If you ever feel a little busy, maybe think about Molly Yeh.
The queen of hotdish and sprinkles still runs the award-winning blog, My Name Is Yeh, that first brought her fame. She’s written three bestselling cookbooks, including Home Is Where the Eggs Are, which came out in fall 2022. She’s about to start filming the 13th season of her Food Network TV show Girl Meets Farm. And she and her husband Nick Hagen welcomed their second little girl Ira at their sugar beet farm in the bitter cold of Northern Minnesota last year.
“I have a good village,” Yeh says. “But I’m still catching up on sleep.”
And one more small, tiny thing—the couple also opened their first restaurant. Bernie’s opened a few months ago in their hometown, East Grand Forks. They started with breakfast and lunch on October 1, serving soups, salads, sandwiches, and an entire toast menu on freshly baked bread. Dinner followed on February 9, adding crispy walleye schnitzel and relish trays. Plus, there’s a market section stocked with comforting casseroles and a bakery counter stacked with colorful cakes.
For fans of Yeh’s blog, books, and show, it’s all true to her style. Yeh rose to fame sharing recipes from her own Chinese and Jewish heritage alongside Midwestern comforts. Even after so much success, Yeh says running a hometown restaurant is incredibly challenging and rewarding. Pushing reservations live for dinner, “felt like we were doing it all over again,” Yeh says. “Only this time with so much more knowledge and experience.”
Read on to learn more about the restaurant’s most popular dishes including the schnitzel, the top-notch bakery within the restaurant, the historic space it’s located in, and how Bernie’s marks a homecoming for Yeh.
For the new dinner menu, Yeh worked closely with chefs Jacob Gonzalez and Chris Schultz to showcase fresh ingredients from local farms and heritage recipes inspired by church cookbooks. The early hit is the walleye schnitzel, featuring the freshwater fish that swims all over the region, fried up crispy with a dollop of house tartar. The Swedish meatballs “melt in your mouth,” Yeh says, sinking into sweet red potatoes and saucy gravy. Yeh advises not to skip the veggie burger flecked with native wild rice and set on a pillowy potato challah bun. The relish tray, an array of pickles, pickled eggs, ham, and sourdough, is another must-order and arrives on a pie plate.
The Knoephla soup with potatoes and dumplings is a hearty lunch option. Yeh added a chicken caesar wrap, not so often seen in town, folding in dino kale and yogurt dressing. At breakfast, half a dozen different toasts include egg salad on classic white and nut butter on whole wheat. The ham toast with griddled sourdough topped with mayo, ham, and flaky salt, is Hagen’s favorite. “I wanted to showcase these simple pleasures, but do them really, really, really deliciously,” Yeh says. “Pure goodness, the way it’s been made on farms for generations.”
There’s also a full bakery at the heart of the restaurant. Bread baker Matt Talley was selling sourdough at the farmers’ market when a friend kept mentioning a new restaurant. “I didn’t know it was Molly opening a restaurant,” Talley says. When he finally realized, “I was like, ‘Oh dang it, I should have applied!’”
He did get that application in and now as the head bread baker for Bernie’s, Talley bakes nine different varieties of daily bread. His country sourdough features a dramatic dark crust and hydrated crumb. Yeh’s potato challah came from the latest cookbook; the potato flour helps to sweeten and soften the rich dough. The bread is sold through the bakery and also supports the entire restaurant. For instance, the potato challah is braided into a big loaf and rolled into burger buns. Talley has smash-tested those buns and they completely reinflate.
“It’s the most magically fluffy bread,” he says. “I wish my pillow was that good.”
Nearly a dozen different cookies and bars include cult favorite chocolate chip with crushed potato chips and frosted almond bars that swap colors to support sports teams. (When there’s a Viking’s game, the cookies go wild with purple.) The bakers hand-roll croissants, knot cardamom buns, and pump potato doughnuts full of cream. They proudly set out a layer cake of the day such as chocolate with peanut butter frosting.
There’s a deep shelf of different sprinkles in the back room, Talley confides. “She’s a sprinkle connoisseur, let’s say that.”
That kind of childlike joy also beams through the space. The Yehs took over this location from Whitey’s Wonderbar, a beloved 100-year-old local bar. “Everyone has a Whitey’s story,” Yeh says. They kept the vintage letters of the sign and reordered them to spell Bernie’s, the name of their eldest daughter. JDD Studio in Minneapolis oversaw a full renovation, filling the cafe with white walls, white marble, warm woods, and natural light.
The bakery case rests on top of the original stainless steel horseshoe bar. Next to it there’s a little market displaying local ingredients, signed cookbooks, cute merch, and freezers stocked with hotdish. A greenhouse in a corner of the dining room has a few fresh plants. Some of the sweetest details are the smallest: Staff aprons and bakery boxes come in baby pinks and blues, a couple of friendly garden gnomes guard the greenhouse, and antsy kids can walk over to a chalkboard for a scribble. They can also take a wooden pony toy mounted with crayons back to their table for coloring.
Bernie’s represents a big restaurant opening for a small city. Grand Forks in North Dakota has a population of about 59,000, and sister city East Grand Forks across the river in Minnesota an even smaller 9,000. The mayor personally announced the highly anticipated opening, while the cookies made the cover of a local visitor’s guide. Yeh says the blog and books often appeal to a young and urban demographic, but the television series brought her back to her hometown audience. Now most people walking into Bernie’s watch the show, and she’s blown away by the excitement. “It’s Grand Forks,” Talley sums up. “As far as well-known people starting a restaurant—she’s it.”
Other Food Network stars have gone on to open restaurants, often glitzy destinations in big cities. One of the hottest reservations in Vegas right now is Martha Stewart’s new restaurant The Bedford, joining Giada and Emeril on the Strip. The outlier might be Ree Drummond of Pioneer Woman, who owns a restaurant, bakery, and market in small town Pawhuska, Oklahoma (population 3,000).
But for her part, Molly Yeh never considered opening a restaurant anywhere other than East Grand Forks. “It’s hometown pride. I love it here,” she says.
She goes into the restaurant during the day and tucks her girls into bed at night. After so many years of cooking and blogging at home alone, “I wanted a physical space to interact with the community as well as showcase all of the amazing local ingredients and heritage recipes in this region,” she says. “We live among so many amazing farms. We have the best potatoes.”
Becky Duffett is a food writer living and eating in San Francisco. Follow her on Instagram at @beckyduffett.
