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A community restaurant
M.B. Haskett Delicatessen has been on Phillips Avenue since January 2012, cooking food that starts as ingredients.
How it started
One idea, a borrowed room and a very small oven
Michael Haskett came back to Sioux Falls with a simple idea for a restaurant: real food made by real people. Beyond that, and a conviction about minimally processed, ingredient-focused cooking, the details were open. He found a room downtown, talked a couple of friends into joining him, and opened in January 2012 with a tabletop convection oven and two electric fryers he was using to boil water.
The cooking was the draw. Haskett and the people working with him spent those first years inventing a new menu more or less daily, and downtown turned out to want exactly that. In 2014 the historic space in the Southwest Building was rebuilt from the floor up, and with a real kitchen in it the restaurant could finally do properly what it had been doing by improvisation.
The food is Lucia Watson inspired, which is to say it is Midwestern cooking that takes its region seriously. Everything is seasonal, most of it is made here, and the point of it is a room where people meet.
In his own words
Michael Haskett on starting the place
Three and a half minutes on how the restaurant began, and on why the food comes from people you can drive to.
Filmed in 2015 for the OTA spotlight series, one of forty South Dakota stories made by Passenger with OTA and the South Dakota Community Foundation.
Watch it on Vimeo. Film by Passenger, 2015. 3 min 35 sec.
What we are trying to do
Scratch cooking, in season, for the common good
That is the mission as the kitchen states it, and it comes apart into three fairly ordinary commitments.
Made here
The spreads, the vinaigrettes, the soups, the pastry. If it can be made in this kitchen it is, which is also why the deli salads are different every day.
In season, and close to home
Breakfast and lunch shift through the year and the dinner menu is rewritten as the growing season turns, using people we can drive to wherever that is possible.
Open to everyone
Breakfast at seven for whoever walks in, lunch at the same counter, and dinner three nights a week for anyone who wants to sit down to one.
The room
Just down from the State Theater
We are on the corner of Phillips and 12th, in the Southwest Building, in the part of downtown you can park once and walk around.
- Opened January 2012
- Rebuilt 2014, the whole space
- Address 324 S. Phillips Avenue, at 12th Street
- Closed Mondays
- Dinner Thursday to Saturday, 5pm to 9pm
Come and eat
Breakfast from seven, Tuesday through Friday
Brunch at eight on Saturday and Sunday, lunch from eleven, and dinner Thursday to Saturday. Closed Mondays.