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The 5 Best New Restaurants in Northeast Minneapolis

Northeast Minneapolis has always been the city's creative soul, and 2025 is proving it. These five new restaurants are redefining what it means to eat local.

Victim of the Beast 666

In Salt Lake City Cemetery, a modest red granite headstone has drawn curiosity-seekers for decades. It marks the grave of Lilly E. Gray, who died in 1958 at age 77. Below her name and dates is a single, enigmatic line: "Victim of the Beast 666." Ghost hunters love it. Conspiracy theorists have spun elaborate tales. The real story involves a paranoid husband, a grudge against the government, and a reminder that the most compelling mysteries sometimes have the most ordinary explanations.

The Night of the Axeman

They called it the worst crime in Colorado Springs history. On a September night in 1911, someone entered two homes and killed six people with the blunt end of an axe — a man, his wife, their toddler, and a woman with her two children. Every victim's face was covered with a sheet. Every mirror in the houses was draped. The killer vanished and was never found. A century later, researchers believe the murders were the work of a serial killer who rode the railroads across America, leaving a trail of axe murders from Colorado to Iowa.

The Highway Over the Graves

For a century, Dallas built over its dead. Freedman's Cemetery was established in 1869 for formerly enslaved people — the only place in the city where Black residents could bury their dead. By 1900, over 5,000 people lay there. Then the city forgot. Roads were built. The cemetery disappeared from maps. In 1990, construction crews discovered they'd been driving over graves for generations. What they found forced Dallas to confront a history it had literally buried.

The Founding Tragedy

In 1918, the Spanish flu reached Alaska and devastated the Dena'ina Athabascan people who had inhabited the Anchorage region for centuries. Approximately 50% of the Dena'ina population in the Cook Inlet region died. Eight villages were completely abandoned. The founding of Anchorage and the near-extinction of its original inhabitants happened simultaneously — and the city has never reckoned with this coincidence.

The Wettest Dry Town in Alaska

In 1917, Alaska banned alcohol sales — two years before national Prohibition. Anchorage, a rough railroad town of 1,900 people, responded predictably: it became one of the wettest dry towns in America. Bootleggers landed contraband at a hidden cove on Cook Inlet. Forty speakeasies operated openly. The legendary "Phantom Swede" ran liquor with impunity. Children earned $5 bounties for reporting illegal stills. Anchorage was born drunk, and Prohibition only made it thirstier.

The Tornado That Taught Us Everything

The 1957 Fargo tornado killed 13 people and destroyed over 1,300 homes. But its greatest impact was scientific. A young meteorologist named Ted Fujita spent weeks studying the devastation, analyzing 200 photographs frame by frame. His groundbreaking research introduced terms like "wall cloud" and "tail cloud" to meteorology. It eventually led to the Fujita Scale — the F1-to-F5 system we still use today. Modern tornado science was born in Fargo's rubble.

The Halloween Massacre Denver Forgot

Denver's Chinatown was thriving in 1880 — laundries, restaurants, over 400 residents in a neighborhood called Hop Alley. Then, on Halloween night, a bar fight escalated into a race riot. A mob of 3,000 white men destroyed every Chinese business, beat residents in the streets, and lynched a man named Look Young. The Chinese consul demanded reparations. The federal government refused. The killers were acquitted. For 142 years, Denver's only marker blamed the victims. It wasn't corrected until 2022.

The Son Who Bombed His Mother's Plane

Minutes after takeoff from Denver's Stapleton Airport, United Airlines Flight 629 exploded in midair, killing all 44 people aboard. The FBI investigation led to a shocking discovery: the bomber was one of the passengers' own sons, who had planted dynamite in his mother's luggage for insurance money. Jack Gilbert Graham became one of the first people executed for federal murder. The case changed aviation security forever.

The Neighborhood Under the Highway

For over sixty years, Dobyville was a thriving African American neighborhood in the shadow of Hyde Park's mansions. The people who worked in those mansions — cooks, maids, gardeners, drivers — built homes and raised families just blocks away. Then, in the 1970s, Tampa decided it needed a highway. Dobyville was in the way. The city demolished the entire neighborhood, scattered its residents, and paved over the memory. Today, cars pass over where the community used to be at 60 miles per hour. There is no marker.

When Seattle Was Coal Country

For fifty years, King County was one of the largest coal-producing regions west of the Mississippi. Mines in Newcastle, Renton, and Black Diamond employed thousands. Chinese workers did the most dangerous jobs. Indigenous Duwamish people were displaced to make way for the mines. Then oil replaced coal, the mines closed, and Seattle became the tech-and-coffee city it is today. Most Seattleites have no idea their city was built on coal — or that abandoned mine shafts still run beneath their suburbs.

