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Story and Photos by Grace Aigner / The Hubbard School

When the owners of Annie’s Parlour announced in July that they were permanently closing the beloved burger and malt joint after nearly 50 years in business, Tony Nicklow and Daniel Lam were left worried about the fate of independent Dinkytown restaurants like theirs.

“It was a gut punch,” said Nicklow, the owner of Tony’s Diner on Fourth Street in Dinkytown. Lam, owner and manager of the neighboring Chinese restaurant Shuang Cheng, remembers how hard Annie’s owners worked.

Nicklow and Lam have every reason to be worried because Annie’s Parlour is not alone. An influx of chain restaurants, perceptions about crime and safety, the increased cost of goods post-pandemic and limited parking have made it difficult for independent restaurants to thrive in Dinkytown.

Both restaurant owners, though, believe they have a key asset to survive Dinkytown’s tumultuous market: Goodwill from their customer connections. For Annie’s Parlour, its hard-earned loyalty from diners was lost during the pandemic.

“I take pride in getting to know as many people as I can,” said Nicklow. At the encouragement of his father, Nicklow, 51, opened Tony’s Diner in 2002 with a friend from college. At first a steakhouse, Nicklow’s restaurant grew into a casual diner. It’s one of the remaining handful of independent restaurants in Dinkytown. 

Shuang Cheng relies on families from Minneapolis suburbs for the majority of their customer base, Lam said, especially when students leave campus during the summer. “It's my customer, I feel power in that they like to come to my restaurant,” Lam said.

Shuang Cheng and Tony’s Diner stayed open during the pandemic.

Tony Rimarcik, one of the former owners of Annie’s Parlour, said the restaurant lost its connection with a generation of students while closed during the pandemic, which was detrimental to the restaurant’s success after reopening.

“We didn't have any of that shared experience to get people in,” said Rimarcik, 60. “Without anyone making any suggestions, you're just looking at the street or on Google Maps or somewhere and it's just another place right of the many places in Dinkytown.”

For Nicklow, a connection with a major customer—the University of Minnesota—turned out to be a lifeline during the pandemic. “At one point, we were feeding the football team every day, five days a week, for like four years,” he said. 

Nicklow said university athletics—including athletes and their parents—are the diner’s most reliable customer base. Catering for the university athletic department accounts for about 40%  of the diner’s yearly revenue, he said.

Higher rent costs are always a challenge for the restaurateurs, which could justify higher prices. But Nicklow wants to avoid raising prices for their college student-dominant customer base. He added that Dinkytown restaurants not only struggle to compete with one another, but with the food other Minneapolis neighborhoods have to offer. 

Lam, 62, said he cares most about high food quality while keeping meal prices friendly to a college student’s limited budget. “We keep it as low as we can because we’re thinking about how we deal a lot with students and some of their families who come here for years,” Lam, who bought the restaurant from its first owners in 1988, said. “We feel like our responsibility is to keep that reasonable.”

Annie’s had closed temporarily from March 2020 to February 2024. But after re-opening for just over a year, Rimarcik said the restaurant was losing money and wouldn’t have a chance of making a profit for another four months when students returned to campus again.

He also said Annie’s Parlour, originally opened by his father, John Rimarcik, struggled with the increased cost of goods like dairy products, potatoes and onions when they reopened after the pandemic. The cost of a half-gallon of ice cream, for example, increased by about $1.50 from March 2020 to July 2025, according to federal data. 

Lam and Nicklow knew the owners of Annie’s Parlor well – Tom and Tony Rimarcik and their family. Lam said John Rimarcik ate at Shuang Cheng, which translates to “twin cities,” a couple of times a month. He said, despite challenges like high delivery demand and limited parking, independent restaurants like his can succeed in Dinkytown if they’re determined to stay. “If you put the effort in there, it still can survive,” Lam said.