit Second Stork and Scouting America. Mancini calls it “a gathering place for anyone to put together any kind of group they want.”
Mancini is passionate when I carefully ask about the rumor that Mancini’s welcomes members of ICE into his restaurant. “It never hurt business, but it hurts you emotionally, because it’s lies,” he says.
The rumor started shortly after Renee Good’s killing in Minneapolis, when the restaurant received a call from a woman who identified herself as a journalist. Mancini suspects she was from out of town. He does not recall her name, and was unclear about who she represented.
“A person was in our parking lot and thought there was an ICE vehicle in here,” he says. In the brief conversation that ensued, Mancini said that he was ready to help employees in case of an ICE raid: “Absolutely, yes. I’m well educated on immigration laws.”
She then asked if he planned on feeding ICE. Mancini responded with his restaurant’s mantra: “We feed customers.” Soon afterward, he hung up, spooked.
“I don’t know if this is a podcaster from MAGA,” he says. “I don’t know who I’m talking to. Because of that one thing, I got put on a pro-ICE list, or that we fed ICE.
“But I can tell you, my employees can tell you, and my family will tell you—on my father’s grave, I will tell you—that we never saw an ICE agent in here. Or at least they’ve never said they were. We never fed any ICE-agent groups.”
Mancini says that the restaurant opened itself up for dialogue. “We tried to put things out on the internet: ‘Feel free to call Pat or John,’” he says. “And I didn’t receive one phone call.”
When I moved back to Minnesota in early 2016, after leaving Minneapolis 17 years earlier, I wound up in St. Paul, a block off 7th Street West, a short way from downtown. Not really knowing the neighborhood yet, I wandered into Mancini’s, and not only did I eat well, I had also found a real time capsule. Mancini’s is old-school without retro. It isn’t trapped in time so much as doggedly preserved, especially the menu. That bread! That steak! That ambience! I left, as they say, poorer but wiser.
Then that fall Donald Trump got elected, and the tenor of things changed everywhere. Prior to the Gathering for Good, the last time I’d gone to Mancini’s was two summers ago, with friends—a great time, irresistible. But seeing its abundant pro-cop signage (which has lessened recently) did have an unnerving effect. I flashed back to an incident closer to what is now Grand Casino Arena, where Kid Rock had headlined shortly after lockdown lifted.
Eating lunch nearby, I wound up seated next to a large table full of literally screaming far-right lunatic Kid Rock fans, drunk off their faces. Topic A: sedition—no more and no less. They talked like January 6-ers; I’m sure some of them were January 6-ers. Then one began yelling threats at me, just for sitting there; eventually his wife talked him down. I got my check and ran out of there.
That kind of tension has only intensified in the wake of Operation Metro Surge. “A lot of businesses had to close—a lot of grocery stores on Concord Street, for instance,” Mancini says.
There is sometimes palpable distrust in the air. A few West 7th businesses did not close on January 23, to the consternation of at least some of their workers; shortly before the statewide strike, one such staffer told me off-record that “at least two-thirds of the employees here are immigrants.” At least one other business along the corridor, when asked to be part of the Mancini’s benefit, backed away due to the ICE rumors, an employee said off-record.
Those kinds of rumors have also affected other neighborhood businesses, Pat Mancini says. “I’m finding out now, there was people all over West 7th that said the same thing I did—didn’t want to engage on a phone call, so they said something [like], ‘We feed customers. We want to stay in our lane,’” Mancini says. “And because they didn’t take a stand, they were put on a pro-ICE list. Those things all either hurt business or hurt your reputation.”
But while canvassing West 7th businesses about what to do if ICE came knocking, Emily Goodhue of West 7th Gardeners of Resistance encountered one bar manager who said, “We are not here for any of what’s going on. I can’t put a sign on the door because the owner isn’t that way. But know that I am gonna throw down for my employees.”
And the Gathering for Good was hardly the first ICE-related fundraiser in the area. In particular, Austin and Goodhue were encouraged by a January 17 T-shirt printing event that Wandering Leaf Brewing Co. held with the local muralist Audrey Carver. That night raised over $5,400 for the Community Aid Network of Minnesota, a response that kept Carver busy for hours longer than anticipated.
Still, Pat Mancini worried about backlash. “On social media, there were a couple off-cuff remarks that somebody told me about: ‘Is ICE invited?’” he says.