The Great Mill Disaster: When Flour Exploded

The Washburn A Mill was the world's largest flour mill — a seven-story giant powered by St. Anthony Falls. On the evening of May 2, 1878, accumulated flour dust ignited. The explosion was heard ten miles away. Eighteen workers died instantly. Six nearby mills were destroyed. The disaster changed how the world thought about industrial safety — and gave birth to modern Minneapolis.

From the Horn of Africa to the Land of 10,000 Lakes

They came from a country where the temperature rarely drops below 70°F to a state where it regularly hits -20°F. They had no word for snow in their language. Now Minneapolis is home to the largest Somali population outside of Africa — over 100,000 people who transformed Cedar-Riverside into "Little Mogadishu," built an economy worth $8 billion, and sent a refugee to Congress. This is the story of how Minnesota became the unlikely capital of the Somali diaspora.

The Lost Speedway: NASCAR's Forgotten Raleigh Track

In the 1950s, Raleigh had a NASCAR superspeedway — a one-mile oval where legends like Lee Petty and Fireball Roberts competed under the first nighttime lights in racing history. Bill France Sr. built it to rival Daytona. Then the city complained about noise, banned Sunday racing, and killed it. The track closed in 1958. Today, only a fragment of the backstretch survives, hidden in the woods near an industrial park.

The Max Headroom Incident: TV's Only Unsolved Hijacking

On November 22, 1987, someone wearing a Max Headroom mask hijacked the signals of two Chicago television stations. For 90 seconds, viewers watched a distorted figure make bizarre statements, moan, and get spanked with a flyswatter. The FBI investigated for years. Nobody was ever caught. It remains the only unsolved broadcast signal intrusion in American history — and one of the creepiest unsolved mysteries of the analog TV era.

The Trunk Murderess: Phoenix's Most Infamous Crime

On October 16, 1931, a medical secretary named Winnie Ruth Judd killed her two friends in Phoenix, dismembered one of them, packed the bodies in trunks, and boarded a train to Los Angeles. She was caught when the baggage handler noticed the smell. The trial made national headlines. She was sentenced to hang, declared insane, and spent decades in an asylum — from which she escaped seven times, once living undetected for six years. This is Phoenix's most infamous true crime story.

Mill Ends Park: The World's Smallest Park

In 1948, Portland newspaper columnist Dick Fagan looked out his office window and saw a leprechaun digging in an abandoned hole in a traffic median. He caught the leprechaun, wished for a park, and got exactly what he asked for: a circle two feet across, officially the world's smallest park. For decades it had a tiny swimming pool, hosted snail races, and was home to "the only leprechaun colony west of Ireland." Portland has never stopped being weird.

Punk Rock in a Bomb Shelter: The Village Underground

From 1971 to 1984, a Cold War bomb shelter beneath Raleigh's Village District hosted The Ramones, Iggy Pop, The Police, Sonic Youth, and David Sedaris's high school imagination. The entrance was designed to look like a NYC subway station. Now it's sealed beneath a grocery store. Your organic kale sits directly above where punk happened.

When Tesla Blacked Out Colorado Springs

In 1899, Nikola Tesla chose Colorado Springs for the ultimate mad scientist experiment: generating artificial lightning. His 80-foot tower produced 135-foot electrical discharges — so powerful they fried the local power company's generator and plunged the city into darkness. The site of his laboratory is now a parking lot with a small plaque.

When the Ground Turned to Liquid: The 1964 Alaska Earthquake

On March 27, 1964, the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in North America struck Alaska. At 9.2 magnitude, it shook for four and a half minutes. Entire neighborhoods liquefied and slid into the sea. The landscape was permanently altered. You can still walk through the scars.

Blucifer: The Demon Horse That Murdered Its Creator

Denver International Airport is greeted by a 32-foot blue mustang with veins bulging and eyes glowing hellfire red. The sculpture killed its creator when a piece fell on him, severing an artery. Locals call it Blucifer. The airport sells merchandise about it. Welcome to Denver.

The Phoenix Lights: What Thousands of People Saw

On March 13, 1997, thousands of Arizona residents witnessed a massive V-shaped formation of lights moving silently across the sky. Pilots, police officers, and the Governor all reported seeing it. The Air Force blamed flares. Twenty-five years later, the Phoenix Lights remain one of the most witnessed and documented UFO events in history.

D.B. Cooper: The Man Who Vanished

On November 24, 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper hijacked Northwest Orient Flight 305, collected $200,000 in ransom, and parachuted into the Washington wilderness. He was never found. The FBI officially closed the case in 2016. The Pacific Northwest never stopped looking.

The Dream of the Nineties

The Butcher Baker

Robert Hansen was a man of contradictions that should have been visible but somehow weren't. By day, he ran Hansen's Bakery in downtown Anchorage, a respected small business that made breads and pastr...

On the Bed of a Vanished Lake

Sunshine and Hustle

Zion in the Desert

The Will to Exist

Meeting of Waters