Dara’s Restaurant of the Year

I will never forget the happiness I felt the first time I went to Gai Noi. The whole restaurant, absolutely bustled with what felt like most of Minneapolis. Tables, clinking with big groups (half the indoor tables, and the entire roof, are big tables for groups), craft cocktails made in a flash, just like a cocktail party should be. Laab salads, bright as a meadow, focused to a laser beam of intense herb and spice. Papaya salads so spicy all you can think is: They are not dumbing the food down for the mass market! And price points right around neighborhood hole-in-the-wall prices—$15 chicken curries, a $13 pad Thai. 

And to know that it’s all the work of our home-grown Lao food star chef Ann Ahmed just gives me all the warm fuzzies. The Twin Cities has watched her climb from the tiny suburban strip-mall Lemongrass (now gone) to the more ambitious Lat14, then to wildly ambitious, fine dining Khaluna, before this citywide-party that is Gai Noi.

Gai Noi is my restaurant of the year.

Obviously, a restaurant of the year is a subjective thing. We’ve had a truly remarkable year in restaurants in 2023, with a string of openings as strong as any—mainly due to the pandemic giving chefs and restaurateurs time to plan and think like never before. The Maison Margaux and Porzana openings, Oro by Nixta and Kim’s have all been glorious. Yet, there was something about Gai Noi that particularly made me happy.

I think we will all look back at the pandemic as the signature restaurant event of the era, in the same way that Prohibition changed everything in the industry for quite a while. We didn’t know what we had, then we lost it. When we got something back, in pieces, it was new. Or, that’s what I imagine Prohibition was like, I’m not actually one million years old, though a few times in the past couple of years I have felt it.

Perhaps that’s what I respond to so much at Gai Noi, the feeling of life, liveliness, a city a-buzz, the return of community.

I called up chef and owner Ann Ahmed to ask about the casual vibes. “I really just wanted it to be a place off the park you could pop in to, at 2 o’clock in the afternoon for a snack by yourself, with all your friends spontaneously, you don’t need a reservation, just go.”

Like Kim’s in Uptown, Gai Noi doesn’t take reservations, and it’s so nice to know there are places you can go without battling nine tech dudes’ reservation bots. 

It’s also just very soul-fulfilling to have Lao food get such a palace of hubbub. “I’m lucky to have chosen a career that allows me to learn more about myself year after year,” Ahmed told me. “Laab salads, that is such an iconic dish for Lao people. It’s the national dish, but it means coming together and celebrating each other. And yes, there is tofu laab in Laos, a lot of Buddhist vegans in Laos love it, so that’s why we offer it. But to me it’s a dish that says: No matter how much or how little you have, you share, you offer to people around you. So now there’s a place where people can come to share my team’s laab, and it’s taken me back to that place when I was a young refugee just wanting to cook good food. Gai Noi is a place to share laab.”

So text your friends, put together a group, and go out for some laab and a pina colada whip, and celebrate everything that’s good about living in a city, why don’t you? It’s the people, the experiences, it’s all of us, together.