How Patty Wall Rezoned an Industrial Neighborhood and Launched One of America’s Top Food Halls

Anthony Codispoti (00:00)
Welcome to another edition of the inspired stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. As you listen today, let one idea shape what you do next. My name is Anthony Cotis-Bode and today’s guest is Patty Wall, owner and founder of the market at Malcolm Yards in Minneapolis.

The market is a community food hall and chef incubator built inside the historic Harris Machinery Building. It houses nine chef-driven kitchens, a full-service bar, an innovative RFID-based point of sale, and a self-pour tap wall that makes ordering effortless. They support emerging chefs through short-term leases that let talent shine without heavy overhead.

Since opening in July, 2021, the market has become a neighborhood anchor and a favorite stop for food lovers. Patty earned degrees in journalism and culinary arts and spent years in the food service world. She traveled the country studying food halls before leading the 19,000 square foot renovation that brought this vision to life. Now, before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Ad Back Benefits Agency.

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Patricia Wall (02:07)
It’s okay.

Anthony Codispoti (02:11)
The owner of the market at Malcolm Yards is Patty Wall. Thanks for making the time to share your story today.

Patricia Wall (02:18)
Thank you for having me.

Anthony Codispoti (02:19)
So the first thing I have to call out here is ⁓ the dual studies, journalism and culinary arts, not usually the typical pairing. Tell us how this unfolded.

Patricia Wall (02:26)
Mm-hmm.

Well, after high school, went to college ⁓ and I just had an interest in media and news sources, fascinated with the news, ⁓ television, written media and ⁓ got into writing. And I loved writing and just I had a mentor who was a food reporter at the local newspaper.

and he mentored me through this process and I told him my passion was really cooking and food and that type of thing. So he was the one who guided me into, you should go to cooking school. and sent me on my way to look at cooking schools.

Anthony Codispoti (03:14)
Why cooking school? From journalism to cooking school?

Patricia Wall (03:17)
Well, mostly my dream was to be a food writer as I got into journalism and I wanted to get specialized. However, I always thought that I loved cooking and being around food. loved hospitality service and I thought, well, maybe that’s a career option too. So it was more for me getting specialized in the field of journalism and writing was.

Anthony Codispoti (03:37)
Okay.

Patricia Wall (03:47)
going to cooking school and as I got into it more, thought, well, I can take this degree and I can do something different with it than the people around me, what they’re going to do. So.

Anthony Codispoti (04:01)
So tell us about the time at the Culinary Institute of America, the cooking school as you called it. How did this shape your approach to hospitality?

Patricia Wall (04:09)
Well, it was not like cooking tollhouse cookies in the kitchen with my sister growing up. I’ll put it that way. was, you know, it’s a very structured. When I went there, it was a 21 month program. It’s an associate’s degree in culinary arts. And halfway through the program, you leave the school, you go work in a kitchen anywhere. You’re responsible for getting your own sort of ⁓ internship. You can stay in the country and you can go overseas.

and you work in a kitchen. And so I went and worked in a kitchen in Washington, DC for six months. ⁓ But the school, the way it’s structured, it’s kind of the building blocks of cooking. And you touch on so many different things. You touch on the history of cooking. ⁓ You know, you touch on many different cultural aspects. There’s a huge emphasis on traditional French styles of cooking, Italian.

You get into Chinese cooking, but you also touch on food sanitation. There’s a six-week wine course, which that was really fun, by the way. We were tasting wine at 10 o’clock in the morning and kind of interesting when you got up at four. But you learn a lot about wine and the world of wine and the different rankings and how the different countries structure the regulations, controls.

Yeah, it was a great… The one thing that I will say is that there’s an emphasis on table service. There are four restaurants that are open to the public. You spend seven days behind, you know, in the back of the house cooking, and then you spend seven days front of the house and they hone your table service skills. So you learn everything about table service. learn ⁓ really…

lifelong lessons about interacting with guests. You know, if someone mispronounces something, you do not correct them. You know, everybody likes to likes to be the Karen, right? ⁓ So you don’t correct. Well, you just exactly, know, when you, you know, maybe when you bring it over, here’s your cavernet. So you know, ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (06:20)
You just deliver them their the cabinet that they requested.

Patricia Wall (06:31)
You know, it’s just the correct way to serve wine, pour wine, open a bottle of wine, store wine, ⁓ where exactly to set the flatware, the table settings, serving from the left, clearing from the right, keeping your thumbs off the plate, you know, where to face the entree, where the wine glass goes, where the water glass goes, how to pour, you know, those things are just fascinating. it’s a really good, really good program. The Culinary Institute of America now has a…

Anthony Codispoti (06:54)
Yeah.

Patricia Wall (06:59)
bachelor’s degree program, a four-year degree, but that started after I was there.

Anthony Codispoti (07:03)
Gotcha. And so you graduated there in 92 and then you went into catering for a number of years before transitioning into real estate.

Patricia Wall (07:07)
Yes.

Yes.

Correct, correct. ⁓ Yes, I ⁓ moved back to the Midwest, which is where I’m from, and moved to Minneapolis. And ⁓ I thought, well, I’ll take this job at a catering business while I look for my real job and launch my career. But I ended up working for Dayton Hudson, which is a large retail company, ⁓ worked at ⁓

the Dayton’s department store in downtown Minneapolis. And we had a catering business that operated throughout the skyways of downtown Minneapolis and ⁓ had a leader that moved in to run our division from Washington, D.C. and said, why don’t we take, we had the oval room in our department store, which was the high end clothing in the women’s department. And.

