Sameh Wadi to Bring Back Saffron

It's time.

by

It was a restaurant way ahead of its time. 

Chef Sameh Wadi opened Saffron, his fine dining Middle Eastern restaurant in the Warehouse District, in early 2007. He was 23 years old. 

"Everyone was doing gastropubs because all the cheffy restaurants, like Levain, Five, they were all closing," Wadi told me over coffee. "So I go and open a fine dining Middle Eastern restaurant with white tablecloths." At 23. He couldn't even rent a car!

"I shouldn't have rented an entire restaurant location!" Wadi laughed. "But honestly, I opened it because there was nothing like it when I moved to the United States. There were no Middle Eastern restaurants. There were no Middle Eastern chefs. The closest thing was the Barbary Fig in St. Paul, and I used to go eat there all the time. But it was more North African than the Middle Eastern food I grew up eating."

Wadi remembers looking for some kind of connection in the kitchens he was working in. "Nobody was cooking this food. But at least Tim McKee understood the language. I remember walking into Solera, and my eyes went up to the shelf with all the books. I scanned it, wondering: What are these people reading, do we speak the same language? He was the only chef I knew that had Paula Wolfort's couscous cookbook. I was like, I need to work for this guy."

"But eventually, I realized: I need to be this guy. I need to be the Middle Eastern chef that young cooks can look up to."

Saffron did exactly that. It carved a massive opening for cooks and eaters in the Twin Cities who were seeking more than just hummus from the deli. Nobody really even knew what Kofta meatballs were, let alone that they might come to love Na’anik sausage or order lamb brain from a menu. Over a decade, Wadi, along with his ever-smiling brother Saed, greeted and fed thousands at Saffron, even publishing The New Mediterranean Table cookbook along the way.

The restaurant closed in December 2016. "The building we were in was sold, and I think the new owners were way over their heads. It was chaos, and when they refused to fix the HVAC in our kitchen, I knew I didn't want to sign a new lease with them, so we were done."

While he was busy with other projects, like Milkjam Creamery, World Street Kitchen, and Grand Catch, Saffron never left his mind. Wadi found a space in 2019 that he thought might be great for Saffron, but then decided to focus on a project that had already begun rolling: an ice cream factory. He was ready to sign a lease on that in early 2020, when COVID hit and the deal fell apart. After the pandemic and the uprising, Wadi is sure that neither locations would have made it.

He's learning to listen to the universe a bit more.

"Coming out of the pandemic, I think my body was just like: chill the fuck down, child you're not ready. So all last year I was at home, just cooking. It was the first summer I've ever taken off since I moved to this country when I was 13. It reset me. It brought me closer to the food as I re-explored old recipes that I hadn't cooked in a while." Wadi felt that the time off was what led him deeper into the foods of his family, which brought back something he felt missing.

"Like naturally fermented leavened bread that is cooked on river rock. You can't make that when you have to go to service, then to work the food truck, and then come back and make ice cream before you take a meeting. You can't do that. And you don't get close to the food, even if you did have a Monday or Tuesday off. But I didn't leave my house because I was not feeling good. So I could watch this process of a 48-hour fermentation. Just slow fucking ferment on this bread, and I'd cook it on river rock. And the closer that I got to it, the more I understood: this is really good food. I'm actually a decent cook, I'm not a terrible cook."

Wadi made a Palestinian dish with this bread for his mother when she came over for dinner. "M'sakhan is a dish that uses this river bread soaked in olive oil flavored with stewed onions, and there's roast chicken on top. I invited my mom and my sister and my cousin over, and I made the bread in front of them. My mom had not seen that bread being made like this since she was a kid in the Middle East, she couldn't believe it, she kept saying: my son knows how to make this."

That was the moment that Wadi decided it was time.

"I realized that this was a waste of energy. I need to do something with this. As days went by, it became clearer and clearer that I needed to re-open Saffron. Over the past few years, people kept telling me: 'We miss Saffron, we miss Saffron.' Me too, right? And then suddenly I was like, oh, you're an idiot. People are telling you what you need to be doing next and you're saying me too. As if it's not in your power. So I told Saed, I want to re-open Saffron and he said: I'm ready. Let's do it."

The Wadi brothers feel perfectly positioned to do this right now. Their teams at both World Street Kitchen and Milkjam are solid, some of them are original employees going back 18 years. When they recently hinted at their plan internally, many staff were excited to be on the journey with them. 

What will Saffron look like today, in the hands of a chef who is now in his 40s and seen some things?

"In terms of the food," Wadi explained, "I think the credibility and soulfulness of Saffron is the thing that I personally miss the most. That's going to be the highlight of it. And we're just gonna tighten it up and be a little bit more hyper-focused on the Middle East and North Africa and less of the rest of the Mediterranean. And there are so many regional differences that people don't understand. When they think of Middle Eastern protein, they think lamb. But in Kuwait, it's predominately fish. This time I want to focus more on that, the originality, and celebrate the Levant in particular because that's where my roots come from. You know my parents' cookbook is all Palestinian cooking. So reading through some of those recipes, I kept thinking: This will be killer on the menu."

If you want to see some of the dishes Wadi has been playing with just check out his Instagram, be prepared to get hungry.

Saffron does not have a lease signed as of today, but there are a few spots in play. Sameh Wadi is hoping to create a great partnership with a new landlord somewhere in Minneapolis, because he wants to build something important. Again. 

"This is my legacy, I want to build this back into our food culture in town. It's time."