Gourmet Chef: Local North Dakota Kitchen Store Favorite for 22 Years

For the last 22 years, Gourmet Chef in downtown Minot, North Dakota has made itself a part of the community by playing to the strengths of being a local business. The kitchenware store specializes in a full array of gourmet products, including items for making Scandinavian foods, a reflection of Minot’s population, many of whom have Scandinavian ancestry. Gourmet Chef also carries gourmet foods made locally in North Dakota and actively participates in the downtown association. Minot is a small but growing city of 46,000, and owner Denise Lindbo does what she can to ensure that the retail business remains a reflection of the fast-paced growth the city is currently experiencing.

North Dakota is home to a large population of people with Scandinavian ancestry and Minot hosts North America’s largest Scandinavian festival, the Norsk Høstfest held in the fall at the state fairgrounds in Minot over the course of five days. One of the city’s major attractions is the Scandinavian Heritage Park where visitors can tour sites like a full-size replica of the Gol Stave Church from Norway, or the Sigdal House, a 230-year-old house from Norway that was dismantled, shipped to Minot, and reassembled at the park.

“With lefse it’s not an item that is easy to do by yourself. So you get a group of people together, family, friends, and you’re all making lefse. It’s a social event,” says Lindbo, explaining the experience of making the Scandinavian flatbread. “You bring your people in and you roll it and you grill it and you have to cover it right away so it doesn’t dry out, so it’s a group project. It’s kind of fun because it’s one of those things that’s coming back into style again. Your grandma used to make lefse, well now I want to have those memories of making that with my family.”

Gourmet Chef’s specialty products for making authentic Scandinavian dishes sell the most around festival time and through the holidays. There are lefse grills, kranskake molds, rehrucken pans, krumkake bakers and aebleskiver pans. Lindbo gets the lefse grills from Bethany Housewares, krumkake irons from Chef’s Choice and additional tools from Norpro. The traditional dishes that can be made with these tools lend themselves to the holiday season as many of the dishes are intricate and require more than one set of hands, turning the making of the meal into a group activity.

The cultural heritage that customers are able to delve into with the aid of the Scandinavian specialty products offered by Gourmet Chef speaks to the general family atmosphere of the shop. Lindbo and her mother, Mary Probst, opened up Gourmet Chef together in April of 1993. Probst owned the store for the first five years, and Lindbo took over after that. Her mother is now retired from the store for the most part, but still can be found many days visiting the store. Lindbo was born and raised in North Dakota and has family in town from both her side and her husband’s side. They help her out with her two children when she is working on weekends, overseeing a cooking class at night, or possibly participating in the events regularly organized by Minot’s Downtown Business & Professionals Association.

“Minot is a fast paced city right now … We’ve got a lot of new people coming in, a lot of new faces, and new ideas as far as what they like for cooking,” says Lindbo. “A lot of people from the south are coming up, which brings us a whole new avenue of what my customers are looking for.”

Minot has experienced a population boom in the last few years due to the fact that it is located atop the Bakken Oil Formation, which has drawn in families to the area for work. North Dakota now ranks second in the country for oil production, behind Texas, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The most recent U.S. Census Bureau numbers list the population of Minot at 46,321 as of 2013, but Lindbo personally estimates that it might be closer to between 55,000 and 60,000 now. She says that the combination of the influx in population, the nearby Minot State University and Minot Air Force Base draw a diverse clientele for Gourmet Chef to serve.

As Minot grows, so too does the downtown area where Gourmet Chef is located. It spans a small area that is about three blocks by three blocks, but Lindbo says new businesses are moving in. The downtown is currently undergoing revitalization through construction that will last for at least another year and a half, but will result in new sidewalks, street lighting, curbs and streets.

In the meantime, customers are continuing to find their way to Gourmet Chef as they have for the last 22 years. The shop recently underwent remodeling to keep it fresh and updated while also adding on 1,300 square feet, bringing the total size of the space to just under 4,000 square feet of retail space. The renovations left Gourmet Chef with “a great big, huge kitchen and island” for cooking classes that can accommodate 20 participants, says Lindbo.

Gourmet Chef has offered cooking classes for 18 years now and the popularity of the classes contributed to the need for an expanded kitchen. Lindbo has three local instructors that regularly teach cooking classes. On top of that, other members of the community might conduct a class in their personal area of expertise. Pie classes and Scandinavian classes have been taught by ladies that won first and second place prizes for their pies at the state fair, and a home economics teachers helps teach the children’s cooking classes.

Besides the cooking classes, Gourmet Chef offers customers the chance to get their hands on any kitchenware they could think of. Lindbo cites gadgets as about 30 percent of business, with cutlery, cookware and bakeware each consistently comprising around 11 percent of business year after year. The shop moves enough WUSTHOF Trident cutlery to have earned a trip to the WUSTHOF factory in Germany for Oktoberfest as a prize for being a top WUSTHOF retailer. Gourmet Chef also carries jams, jellies, baking mixes, sauces, soups, and other gourmet food products from local North Dakota companies.

“We’re blessed with having family all over and I think that shows, as far as the customers and my employees coming in,” says Lindbo. “We treat each other like family, my employees and I. We do our best to help each other out and I think that shows to the customers when they come in.”

“I love what I do and I hope it shows to my customers and my employees,” she added. “I can’t imagine doing anything else or being anywhere else other than our downtown area and that’s what makes it fun. That’s what makes it not a job.”

This story was originally published in the June 2015 issue of Kitchenware News, a publication of Oser Communications Group.