⁓ My boss had said, why don’t we take this catering division and let’s make this the oval room of catering. I headed up the off-premise catering. Did galas around town, house parties, museums, very high-end. We customized menus for every event. ⁓ It was an amazing job. ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (08:38)
probably more challenging

because you’re making this like high quality food, but you’re doing it off site. You know, you don’t have the convenience of having everything in your own kitchen back a house there.

Patricia Wall (08:44)
Right, exactly.

No, I can think of easier ways to earn a living, quite honestly. But when you get into opera miscater, especially on a high end level, it’s, you and my role was managing and sales in front of the house ⁓ because, you know, I could talk about the food, sell the food, work with the chefs to create the menu, but also work with the guests to create the front of the house experience that was what they had imagined with. ⁓

the table settings, the decor, the florals, on and on and on. ⁓ You know, it was very challenging in terms of every, you need to track for every single thing that you bring with you when you head out the door. That every single person there needs from the chefs to the servers to, and sometimes cooking on site, sometimes you bring a portable oven and ⁓ you you bring hot boxes to hold things in.

And all of that gets loaded into a truck, unloaded, set up. And then you execute the event, you clean up, you load the truck back up, take the truck back to the store, unpack it. Everything has to get washed, put away. So like I said, it’s it’s challenging, but ⁓ it was so fun. I got to be the center of some of the most incredible parties in the Twin Cities for seven years. So.

Anthony Codispoti (10:14)
Any of

them you can talk about.

Patricia Wall (10:17)
let’s see. I remember we catered a wedding ⁓ in someone’s home that was some of the guests were, you know, I remember the son of the Shah of Iran was there and the you know, the security was was pretty extensive. We all had to have background checks before we were there. But, you know, seven courses.

coming out of, know, and operating out of somebody’s garage. you know, a lot, mean, there’s a handful of events like that that we did. I remember we hosted at Dayton’s, we hosted a handful of celebrities from time to time. I remember running around downtown Minneapolis looking for low fat peach yogurt for Julie Andrews. I mean, you know, fun things like that, but no.

A lot of, and being part of a retail company, a lot of fashion designers, we did a lot of events with fashion designers where, you know, there was a big fashion show and then the food was kind of, you know, interspersed with the experience for the guests. Yeah, we did a lot of things at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and just beautiful environments, a lot of outdoor weddings, outdoor events that were incredible. So.

Anthony Codispoti (11:38)
So a

lot of fun, but at some time you transition out of food service into real estate. What was the bridge there?

Patricia Wall (11:39)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yes, exactly.

Well, I met my husband. I was planning an event for him. I was actually planning his wedding to another woman. Yes, look at your face. I know. And people say, oh, you’re in that movie. Well, not exactly. I did not. I was not the gold digger that got in there and broke up the wedding just for the record. You know, what ended up happening.

Anthony Codispoti (11:56)
that’s a fascinating story.

Patricia Wall (12:12)
We I spent a lot of time with John and his mother, and then he brought his fiance to Minnesota and I worked with the three of them. And what ended up happening was they called it off. ⁓ Ten days before, it was very hard thing for them to go through. And I ran into John about three months after the fact and ⁓ in the Skyway system and tell Minneapolis and said, hey,

John Wall and he said, hey, I really want to thank you for all of your efforts planning the wedding. And I thought, okay, well, of course, my job, you’re welcome. ⁓ so then he asked me out and we went out, went out a handful of times. we, know, hit and miss over a year. We really didn’t officially start dating until a year late. So it had nothing to do with breaking up the wedding, but ⁓ we are.

Anthony Codispoti (13:06)
Now that we’ve got

all of that out of the way, all the scandalous ideas people had just put in their heads.

Patricia Wall (13:09)
Yes.

Yes, but we’re going on 29 years. So we have two kids. Anyways, so met my husband. He is in the commercial real estate development business. So while we while you know, I had we had young children and I definitely wanted to keep my hands in something. So I helped him. He was developing condominiums, apartments. And so I helped with the design build process, work with the architects, contractors.

I got involved in the sales process. got my real estate license so we could retain more income from the sale of condominiums and decorated models. Just did everything and it was fun. love real estate. Yeah, it was great. So I got to tap into the commercial aspects of commercial development. And then at the same time, I also did some residential helping

Anthony Codispoti (13:55)
picking up some new skill sets, yeah.

Patricia Wall (14:11)
friends or neighbors, whomever, buy and sell homes. My husband’s family is in the banking business. They own a local chain of banks. During the recession, I listed most of the residential REO properties that the bank had foreclosed on, that was all over the Twin Cities. Rochester, most of them were properties that had been built and were maybe 85 % of the way finished.

and had not been finished and then everything crashed and they weren’t worth what, you know, what the intended price was to be. And so I would bring somebody in and finish the house, it, sell it. So basically helping to get get things off the bank’s books. So so it was quite a quite a variety that I did.

Anthony Codispoti (14:58)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. And so

then how does this idea for the market at Malcolm Yards come about? What was the genesis of this?

Patricia Wall (15:08)
Yes.

Well, I think it started we were on a family trip in Vancouver and beautiful city. And we went to Granville Island in Vancouver, which is an island off of Vancouver, which there’s ⁓ sort of a warehouse area with a college boutique hotel, some heavy public arts.

district and these warehouses have been converted into, building after building was a public market where there was fresh produce, there were food stalls, a meat counter with a butcher, seafood counter, and then you could walk up and get a lobster roll, you get street tacos, get gelato, craft beer, wine, and I walked around and that was it for me. I thought this is seven. If I die tomorrow, this is where I want to be.

