‘It isn't just hotdish’: Justin Sutherland on what gets him excited about the food at Allianz Field

‘It isn't just hotdish’: Justin Sutherland on what gets him excited about the food at Allianz Field
By Jeff Rueter
Mar 26, 2019

When you cover soccer in the United States, you get used to conducting your interviews without interruption. Conversations with players like Clint Dempsey and Zlatan Ibrahimovic usually take place in controlled settings, tucked away from the public eye. As the sport continues to grow in popularity, players can still go unrecognized outside of a soccer environment—a point hilariously proven when a fan asked Bastian Schweinsteiger to take a photo of herself with other Chicago Fire players.

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But try taping an interview with a celebrity chef as members of the public are eating and drinking next to their favorite contestant from a reality cooking show and it’s a very different experience. During my 10-minute conversation with Justin Sutherland at the Allianz Field brew hall last Friday, I twice pulled a Schweinsteiger as strangers interrupted our interview, handed me their cell phones, and posed for a snap with the chef who is masterminding the cuisine for the opening of the new stadium. Wearing his “In Diversity We Trust” hat by Hybrid Nation (his brother’s clothing line) and sporting a well-maintained beard, Sutherland is easy to pick out in a crowd, and this crowd was eager to pick him out.

“It happens at least a dozen times a day,” Sutherland said with a laugh. “It’s started happening in men’s bathrooms. I’ve been shaking a lot of hands and taking selfies in men’s rooms. It’s like, are you comin’ or goin’?”

Sutherland has lived in Saint Paul since attending Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Atlanta 12 years ago, and recently he has begun to attract attention at the local and national levels. He opened the Handsome Hog in 2016, serving as its executive chef. Late last year, Sutherland took over as a managing partner of Madison Restaurant Group, which includes Ox Cart Ale House and Public Kitchen + Bar. He earned a rare victory at Kitchen Stadium during a 2018 episode of “Iron Chef: America” on Food Network. He also competed in the most recent season of “Top Chef,” winning a trio of quickfire challenges on the way to a top-half finish. As one fan asked for a photo, she stated her belief that he should have won the competition outright.

“Thank you,” he said. “Me too.”

In recent months, Sutherland has taken on a new challenge: feeding the masses at MNUFC matches. Over the winter, he joined Minnesota United as a culinary consultant to help develop the cuisine that will be on offer at Allianz Field.

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As I reported this piece, I kept hearing the term “food story” from Sutherland and other people working on the project. They use it to describe what a menu says in a collective sense about the venue that is offering the food and the people who are eating it.

Among Sutherland’s first decisions in helping craft this stadium’s food story? Bypass trying to learn the industry standard for stadium fare altogether. It helped that he would be working closely with Bill Van Stee, Allianz Field’s executive chef and a 10-year veteran of Delaware North, the company that also runs the food services across the river at Target Field, as well as at MetLife Stadium, outside New York City, and London’s Wembley Stadium.

“I actually did the opposite,” Sutherland said. “I don’t know if there’s a business model or plan for that, but if there is, I didn’t want to find it. I wanted this to be organic, and it’s a learning process for me. I wanted to go with my gut and make it work. Chef Bill and Delaware North are really great to work with, and I think we’re pretty ready for the season.”

Van Stee has lived in Minnesota his entire life, save for his time at the French Culinary Institute in New York. Working at Target Field gave him experience in feeding tens of thousands of patrons across a few hours of baseball. But as Van Stee notes, serving soccer fans is a very different proposition.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said the phrase ‘this isn’t baseball,’” Van Stee said. “The flow is so different. In baseball, people get up and move every inning or two as the game just sort of happens in the background. I talked to a friend of mine who runs D.C. United’s food and he said once the game starts, it’s a ghost town. You won’t hear anybody, you won’t sell any food. When halftime comes, it’s the busiest 20 minutes you’ll ever experience in sports. The whole first half is getting ready to feed a whole stadium in 20 minutes.”

The heart of the stadium’s dining experience might be the Brew Hall, which was opened to the public on Friday. It has 96 taps and an offering of bar snacks. The team’s aspirations for the space go beyond serving a gameday audience. Whereas the food at most ballparks caters to a captive audience, the Brew Hall will be open on non-match days as well, which means they’re counting on people actually wanting to eat there.

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Many stadiums will partner with Anheuser-Busch or MillerCoors for their official beer, but Allianz Field’s main partners will be Surly and Summit—one brewery from Minneapolis, another from Saint Paul. That level of creative control flows beyond the pints poured and onto the food menu.

In the name of journalism, I sampled a pair of items on the Brew Hall’s menu, starting with the brisket pub nachos. Every ingredient is prepared in-house, with brisket, nacho cheese, green onions, jalapeños, seasoned sour cream and bacon layered over a pan of potato chips.

It was enough to make our team of editors jealous over Slack.

“Everybody does a nacho, but we wanted to have fun with what they’d be like in a brew hall,” Van Stee said. “How can you Americanize a nacho more than it already kind of is? You’ve got the MyBurger concept, and those guys have been great to work with here. It’s what I’d want to eat if I was drinking a beer at the pub. We’re frying the chips here, braising briskets here, and creating it all in-house. And we got to have Cloverdale bacon, which is a local partner who’s going to be in a couple of places.”

