Diane's Place

The Restaurant

Diane's Place opened in spring 2024 inside the Food Building in Northeast Minneapolis, a converted industrial complex on 14th Avenue NE that has anchored the neighbourhood's renaissance for a decade. Chef-owner Diane Moua — for years one of the country's most decorated pastry chefs, with extended Beard nominations during her tenure at Spoon and Stable — built the restaurant as the personal project that her résumé had always been quietly preparing for: a kitchen that cooks the Hmong food she grew up with, plates the French pastry her career was built on, and serves both with the kind of warm-host hospitality that has now made her room a national reference.

Food & Wine named Diane's Place its 2025 Restaurant of the Year, citing the high level of service, the hospitality, and the way the kitchen shares Hmong food traditions with a Minneapolis audience that had not previously had a fine-dining lens on that cuisine. The menu rotates with the season but reliably includes a sausage-and-rice dish from Moua's family canon, a green-papaya salad sharper than any Minneapolis version that preceded it, a Hmong-style poached chicken with herbs, and a rotating list of pastries — kouign-amann, croissants, the chocolate eclair Moua developed at Spoon and Stable — that justify a return visit on any morning.

The dining room itself, set into the Food Building's exposed-brick architecture, seats around fifty and reads as warm rather than precious — the sort of room that absorbs a celebration without losing its calm. Brunch is daily except Wednesdays. Dinner runs Thursday through Sunday. For Minneapolis diners and visitors who want a meal that tells them something they did not previously know about American cooking — and want it served by a chef who is one of the kindest hosts in the country — Diane's Place is the address.