And I just thought this is the most beautiful place. And I said to my husband, why don’t we have anything cool like this in Minneapolis? we talked about that. I thought about it. And I said, this is what I want to do. I want to create this. I want to get back into food where my real passion is. And if you think about developing a food hall, it really is a combination of ⁓ all of the things that I’ve done. It’s a combination of development.

It’s a combination of real estate. There’s definitely a sales aspect to it. There’s customer service. There’s styles of food. ⁓ There’s styles of service. There’s the customer experience. So ⁓ that was where the idea was born.

Anthony Codispoti (16:54)
So

what was the name of this market and this island off of Vancouver? you even remember? Granville Island.

Patricia Wall (16:58)
It Granville Island off of

Vancouver in British Columbia.

Anthony Codispoti (17:02)
And it reminds me of the one that I’ve been to in Seattle. Pike’s Market, I think it’s called. very similar. Yeah, so okay, so you had this idea and how many years ago was this?

Patricia Wall (17:05)
huh. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yep. There’s balls everywhere. So.

Okay, that was maybe 20. Well, I guess it was 10 years ago now. So about 10 years ago.

Anthony Codispoti (17:19)
10 years ago. And so,

and so did you just like, okay, we have to have this and you came back to Minneapolis, you just jumped into making this happen. We talked about in the intro about how you traveled the country, sort of evaluating what other properties were doing first.

Patricia Wall (17:31)
Mm-hmm.

Yes, my, ⁓ John, ⁓ my husband had said, just start talking to people. And I said, who’s going to want to talk to me? It’s funny when you start something completely scary and new, how do I dive into developing a food hall? I’ve never done this before. And ⁓ I really did start talking to a lot of people in the development world, started talking to a lot of people in the culinary world and food service.

But then we took off, we traveled around the United States. We met with a handful of food hall developers. And I remember what the first one said to me was, what do you want heartache and pain? What are you thinking lady? ⁓ I would turn and say that to anybody now, but ⁓ you know, we learned what we saw when we went around the country was we saw, I’m thinking of one in Atlanta.

in particular that we went to that was in a neighborhood that was pretty rough ⁓ before. You know, it had a history of being a very rough, high-crime neighborhood. And ⁓ developers came in, took this old building, an adaptive reuse, in ⁓ the kitchens, brought in high-end chefs doing these fast casual gourmet concepts, opened up a bar, ⁓ parking lot just opened.

What a risk, right? ⁓ Build it and they will come. That whole neighborhood started to gentrify. And it was a really cool thing to see. mean, then the housing started to turn over. Condominiums were developed. Apartment buildings were built.

Anthony Codispoti (19:19)
just because

somebody put this market in the middle of it all.

Patricia Wall (19:21)
Yep.

So I think the takeaway from that is when you are developing a neighborhood, the food hall serves as the neighborhood living room. It’s the amenity. So ⁓ fast forward to where we are now in Minneapolis, Malcolm Yards. We, my husband and I have 22 acres and we had to rezone from I2 to C3A. It’s a long story.

And ⁓ we took a late 1800s building that someone had inconveniently set on fire for us, ⁓ trying to stay warm in the wintertime because the building was vacant. ⁓ the fire was put out by local firefighters and who had understood that the building was historic and they worked very hard to put it out. If you look up online, the Harris

machinery building fire, you’ll see some great pictures, some glacial formations, because it was about 30 below when this happened. So someone set it on fire. Anyways, we had to do an adaptive reuse of this building. So.

Anthony Codispoti (20:20)
Yeah.

my gosh.

What does

that mean, adaptive reuse?

Patricia Wall (20:34)
Well, means you take an old building and you, well, first of all, from a commercial real estate perspective, it is far cheaper to take something like that and level it and build new, right? But you don’t have the character, you don’t have the history, you don’t have the wood, you don’t have the architectural details that were put into these old buildings. So you take the building, you rebuild it, you re-envision it, and done right, it looks very similar to what it was. ⁓

Since it had undergone some alterations with the fire when it was vacant, street artists had moved in. There’s a fair amount of graffiti. so, you know, the building had 150 interior shoring jacks holding up the roof. We had to do some pretty serious exterior shoring jacks to keep the exterior structure held up. So.

Anthony Codispoti (21:30)
Why were you so committed to this particular property?

Patricia Wall (21:34)
Well, when we first talked about Food Hall, there was another property that John had developed in downtown Minneapolis that I really had my eyes on. It was a brand new apartment building and very close to the Mississippi Riverfront. I thought it’s close to, it’s downtown. That’s where I wanted to do it. And one of the developers we met with said, don’t do it, don’t do it there. And then we said, well, we have this other property where we have,

the world’s oldest, or I’m sorry, not oldest, formerly the world’s largest grain holding facility. ⁓ We have large empty silos on our property and ⁓ we said, yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (22:20)
And sorry to interrupt, Patty. Did you already own the property at this time? Like

you owned it prior to having the idea for this ⁓ this food?

Patricia Wall (22:29)
Yes. So ⁓ just to backtrack here, my husband started buying up this land. We’re very close, just blocks away from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis campus. My husband started buying up parcels of this land starting in 1999. His ⁓ development plan was to do a biotechnology research and development park. He worked on it for many years.

You know, went on the governor’s trade mission trips overseas, conferences, met with people. It just did not get launched, which that’s the nature of commercial real estate development. So we need to figure out what we’re going to do. And at the same time, when we were leaving Vancouver and I said, this is what I want to do. And he said, you know what? Screw it. I’m done with this R &D park idea. He goes, I’m going to do what everyone else does. I’m just going to do, you know, housing office retail.

on this land. And I said, if you’re going to do that, the one thing you need at the center of this neighborhood is a food hall that will keep your properties full. So he had to see it firsthand in the country before he believed me. But but he’s now very happy. And yeah, so that’s how we ended up pivoting was was getting the advice from another food hall developer. No, you should really work on this neighborhood. And then the pieces started to come together. And ⁓

We are in the Prospect Park neighborhood of Minneapolis and Southeast Minneapolis. The Neighborhood Association is part of the development process, really does have a say in what you do. Getting their blessing is huge. They said, look, we’ll let you build residential here. We want two things. We want you to keep the Harris Machinery Building, which is where the food hall is now.

