June 24, 2021

By David Berman and Molly Wetsch

One year ago this weekend, Sioux Falls was on Guy Fieri watch.

The Food Network host of “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” was rumored to be in town, restaurants on his calendar couldn’t officially confirm, but enough had leaked out that crowds began to follow in search of Fieri’s signature red Camaro convertible.

One year later, the owners of the six restaurants visited say business has changed in a big way.

Look’s Marketplace

While it has been five months since the episode aired featuring The Porcules sandwich and the Motor City pizza, Look’s Marketplace co-owner Beau Vondra said demand for the dishes hasn’t slowed down yet.

“We’ve definitely seen an uptick in traffic,” Vondra said. “The items that were on the show being ordered are up in frequency, and the amount of out-of-towners we get are increasing.”

The out-of-towners in question are usually stopping through town and want to try a Food Network-approved restaurant, he said.

“A lot of it is ‘Oh wow, we’re going to be in Sioux Falls for our kid’s baseball tournament or hockey tournament or soccer tournament. We should check out these places,’”  Vondra said. “I also think there are people that are traveling to Mount Rushmore and they stop here to try us or one of the other establishments that were featured on the show or maybe even a couple of them as part of their trips.”

In terms of the future, Vondra said Look’s major goal is to continue its impact in the community and to grow within the space along Prairie Green Golf Course.

“Our place was pretty ambitious when we opened it up before the pandemic,” Vondra said. “Right now, we’re just looking at focusing on the large business we have in front of us and trying to grow that as much as possible the next few years. That’s our goal is to be part of the fabric of the Sioux Falls community to come.”

Lalibela Restaurant

It’s a similar theme at Lalibela Restaurant, which has seen an overall increase in customers in the past year.

Owners Martha and Mulugeta Endayehu have been operating the Sioux Falls Ethiopian restaurant on North Kiwanis Avenue for several years, and it has become popular with locals. Now, they’re getting lots of new visitors because of their exposure on the Food Network, they said.

“We have more people coming in,” Mulugeta Endayehu said. “A lot of people will come to travel and to eat here.”

Despite the increased traffic, though, Endayehu said they haven’t hired any new staff or expanded the menu, and the restaurant is operating similarly to how it was this time last year.

“On the help side, we didn’t get more staff to expand,” Endayehu said.

The dishes featured on the episode have become very popular at the restaurant, Endayehu said. Doro wot is a spicy dish and miser key wot is a lentil stew, both of which are traditional Ethiopian cuisine.

“Lots of people come just to eat” the featured dishes, Endayehu said.

Daily Clean Food & Drink

Business at Daily Clean Food & Drink is busier than ever one year after the taping, co-owner Shaley Bolks said. She credits the exposure for the notable increase in traffic.

“We have been selling a heck of a lot more than what we were before the show,” Bolks said. “We get a lot of people from out of town that say they’re passing through, and we’ve had people that say they’re going on a tour of Sioux Falls and hitting all the places in one day.”

The restaurant has expanded both its staff and menu to accommodate the influx of customers.

“We started offering the items that we did make on the show for grab-and-go (as well as) adding more acai bowls and smoothies to our menu,” Bolks said.

“We started bottling our sauce that we made on the show and are selling that and grab-and-go, and we definitely are a little bit more heavily staffed now than we were to be able to take care of our customers and still be able to hand out quality product and quality food.”

Looking forward, Bolks said that the exposure from “Triple D” has given Daily Clean Food & Drink the opportunity to consider expansion. The owners are opening a shared kitchen space in The Wedge on Western, where the restaurant is located, in spring 2022 and Bolks said they’re looking to other ventures as well.

“We always kind of talked about another location, and that’s starting to become more of a reality now,” she said. “We’re also talking about some other potential summer opportunities, like maybe having a Daily food truck for the summer.”

Bread & Circus Sandwich Kitchen

While “Triple D” was filming at Bread & Circus Sandwich Kitchen last year, co-owner Barry Putzke said he was told by producers to prepare for a massive surge in business. While this might seem like music to the ears of a restaurant owner, Putzke said it came across as more of a warning. In fact, they even showed him articles with examples of restaurants who were featured on the show that eventually closed their doors because they couldn’t keep up with the demand.

“‘You’re either going to sink or swim,’ is what they told us,” Putzke said.