But as showtime approached, Mancini and everybody else had something new to worry about: The snow had been coming down hard for hours. “I remember looking at my bartender—Tim Tschida, former major league umpire—and I said, ‘You know, it’s about a quarter to six. We worked hard, but the weather is the weather,’” Mancini says.
“And within a half-hour, they were coming in every door.”
A woman from a nearby business who had been looking forward to the Gathering for Good arrived at Mancini’s a half-hour after the event started. She and her husband walked in the door, took one look at the crowd, and left. There were just too many people.
“In a way, I think it was good that we had the blizzard, because there was not room for another person in there,” Jeffrey Austin says. In fact, so many people couldn’t get into Mancini’s that they trekked to other nearby restaurants instead. “Emerald Lounge had a very big night,” he says.
The Gathering for Good took place literally mid-blizzard, when the streets had not yet been salted or plowed. In other words, people showed up in startling force despite the roads being reduced to a slalom course. (I can attest that it was not much better on foot, either.) People didn’t just come to this event—they prioritized it. Had the weather been more cooperative, Mancini’s would likely have been even more packed.
Which is hard to imagine. The crowd was roughly two-to-one standing to seated, sometimes seemingly three to one. At times, everyone in a given vicinity would not be able to budge.
And nobody complained—not that you could make out a tenth of what was being said, of course. The room was almost more like a convention floor than a dinner. Everyone seemed equally dazzled by the turnout, by the goodwill, by the sense of shared purpose.
By 7:15, things were more manageable. There were even open seats at a few tables—though most of the people still standing were too politely Minnesotan to take them.
Among the throng were a number of local politicians, including St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her, state Reps. María Isa Pérez-Vega and Samakab Hussein, state Sen. John Hoffman, and St. Paul City Council President Rebecca Noecker. U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum couldn’t make it, but she’d already been there two days before, when Mancini’s had hosted a fundraiser for her.
Pat Mancini estimates they fed 800 people that night, not counting “another at least 200 that didn’t partake in food. We went through 200 pounds of mostaccioli, 70 pounds of meatballs, tons of Caesar salad. We went through over a thousand [chocolate-chip] cookies.”
(Amazingly, the Gathering for Good wasn’t even the only thing going on in the building that night. A pre-booked wedding party, with more than a dozen guests, celebrated simultaneously behind the door of the private-dining Chop Room.)
The money raised—some $35,000, according to Austin and Goodhue, as much as the ticket gross for the Tom Morello/Bruce Springsteen show at First Avenue—went to the Saint Paul and Minnesota Foundation, split between two funds: the Rapid Response Fund and the Community Sharing Fund.
But although this was a fundraiser, the people who came to the Gathering for Good were, overwhelmingly, not activists. Austin estimates the Mancini’s crowd as roughly 20% people who were already involved; Goodhue suggests it might have been closer to 10%. The message was reaching more people than either had expected, or dreamed. There were no thumbs down in this room.
Austin and Mancini each made brief statements over the PA about halfway through the event. Describing the Gardeners of Resistance, Austin told the overflow crowd at Mancini’s, “We made a decision to take a stand, speak out, and invite our neighbors into a community where they could feel safe and heard and express their concerns about the state of our country.” The cheers for that statement were loud—and telling.
Near the end of his remarks, Austin said: “To me, Pat and the Mancini family is what courage and compassion looks like. It’s not, ‘What’s in it for me?’ but ‘How can I help?’”
Mancini’s remarks were personal and from the heart, emphasizing family and community. “As I look back, I think of my grandparents, Italian immigrants, who came here in 1919. My grandfather and my grandmother were very poor,” he said. During World War I, Pat added, “They were fighting off fascism. And my grandfather helped with that,” to huge cheers and applause.
He spoke about his grandmother, who used her good English to help other newcomers get a leg up. “She helped Italian immigrant people, friends, read, learn English, open bank accounts,” he said. “She was really special.” He concluded, in part, “I'm proud and humbled to be here in the restaurant community . . . There's no place like West 7th.”
Over at the info table just past the host stand, an older gentleman approached Emily Goodhue “with his tears in his eyes,” she says. “He was like: ‘My dad fought in World War II against fascism. I can’t believe we’re back here.’” Another older man there with a group of friends said proudly, “We just did a constitutional observer training last night.”
What Goodhue heard the most, though, was: “Thank you so much for doing this. We are so upset about what’s happening, and we are so glad to be here.”