And we want you to keep the large ⁓ ADM brain silos. And my husband’s, ⁓ well, it’s part of the history. Well, the Harris Machinery Building definitely has a history and character to it. The silos is, ⁓ the silos they wanted to keep because it’s part of the history of our city.

Anthony Codispoti (24:33)
Why?

that just had visual character to them.

but the silos in particular.

Patricia Wall (24:55)
It’s part of the history of this neighborhood. They’re just this iconic structure you see as you go through a major throughway through, you know, driving from Minneapolis to St. Paul, you can see them. Now, it’s a landmark and someone did get on, someone did get in, people do kids break in, get into the silos. That’s a whole other podcast you should talk to my husband about.

Anthony Codispoti (25:07)
to landmark.

Okay.

Patricia Wall (25:24)
chasing kids out of the silos despite incredible efforts. They’re called Urban Explorers, Anthony, I’m sure you did it when you were young. ⁓ But someone did get up there, a group called United Crushers, and they got up and they hung these chain chairs over the side and spray painted United Crushers on the side of the silos. ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (25:46)
Is that

there today? Okay, that’s part of the visual landscape.

Patricia Wall (25:49)
It is. is. just

part of the visual landscape. One thing you should know is that in the city of Minneapolis, if you have graffiti on your building, you are fined as as a landlord property owner. You are fined for graffiti on your building. So, you know, my husband was thinking, how in the world do I get up there? 13 stories high.

and paint over this. And ⁓ he went to the city and the person he talked with said, well, looks like art to me. So we were able to get that declared as art. So it stays, it stays. And sometimes we’ll call it the United Cross your screen silos. So it’s a backdrop for our food hall.

Anthony Codispoti (26:30)
Hahaha

the other way. Okay, nice.

Okay.

So in all of these other food halls that you went to look at, what were some of the particular points of inspiration? Where did you go where you were like, ooh, gotta have that, gotta have that?

Patricia Wall (26:56)
Well, it’s both, I got to have that and hey, I do that differently. ⁓ Everybody does these things ⁓ their own way. You go into a restaurant, fine dining, you know what to expect, right? You know, you walk in or you have a reservation, there’s a host, you get seated, you know the drill. ⁓ Food halls, very different ⁓ workflow or…

or customer experience wherever you go. ⁓ Yes, I would say every food hall developer goes around and sees other food halls and gets ideas and inspiration from other food halls. I think seeing the mix of food, ⁓ think seeing where the bar is, studying their websites, what are their activations, ⁓ learning about private events is huge. There’s definitely ⁓ philanthropic component to it, giving back to the community.

⁓ All sorts of things. think a couple things that resonated with me were as a female going into a food hall. ⁓ There you know number one. You know I like to drink. I like to get a beverage so. And my experience in fine dining and hospitality is you want to get a drink in your hand. It doesn’t have to be alcohol. It could be something else.

But I think your first step is, do I drink? So as a female, I do not want to walk up to a very crowded bar and try and push my way through to get a drink. I want it to be easy, simple, quick. And then I want to be with the people that I came with. I don’t want to stand there and wait in line for forever while the group I came with is having fun or having a conversation. So ⁓ that sparked some ideas.

Also to the ordering process. ⁓ So you order your food, you pay, you put out a credit card or however you pay, Apple Pay, and then how do you know when your food’s ready? You stand there, we’ll call your name. Well, and you think, okay, well, ⁓ how long is that gonna be? That’s an awkward social experiment. And wait, I have to go to other kitchens and then get my, you know, this. And ⁓ I thought, this can be done better. So the technology’s out there.

And I think that was one thing. then noticing, and also from fine dining too, these chefs spend a lot of time, ton of work creating every single dish. ⁓ Hours and hours of preparation go into it. And the presentation is very important to a lot of these chefs. And when you put something in disposables or on disposables, it just doesn’t give it the justice it deserves.

Also too, you so I wanted the presentation to be on real plates, real flatware, ⁓ glass, you know, glass, glassware, not plastic. And also too, there’s a there’s an environmental responsibility there, I felt. So, yeah, those are some things that I learned going through.

Anthony Codispoti (30:07)
So

talk to me how you solve the drinks issue, right? You’re a woman, you don’t wanna have to muscle your way up to the bar. You don’t wanna be waiting in line while your friends already have their drinks and they’re having fun. So how do you solve this problem?

Patricia Wall (30:22)
Well, we came up with, we did two things. We have a self-pour wall. It’s formerly Pour My Beer, but it’s Pour My Beverage now. ⁓ It’s a self-pour tap wall. So what we put on our self-pour tap wall ⁓ is craft beers, wines, ciders, seltzers. We have that, and I can get into the operational aspect of that later.

Then we also have a bar we call it the Boxcar Bar. And we set up our cocktail, our craft cocktail program so that we make we use local spirits and we make craft cocktails every day in kegs. So they’re pre batch cocktails. They’re hooked up to a tap wall. So the bartender what they do were three blocks from the Minnesota Gopher football stadium. So on Gopher game day, ⁓ there are

thousands of people walking by floating in, is wonderful. We love it. And so it needs to be quick. You can’t have a bartender standing there shaking for 10 minutes with a shaker. It’s got to be quick. So ⁓ you order a drink and the bartender grabs a glass, puts specialty ice, pours the drink, garnishes it, hands it over. And then

Anthony Codispoti (31:43)
so I’m not using

a pour your own dispensary for ⁓ one of the cocktails. That’s still being served by a human being of our gender.