Fortunately, a year later Bread & Circus is successfully staying afloat amid the torrent of customers. Putzke said the restaurant is busier than ever because of a number of factors — the buzz from the show, COVID-19 guidelines being lifted and the reopening of Levitt at theFalls across the street among them — but has been able to navigate increased demand well.

On a daily basis, customers still mention that the show is a main factor as to why they stopped in, Putzke said. The Vietnamese fried chicken and curried cauliflower sandwiches, both of which Fieri consumed on the show, are ordered frequently each day.

Putzke said the filming of the show last year came at a crucial time as it provided a major boost in the middle of the pandemic.

“Any person in our position, it’s kind of a dream to get that call,” he said. “We were super thrilled, and it was such a great experience. We put ourselves in a good position to be ready for the swell afterwards, and we couldn’t have drawn it up better.”

The goal for the restaurant is to maintain the momentum throughout the summer and beyond, riding the resulting wave of success from the show to hopefully big things in the restaurant’s future.

“If nothing else, it’s giving us an opportunity to get ready for whatever comes next,” he said. “We’re just going to keep doing what we’re doing and hope customers keep coming down and having a good experience.”

Urban Chislic

Urban Chislic has received visitors from all over South Dakota and surrounding states since appearing on the show, according to co-owner Hong Phromanny.

Fieri ate the pork sandwich and Regret burger on the episode, which aired in January. Once the episode aired, demand for those two dishes in particular skyrocketed.

“It was to the point where there’s two cooks that all they did was just make those two items nonstop because that’s what everybody was ordering, which was amazing,” Phrommany said.

The biggest challenge for Urban Chislic in the past year has been keeping the restaurant staffed, Phrommany said.

“It’s been a challenge to try to get interviews set up, to find the right team, to maintain that team,” he said. “Sometimes even if they wanted to work, their spouses or their partners cannot, and then all of a sudden kids were being in school and out of school. And so that was a huge challenge for us to staff even this tiny little restaurant that we have.”

While the amount of customers who mention the show when they come in has dwindled, Phrommany said the restaurant still sees healthy crowds on a daily basis. With this success, he said he hopes to one day expand Urban Chislic outside of Sioux Falls to local college towns and beyond the state’s borders.

Reflecting on getting the restaurant on “Triple D,” Phrommany credits the decision from local leaders to keep businesses open last year as a main factor for getting on the show.

“If COVID never happened and if the decisions weren’t … made from our congressmen and women, this (production) company might’ve never came to South Dakota,” he said. “But because we were open, they probably had explored like, ‘Well, we need to do some work. We need to get some content.’ And so they ended up choosing South Dakota, and I think it was kind of a blessing in disguise and worked out really well.”

‘O’ So Good

‘O’ So Good received a massive wave of demand last year after the filming, but staffing issues made it difficult to keep up. The Garretson-based restaurant has always had problems finding employees in its four years of business, but this was especially heightened over the winter, according to co-owner and head chef Omar Thornton.

The restaurant has had to navigate inconsistent serving times and challenges with maintaining its quality standards as a result, he said.

“It’s really been a roller coaster year for us, being in a kind of small-town environment even before the pandemic … it was hard to find workers, good workers, but it’s even tougher now after the pandemic,” Thornton said.

After sporadic staffing for months, Thornton has made the decision to leave Garretson and move the restaurant to downtown Sioux Falls. While he couldn’t confirm the location yet, he said his business will be joining an established spot downtown to take over the kitchen. It will continue to operate out of Garretson until mid-July, when he hopes to complete the transition to the Sioux Falls location.

Thornton said he hopes the move will ease their hiring efforts and allow the restaurant to serve the community more consistently.

“We’re sad (to move), but we’re also happy because we know that it’s going to allow us to really put in a lot more effort,” he said. “I know that Sioux Falls is having their own problems with their own people to hire, but we’re hoping that our name will help us because we also have done a lot of things for the community, not just our community here in Garretson, but we’ve done a lot for the community in general, around Sioux Falls and in Sioux Falls.”

Even though ‘O’ So Good will soon leave the location where Fieri visited and raved about its food, Thornton said he is still proud to have brought “Flavortown” to Garretson and will continue to provide delicious comfort food for the community.

“That’s going to be the sad part is realizing that Guy Fieri was actually in this building that we’re not going to be in,” he said “But that he came here and experienced the food I grew up tasting, eating and eventually cooking myself, that means something to me. Even if I decide to retire tomorrow … I can hold that dear to me saying that my family way of living, being brought up on flavors, brought the Food Network to a small town in South Dakota.”