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.