Patricia Wall (31:51)
No, that’s a bartender.

⁓ know, and that has to do with, ⁓ I was being, it is possible to serve cocktails out of a cell pour wall. I’ve seen it done locally. ⁓ My thought was that we’re next to a college campus and, you and yes, the cell pour wall does time out at a certain ounce level. And, you know, we do a little.

checking on the guest if they asked for the card to be sort of updated so they can use it again. But someone would go through a fair amount if they were putting drinks on their tab for other people. If you buy drinks for four people, then all of a sudden. Exactly. But I did not want to put hard liquor on the tap wall. Given the proximity to college campus, 40 ounces of craft beer is a little different than 40 ounces of vodka tonic.

Anthony Codispoti (32:33)
Okay. So this is like a security measure to still have the bartender in place. Got it.

Patricia Wall (32:50)
I’m sure you’ve experienced at some point in your life, Anthony. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (32:53)
No comment.

Okay, so that was the creative solution to the beverage component of the experience. ⁓ But now you also kind of highlighted an issue with the food delivery that you wanted to change. It’s like, I’m ordering my food over here, but my spouse is ordering their food over there. How many minutes is it gonna take? Should we go there first? Should we come back here? So what’s the solution for all of this?

Patricia Wall (33:02)
Mm-hmm.

Well, we worked with a point of sale system out of Arlington, Virginia to ⁓ write the development for us. My vision was you come in, you get your ID checked, you get a wristband put on you ⁓ if you’re drinking alcohol. We check IDs and we check again if we think someone’s not really of age. We’ll check them again just to be sure. ⁓

we swipe a credit card and open an RFID card. So ⁓ for example, I can open if I’m doing a private event for 300 people, I can have 300 RFID cards. ⁓ If I have a family.

Anthony Codispoti (34:09)
So an RFID

card was just look like a credit card. It’s got a little chip in it so that it can send the signal. What’s the signal? What’s the alert?

Patricia Wall (34:18)
So what happens is once you have this RFID card, which we call yard cards, ⁓ you are given a card. You can walk around with if I walk up to the Korean chicken kitchen and I order a Korean chicken sandwich, I put my first name and my cell phone number in one time while I’m there during my visit.

And ⁓ I order, I can ask questions of the chef about the food. I tap my card and it goes on to a tab. So it’s kind of a token that’s in the card. You’d have to talk to someone smarter than me who could explain it really, really well.

Anthony Codispoti (34:55)
Okay, so the RFID card

is a way to track and combine all your purchases while you’re there at the market. Okay.

Patricia Wall (35:02)
Exactly.

So you walk around kitchen to kitchen, you can order food, and you will get a text message on your phone when your food’s ready. So you can go be with the people you came with, you get a text. ⁓ So you get up and pick up your food. And then you can go to the bar or you can go to the South Poor Wall. The South Poor Wall, you walk up. We have Poor Wall ambassadors that helped you. There’s a lot of different craft beers. And if you want to try different

beers or different wines. There’s someone to help you to help explain the beer and to show you how to pour if you’re not comfortable. You just tap your card on the card reader, grab a glass and pour the beverage you can try. You can try an ounce, try four ounces. You can just go around and sample different things until you decide what you want. But we found it was a really interactive tool. A lot of our

Beverage sales came from the pour well. Guests love it. Guests love it. It’s a wonderful thing. And it offset pressure on the bar during game days and when we were extremely busy. yep. And then the guests, when they’re done, ⁓ when they’re done, they drop their card off, you know, who wants to wait for somebody to check out. You can walk up to the host stand. You can get a receipt printed and close out your tab right away. Or you can just drop it in a box and walk out. And ⁓ what happens is

Anthony Codispoti (36:03)
It’s fun. Right.

So.

Patricia Wall (36:29)
The point of sale system periodically flows out the transactions and you get a texted receipt on your cell phone. Yeah, so it’s the very, ⁓ you know, guest focused experience. People love it. People love it. And then our private events. We have a lot of, we do private events all day long, everyday corporate events, birthday parties, celebration of life, all sorts of things. So.

Anthony Codispoti (36:35)
Well, that’s fascinating. ⁓

Patricia Wall (36:56)
When you have a party for 300 people, as I mentioned, ⁓ a lot of people like the market for private events because everybody can get whatever they want. So they’ll open up 300 cards. The guests can go get whatever food drink they want. And then the tab in the end will go on one credit card. So a girlfriend of mine who works for a large engineering firm told me she was at a food hall out of state.

Anthony Codispoti (37:17)
Mm-hmm.

Patricia Wall (37:26)
She said, I have my team. was treating them all to lunch in this beautiful food hall. And she said, it was impossible to follow them around to make the payments at all the different kitchens when they all wanted to eat different. And she just said it was kind of a mess accumulating all the receipts for her expense reports. She said, versus the market where I can just have everybody get their own card, get what they want, drop it off, I get a receipt. Super easy. So.

Anthony Codispoti (37:54)
That is super easy. What if I want

a tip?

