Jami Olson’s grandfather Bill was born and raised in Karlstad, Minnesota, population 710, a small farming community 30 miles south of the Canadian border and 30 miles east of North Dakota. He farmed wheat, mostly, and soybeans, and ate breakfast at the same town diner every morning. He loved fishing, and escaped to Lake of the Woods any time he got the chance, reeling golden-green walleye up from the darkest reaches of the water. He’d return home to his farmhouse, painted white with red shutters, which had a dirt cellar stocked with canned vegetables and changed very little since his wife, Maxine, died years before. One night at the farm, Bill woke before dawn. His dog was barking. He walked downstairs and peered through the picture window at the front of the house. A UFO was sitting outside, casting sheer silver light onto the plum trees that framed his front yard. He watched it for a while. Eventually, it lifted back up into the sky and disappeared.
Bill was Olson’s paternal grandfather. Her parents were divorced, so Olson attended school in North Dakota but spent summers and some weekends at her father’s farm in Karlstad, just down the road from her grandparents. It was an idyllic farmstead life, she says—shucking sweet peas with her great-grandmother, selling corn for a dollar-a-dozen by the highway, swimming in ditches with her cousins when the wheat fields flooded—and one also imbued with the dark thrills and mysteries of rural life. The spaceship spottings, for example, both documented and rumored, and Olson’s own foggy memories of mysterious lights bouncing on the highway ahead of her family’s pickup truck; the dread every time she descended into the dark dirt cellar to fetch a can of tomatoes.
Olson is a restaurateur—she leads Centro Restaurant Group, which comprises Centro, Vivir, Everywhen Burger Bar, Hippo Pockets, Bina’s Bar, and now Bill’s Bait Shop, set to open on August 7 in the former Chicago’s Taste Authority space in south Minneapolis. She also might be the most unique storyteller in Minnesota’s food scene—few restaurants have a visual narrative like hers. “I went to school for film production, so I like storytelling, imagery, and putting pieces together to create beautiful things,” Olson says. “The majority of my job is all business and numbers and managing people, but this is the creative side of me, and it’s my favorite part. I love it—even when I was a kid, I loved designing, drawing pictures of what my house was going to look like when I was older and all the different rooms.”…