Throughout our interviews, Sutherland and Van Stee rattled off a list of popular local restaurants that will help feed the masses in Allianz Field’s first year. Among the first batch of options to be revealed: El Burrito Mercado, Shish on Grand Avenue, Hot Indian, Brasa, Afro Deli and the Carolina pulled pork sandwich from The Handsome Hog.

“What I’m here to do is to curate what the food story is for Saint Paul,” Sutherland said. “With soccer being such an international sport, the stadium got dropped into one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Saint Paul. There’s a lot of culture around here.”

It is easy to imagine standard Minnesota stadium fare and assume it could be bland. The state is nationally panned for dishes like tater tot hotdish, spam and lutefisk. Likewise, no sports venue is complete without the standard hot dogs, popcorn and oversized souvenir soda cups.

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As a Saint Paul native, however, Sutherland is quick to attest to a more diverse spread.

“You look out on University Avenue and there’s a huge Vietnamese, Hmong and Somalian population and restaurants,” Sutherland said. “A lot of that is Minnesota food. It isn’t just hotdish—there’s a lot of cultures that have made an impact on the food here. We reached out to the smaller mom-and-pop shops that don’t have a huge marketing budget and might usually get overlooked. We’re making sure everybody has an opportunity to show what we’re all about here.”

With so much of the food prepared in the stadium, the group has a high level of flexibility in terms of what they will sell each week. Sutherland called the cooking facilities “state of the art,” with each station offering different types of equipment. In other words, they’re doing more than just tossing stuff in a deep fryer. This was the case with the second dish I tried, the Brew Hall’s wild rice salad. A baby arugula base is topped with Minnesota wild rice, dried cherries, cashews, a host of vegetables, goat cheese crumbles and a red wine cherry vinaigrette.

“Wild rice salad has some local ingredients,” Van Stee said. “The goat cheese is local, the wild rice is local. We’re making vinaigrettes from scratch. Everything is cut by hand. It’s a healthy option that’s gluten-free, and people could add chicken to it if they’d like.”

Salads are far from a controversial offering, but Sutherland and Van Stee are both excited about the potential for vendors to try selling unconventional items. The stadium is keeping a lot of flexibility with its dining options on the whole.

“With Global Street Grill, we’re going to have two different concepts where we flip it halfway through the season to keep it fresh,” Van Stee said. “If we need to change up a menu item, we can do it. Every stand has digital menu boards. It might not seem like a big deal to the guest, but it takes a lot of time and money print the magnetic ones you remember from the Metrodome. Nobody wants to pay for that, but with a digital menu board, your partner can try something new and not worry about that cost.”

This doesn’t mean the stadium will only serve food for the adventurous diner, though. If you’re looking to get your traditional sports stadium eats, you’ll still be able to satisfy that craving.

“You have to take care of people who want their hot dog and popcorn, Van Stee said. “You can’t have a stadium without those things. I have a five-year-old kid, and if you only have kind of wild food, it could go south for them pretty quickly. As the culinary expectations have grown—and I believe that Target Field set the standard in this town—if you don’t challenge yourselves as a team of chefs, what are you doing this for? Anybody can cook a hot dog; how far can you push the limits of your capability?”

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Also, if these items sound a little pricey, but Sutherland says not to worry—affordability is part of the design.

“Price point was a huge discussion between the stadium owners, Delaware North and me,” he said. “We’re making sure that we’re staying at an affordable price point. We’ll fall into that lower price point compared to most stadiums, for sure. We have established price-points that we want everybody to fall within, with nobody over- or under-pricing anybody. They’ve set those guidelines and you decide what you can put on the menu that’s profitable for you and affordable for the consumer.”


(Photo courtesy MNUFC)

Sutherland is also consulting on food that most people won’t even be able to buy: the stuff that will be served in the luxury suites. He’ll personally cook during a handful of games and bring in other chefs from the Twin Cities for others—people like James Beard award-winner Tim McKee and Thomas Boemer, of Octo Fishbar and Revival, respectively, who will bring unique dishes to the VIP sections.

Sutherland will continue to act as a consultant for at least three years, giving him an extended window in which to try new things across multiple seasons. That’s exciting, because when he talks about his vision for the project, it’s easy to forget that he’s discussing stadium food.

“I’m excited to see what this stadium will do for the neighborhood and the city,” he said. “It’s a really cool partner and project to have. I guarantee this neighborhood looks extremely different in the next five years, which is great. It was a goal of the stadium to keep everything very local: Minnesotans are very proud to be Minnesotans. People from Saint Paul are very proud to be from Saint Paul. We’re making sure we acknowledge that and give it right back.”

(Top photo courtesy MNUFC)

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Jeff Rueter

Jeff Rueter is a staff writer for The Athletic who covers soccer in North America, Europe, and beyond. No matter how often he hears the Number 10 role is "dying," he'll always leave a light on for the next great playmaker. Follow Jeff on Twitter @jeffrueter