Patricia Wall (37:57)
⁓ Well, that’s a hotbed topic. ⁓ So in the state of Minnesota, we have a lot of laws, a lot of laws around tipping. So we use a common point of sale system, ⁓ which goes into our larger business plan, ⁓ the way we set it up. In other states, you can add a tip and

the owner or manager can take the gratuities and divide it up amongst the employees. And that’s called tip pooling. And in Minnesota, tip pooling is illegal. So ⁓ we handle it a different way. There’s a hospitality surcharge rolled into the price that we take, give most of it to the kitchens and the rest goes to offset our staff. And that money we use to offset payrolls on those sites.

Anthony Codispoti (38:35)
Hmm.

Got it. Okay.

Patricia Wall (38:53)
It’s what

we do to get the model to work financially.

Anthony Codispoti (38:56)
Yeah. And so how did you go about choosing the nine different chef concepts for your establishment?

Patricia Wall (39:03)
Yeah.

Well, ⁓ it started with just conversations, meeting with people. First of all, I had a lot of help. I had partners from Denver, Colorado that I developed this with. About a year ago, my husband and I ended up buying them out. ⁓ But ⁓ these partners ⁓

had developed and owned and operated food halls in the Denver, Colorado area. So had a lot of help. so, you know, getting some ideas from them, knowing the Twin Cities food scene, knowing the contacts that I had, I just started having conversations. And I, you know, was trying to sell them on this food hall. And who am I, you know, this

this middle-aged woman coming at you saying, hey, I’m going to do this food haul and I want you to come in here and cook and open up a kitchen. you know, some people just look at me like, my God, you’re an idiot. know, I didn’t, I didn’t have credibility and believe me, I had doors slammed in my face. had people laugh after, after the business opened. had a lot of people say to me, I thought you were nuts.

Anthony Codispoti (40:15)
In their eyes, you didn’t have credibility. They’re like, why you?

Cheers.

Patricia Wall (40:31)
And ⁓ they don’t say that anymore. ⁓ So I just started talking. Why not me? And I think if you only have cooking experience, I don’t know how you do this with the city processes, with permitting, licenses, development.

Anthony Codispoti (40:37)
They’re thinking, why you? You’re thinking, why not me?

Patricia Wall (40:57)
I mean, it really takes a village to do a project like this. It’s a very complex, complex logistical. I can’t think of a more ⁓ complex project under one roof for a business like this. So ⁓ again, I just started talking to people and networking. chefs travel a lot. They love to eat. They love to experience food.

I would say most of them knew what a food hall was. There was another food hall in town that was not doing well. And I remember there were people that I was talking to and I said, I really, really want you in here. And they would say, you know what, it’s not going well over there and no way am I going into a food hall. And then, you know, a lot of the teams that we brought on, I would say I brought them down to the property.

and walk them around. Yes, we had dirt floors, the shoring jacks. It was under construction and ⁓ crazy. No heat. It’s cold here in the winter in Minnesota. No, no, but people got it. People got it. They saw the location. They saw the development that popped up around the neighborhood. They saw the multifamily.

Anthony Codispoti (42:05)
That doesn’t sound like a good sales process.

Patricia Wall (42:20)
They saw the University of Minnesota, the proximity to St. Paul. You know, we are basically on the county line, Hennepin County, Ramsey County, between where Minneapolis and St. Paul lie. We are halfway. just the location. are in such an awesome central location, very accessible from the central freeway that cuts through Highway 94. So people saw the building and they had been to food halls and said, I get it. I see it. And that sealed the deal.

for me. A business plan, we wrote our business plan based on short-term leases, two to three years. ⁓ We removed so many barriers to entry. We built out the kitchens for the chefs. So they come in with no overhead debt. ⁓ We take a straight percentage of sales.

That includes the point of sale system, all utilities, all cam, know, all the landscape, everything that one does overseeing a property. So they were able to just come in, ⁓ you know, and then. While we were developing this project, guess what happened? The whole world shut down. You know, so then it’s a pandemic and. You know, our partners and John and I, we discussed.

Anthony Codispoti (43:35)
Uh-huh, COVID.

Patricia Wall (43:45)
Well, what do we keep going? How long is this going to happen? What do we do? And ⁓ we just decided to keep going. And we thought there will be an end to this. And at the end of it, I bet people are going to want to get out. So. ⁓ So also, as part of as part of that, too, there were a lot of restaurants that had folded during the pandemic. ⁓

I would give the example of one kitchen that opened a Korean chicken concept. The two chefs had studied under Gavin Kasin, who Gavin Kasin is James Beard, award-winning chef in the Twin Cities, studied under Daniel Balloud, a wicked talented man, and has a handful of places in the Twin Cities and has now opened something in Naples. But to study under him is like studying under

a very high end mentor in a culinary situation. ⁓ you know, these two chefs had an idea. They were both ⁓ Asian and had an idea about and one of one of them was Korean and had grown up in Korea and had his mother’s and grandmother’s recipes and had they had this great Korean chicken concept, fried chicken. And they came in and just the food was exceptional.

I did do tastings with every concept that I met. I made them do tastings. I made them do at least two tastings with my partners to confirm. my number one signal for this is going to be a success is the food was so good that it was craveable. I have to get that again. We’ve all been out to eat where you have something and you can’t stop thinking about it. I got to get back there. I got to order that again.

And I, ⁓ you know, we’ve been to restaurants where we’ve had the opposite experience. And you think, yeah, you know, that was great. It was fun. You know, it was great. But I don’t need to come back any time soon. So to me, everything that I tried had to be out of this world. The pizza concept, you know, pizza, you don’t want to mess around. This is the Midwest. People like their cheese. You like your pizza. When I met ⁓ the chef of

rectangle pizza, Jeff Rogers. I brought my 90-year-old father-in-law ⁓ in his three-piece suit to come with me, because he didn’t know what I was doing with this food hall thing. I was opening a restaurant in his mind, and restaurants were huge financial failures, and I was insane. And the only thing that the Harris Machinery Building needed was another great big fire. ⁓ You know, I love him.

Anthony Codispoti (46:40)
And so what’s he think now?

Patricia Wall (46:40)
He’s, we love him.

Okay, so he, well, he loves it, but I have to tell you, when Jeff Rogers came out of the kitchen in boxer shorts, chef’s coat, knee-high socks, hiking boots, and his bandana tied around, and set down the shredder pizza, Detroit-style pizza, and ⁓ we tried it. You know, first of all, my father-in-law got to see what I was doing.

and how I was doing it. And then the second part of that is the pizza was out of this world. And they later went on, they participated in a nationwide contest that was on Good Morning America, where voted the best pizza in America a few years ago. And Good Morning America came to the Food Hall and film. So that’s exciting.

Anthony Codispoti (47:25)
Wow.

Yeah. So, so many parts of this are fascinating to me. The business model is really intriguing. I mean, you really de-risked this for these chefs, you know, creating their own concepts, you know, just charging a percentage of sales. What is, ⁓ it sounds like you guys are having lots of success. It’s like this ⁓ catalyst for gentrification. So, you know, the area around there is really improving. It’s growing up. ⁓ What is the future?

Patricia Wall (47:52)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Anthony Codispoti (47:59)
look like? like is it like, hey, we’ve got a good thing going, we’re just going to keep doing what we’re doing. Are there plans for any changes add ons growth?

Patricia Wall (48:10)
Well, just like Madonna, she keeps reinventing herself, right? Food halls are not you just open it, open the door. It, you know, no business, especially hospitality works like that. We, you know, in our business model, we set up the kitchens so that the kitchens would turn over for positive reasons. And people have gone on to, you know, continue to launch their brands.

You know, they start with one concept here. They launched their brands and they open more locations. We had one very talented couple that was in here ⁓ and they opened they they were going to pivot to a different concept in the food hall. And they came to me and said, we have always wanted to open our own full service restaurant. And our dream is right in front of us. We’ve located this space and we want to do it. And I’m like, that’s amazing. And

So I did the restaurant, it’s called Pink Ivy. It’s in Hopkins, Minnesota. Michael Shaughnessy and Varika, it’s some of the best food you’ve ever had. ⁓ I’m so proud of them. That’s the best part of what I do is I get to help these people launch the brands and ⁓ it’s really fun.

So the next thing, I’m sorry, going back to your question, the next thing is, you know, we just have to keep doing what we’re doing. We have to keep recreating. We need to keep finding new chef talent. We do a lot of public activations. do, you know, bar and bubbles. We’ll have a fitness instructor come in to teach a 45-minute bar class on mats, you know, in the more, weekday morning before we open. And then when you’re finished, you should have a glass of bubbles, of course, because you just did a 45-minute bar class.

So, you know, it could be kombucha, but, or Prosecco. You know, we do keg hit, which is we go through, you know, on our busier weeks, we go through 150 kegs of beer a week. We have a room to house our empty kegs. So we have a fitness instructor come in. A group comes in. Again, this is before we open. They use the empty kegs to do lunges and squats and do a whole workout with the kegs. So it’s kind of fun. You know, we need to constantly come up with

new activations. We were home to the great northern, a huge immersive sauna experience in our parking lot. So, thermoculture, you know, that’s, and then you come in and change and eat and drink and.

Anthony Codispoti (50:41)
just

things to keep freshening up, like give people a reason to new people a reason to visit and people who know the space, a reason to come back. did you hear this fun thing that they’re doing now? We should go back there. It’s been a minute. Yeah.

Patricia Wall (50:54)
Again?

Right. And we also are working on a digital art light show to be projected on the ⁓ United Crushers silos. So we’re getting closer to that than outside partner. So that will be set in the backdrop. We want to bring an artist from around the world and, you know, work with. We just ⁓ met with ⁓ our local theater partner here, Hennepin Arts, met with the Hennepin Arts team.

Anthony Codispoti (51:12)
Mm-hmm.

Patricia Wall (51:24)
talked about some fun things we could do, know, maybe do something with the orchestra playing and have lights in the backdrop, you know, do a Broadway musical sing-along, you know, I’d love to play, you know, the World Cups coming up this June, you know, and it’s in our time zone. So love to do that, love to do holiday light shows, just another, you know, Minneapolis is a beautiful city. Another awesome cultural thing to do when you’re here, experiential.

Anthony Codispoti (51:50)
Yeah. Love it.

Yeah. Yeah, why not? Yeah. So you guys are having lots of success, which is awesome. You’ve had a long career. ⁓ What’s a hard thing that you’ve had to overcome? Something personal or professional? What’s a what’s a real struggle that you go ahead?

Patricia Wall (51:53)
Then of course come in and have a cocktail. Have some street chocolate, know, some pizza.

Mm-hmm.

Well,

So

I would say the hardest thing that I have been through, I would say it’s both personal and professional is, you know, right now it’s February of 2026. We have over 2000 federal agents in town, you know, Operation Metro Surge, as it is called. And, you know,

Keeping in mind, we have a huge political spectrum, people are all over the board politically in this country, in this state, in this city. You say it one way, half the people hate you. You say it another way, half the people hate you. What I will say to this is what’s going on on the ground here for those of us that live here and ⁓ the personal stories of what is happening on the streets. ⁓

It is unlike anything that you see in the news on social media. ⁓ The lack of humanity is positively staggering and heartbreaking, and it’s strongly affecting. And I know this is secondary compared to the humanitarian aspects of this, but it is. It’s really affecting our economy. So and I think people should know that it.

You know, right now people see on the news, they see federal agents and protesters and chemical agents, and so they don’t want to go out. So retail restaurants.

everybody’s hurting right now. We know there’s an end. We know there’s an end. ⁓ you know, getting through that and ⁓ supporting my team and the mental health aspects of my team around me. you know, ⁓ I would say it’s very hard. OK, you brought me to Barbara Walters question here. It’s been very hard. And so I’m optimistic that this will end and we will get back.

We will relaunch, our city’s been through a lot. mean, we had George Floyd riots, we’ve been rebuilding neighborhoods, we’ve rebuilt our police department. We wanna keep moving in the right direction. Those of us that are here love it here. This is a great place to live, great place to raise kids, so.

Anthony Codispoti (54:41)
Yeah.

Yeah, I appreciate you giving voice to all that, Patty. It’s something that’s hard to live with. It’s hard, I think, regardless of which side of the political fence that you’re on. ⁓ Because I talk to a lot of folks ⁓ in different industries, a lot in the restaurant industries, and whether they’re talking about it live on the interview or they’re talking about it privately off camera, ⁓ they’re all concerned. ⁓

Patricia Wall (54:58)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Anthony Codispoti (55:16)
it is affecting their workforce. You know, when in a time when the labor market is tight as it is, ⁓ it’s harder to get folks to come to work. Because, you know, they’re worried about what’s going to happen to them. ⁓ And then the other thing that happens is, you know, even when these are lawful citizens, right, they’re here legally, they look different. And so when they’re done with work,

Patricia Wall (55:19)
Mm-hmm.

and

Anthony Codispoti (55:46)
They just want to go home. They may have gone out for dinner or a drink or run to the store or something and spend their hard earned dollars in local businesses. And now they don’t want to do that because they don’t want to be at risk. so wherever you sit on the political spectrum of this, there’s little question that it’s affecting the economy. And I think that’s something that even if

Patricia Wall (55:48)
Mm-hmm.

Great.

Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (56:14)
the humanitarian aspect doesn’t really pull at you the economic aspect. So it takes a lot of strength because it’s one of those things where you’re right. If you say something, you’re going to make 50 % of the people really angry at you. ⁓

Patricia Wall (56:19)
Mm hmm.

And especially when you’re in a business that is so driven by social media, our social media marketing campaign is a huge part of us. And, know, the comments, if you, you know, you do something wrong, you say something, you have to stay as neutral as possible. you know, it’s,

Anthony Codispoti (56:53)
And even when you stay

neutral, you can’t win because the people wanted you to take a stronger stance.

Patricia Wall (56:56)
Yeah,

and I’ve had this conversation with my licensees that really want me to speak out and ⁓ do things that I think is not safe. And it’s not in our long-term best interests or collective interest overseeing as many businesses as we have because we need to keep going. ⁓ so people are offended by the fact that I’m not angry enough, saying enough.

You know, everybody is dealing with this in their own way, but it’s it’s been a very huge stressful toll. So hopefully someone somewhere will. Come to their senses, and. Yes.

Anthony Codispoti (57:36)
So let’s…

will bring down the temperature in the room. Yeah.

So let’s shift gears into something more positive. What’s your superpower, Patty?

Patricia Wall (57:49)
Okay, well, ⁓ I can tell you what my husband would say, but, you’re wonderful. People want to spend time with you. You’re fun. I would say it’s resilience. We’ve had a lot in developing this project, you know, with the structural issues with the building, ⁓ with the city planning process, rezoning, you know, the business plan, every everything that is happening, you know,

things happen that don’t go smoothly and it’s just the ability to just get back up and get back in there. And resilience is number one coupled by Rosé. why? Resilience and Rosé, those are my two superpowers. So.

Anthony Codispoti (58:30)
Rosé. ⁓

Does

Rose give you the superpower then? that that’s the the fuel? All right, fair enough. I’ve just got one more question for you today, Patty. But before I ask, I want to do three quick things. First of all, anybody who wants to follow what they’re doing, learn more about it, they’ve got a really interesting website address, ⁓ malcomyards.market. instead of dot com or dot net, it’s dot market and Malcolm, M-A-L-C-O-L-M.

Patricia Wall (58:39)
Well, we’ll just have to talk about that offline. Yeah, so.

Anthony Codispoti (59:07)
and yards plural. So malcomyards.market and we’ll have that in the show notes for everybody. Speaking of which, if you’re enjoying the show, a quick comment or review on your favorite podcast app goes a long way towards helping others discover our show. thank you for taking a quick moment to do that right now. And as a reminder, if you want to get more restaurant employees access to therapists, doctors and prescription meds that as paradoxical as it seems, actually increases your company’s net profits.

reach out to us at addbackbenefits.com. All right, last question for you, Patty. A year from now, what is one very specific thing that you hope to be celebrating?

Patricia Wall (59:42)
Yes.

hope to be celebrating still, you know, for any business owner. I want to ⁓ still be in business. I want to have, ⁓ you know, some great talent and, you know, I think that light show going. I think those that’s, that’s the plan for a year from now. Just keep going with you know, and, and this is the funnest job in the world. I’m so lucky I get to do this. This is, I mean,

I get to meet the most incredible people between our culinary team, my staff, the people in this city, ⁓ politicians, public leaders. This is the funnest job in the world. So I just want to keep doing what I’m doing.

Anthony Codispoti (1:00:35)
Patty Wall

from The Market at Malcolm Yards. I wanted to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate you being here.

Patricia Wall (1:00:45)
Thank you.

Anthony Codispoti (1:00:46)
Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us, and if one thing stood out, put that into action today.