Aki’s BreadHaus: The House That Pretzels Built

Aki’s BreadHaus and WunderBar is the biggest event in Minnesota German culinary culture in ages.

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Brown as chestnuts, sparkling with salt, tied in pious and festive loops, clustered on a custom-built pegboard—are these the most beautiful pretzels in the world? Walk in the door to Aki’s BreadHaus and WunderBar, now in its new location on Marshall in Nordeast near the river, and see for yourself. Get one, warm and fresh from the oven or warmed to order, and it’s everything a pretzel ever could be: a tender bloom of soft dough in parts, crisp and taut in parts—just right. 

Launched in 2010 by baker Joachim “Aki” Berndt as a farmers’ market stand, Aki’s BreadHaus later took root as a brick-and-mortar on Central Avenue in 2014. Just this past November, fueled by a wave of fresh pretzel passion the likes of which modern Minnesota has never seen, it opened in a space four times bigger, with a wine bar and hot food. It’s easy to see how these pretzels can drive this scale of expansion: They are a staple at Surly’s Beer Hall, Pryes Brewing, and loads of other breweries; they’re part of Twin Cities Oktoberfest; and they’re sold at Wild hockey games as Nordy’s Knots. They’re everywhere and easy to spot once you clue in to the distinct handmade style: fat in the center with thinner crossed arms, so you get both tender and crisp bits (machine-made ones, on the other hand, have a telltale uniform, tied-spaghetti look). Once stretched and shaped, these pretzels are dipped in culinary lye that bakes away, leaving an outer millimeter of tensile tautness and pleasant bitterness, like the skin of a grape, and keeping the tender insides tender. One bite and it’s clear, as your animal inside roars up: This is it! Pretzel! This is a real pretzel! More! 

So ensues our eternal tale, the march from just born to popular; today it’s spun in dough. And it’s easy to see everything that’s amazing about these pretzels, except this: Why is Minnesota so gonzo for pretzels? And here’s a strange question: If you’re having pretzels and a beer, is that German food? If you’re having a pretzel, a beer, and a bratwurst, is that a German meal? I’m seriously asking. I don’t know the answer. I’ve been puzzling over this for hours. 

Quick pretzel history: The first record we have of a pretzel is a fifth-century ancient manuscript owned by the Vatican. It shows the familiar crossed arms of dough, which were thought to represent praying and, some say, were thus a good thing to get you through a fasting day—when you could not eat meat or dairy—back when there used to be hundreds every year, but which we now mainly associate with Lent. Pretzels predate the nation we call Germany, founded in 1871, by a lot. By the year 1111, pretzels were the symbol of what we now call the German bakers’ guild and hung symbolically outside bakeries so people who couldn’t read would know: Pretzels, and related, found here. 

Some food scholars say that as France is to baguettes, as Mexico is to tortillas, so Germany is to pretzels. If we’re mainly German, us Minnesotans, why don’t we have more pretzel bakeries? And for that matter, why do we have so few German restaurants? It was the 2018 American Community Survey that pointed out how very many of us count a German ancestor, a full 1.8 million of the 5.8 million souls here in the North Star State. That’s roughly one out of three of us, with those of us with Norwegian ancestors (810,300) vastly outnumbered, and Irish (516,500) and Swedish (429,800) outnumbered even more. With so many German descendants, why don’t we have more German restaurants? 

Here’s a quick Twin Cities German food scene overview. There’s the mighty Black Forest Inn, of course, which I always count as one of our most underrated gems. Then there are the historically important destinations in greater Minnesota, like the icon Gasthaus Bavarian Hunter in Stillwater and Kaiserhoff in New Ulm. There’s Gluek’s of downtown Minneapolis, mainly mainstream bar food. Waldmann Brewery, our only new Twin Cities spot to make a big bet on spaetzle and strudel this century. And then of course there are spots like New Bohemia, JW’s Bierstube, and Yoerg Brewing that serve up a bratwurst, pretzel, and beer with next-generation style, more or less globally, side by side on a menu with, say, mini tacos or Korean chicken sandwiches. (Berlin, the new jazz club that sounds awfully German, does have one identifiably German snack, currywurst, though its menu is essentially Italian.) In a largely German state, not so very many German restaurants. But if we call a brat and a beer and a pretzel German culinary culture—the implications, I can hardly face them!

A bratwurst, a beer, and a bag of hard pretzels—pretzels in a bag being the shelf-stable, industrial version of the crispy, skinny pretzel arms in a soft pretzel—that’s us. That’s every backyard barbecue, every canoe-trip-inspired campfire, every steamy winter kitchen packed with a couple parents and a dozen teenagers after cross-country practice. That’s the meal you can build out of any decent small-town gas station. Pretzels, a beer, and a brat: common as air. We don’t say, “I was in my car breathing air,” for we take that as understood. Likewise, we do not say, “I was in my Minnesota life, among pretzels, a beer, and a brat.” Common as air.

Work with me. What if the question is not about why we have so few German restaurants but really: When we’re sitting in our backyards with a beer and a brat and pretzels, are we all existing in a perpetual self-replenishing German quick-serve restaurant and biergarten and no one has ever noticed? 

We might have been… at least until the rocketing success of Aki’s threw it all into view.

I thought about this as I pulled open the doors at Aki’s new location, the new production bakery and wine bar. First things to notice: walls of North Sea blue, a copper bar, a variety of tables and comfy seating such as couches, piled with pillows I think of as generally Scandinavian. I made a note to bring an interior designer here to tell me how the chic interior, with pretty oversized, hammered golden lights and bold prints, implemented by local design firm Shea, fits into contemporary German style. In any event, a lot of what you see was indeed handmade by a contemporary German. Aki Berndt, the baker, spent five years of his early life as a cabinetmaker in Mönchengladbach, in western Germany, not too far from the borders of both Belgium and the Netherlands, and he handmade the copper bar, the pretzel board, the window-box cabinetry that allows you to see from bar to baking floor, and more. On the walls, you’ll also see some of his photos of 1990s East and West Berlin, as well as some charming childhood photos of the baker in lederhosen.

Berndt is good with his hands, says everything in the new Aki’s. A former architectural engineer laid off during the 2009 Great Recession, Berndt taught himself to bake after hunting for a local bread like the kind he grew up with in Germany. One naïve neighbor told him to try one chain bakery, and he discovered pumpernickel that he thought tasted like dyed white bread. Someone else sent him to another chain bakery, where he thought the breads all tasted like cake. So, he purchased some flour and turned to the website Breadtopia, where he bought a sourdough starter nursed along by an Iowan since 1974. To make unemployment less lonely, Berndt set up at a farmers’ market table. (Aki’s is still at the farmers’ markets in Maple Grove, Shoreview, and New Brighton.) After finding frequent customers, and wondering if bread might be a new life path, he spent a year working in bread production at a local co-op and liked what he lived. In 2014, he opened Aki’s on Central, where news of his pretzels was shouted through the town, drowning out the quieter story of his excellent breads. 

A few of the breads he has developed, which are tucked into the shelves at the new Aki’s, are as good as bread gets on this earthly plane. I’m thinking specifically of the Bauernbrot, a rye- and wheat-flour sourdough that does that thing great breads do: offers fragrance and complexity as resonant as those offered by good wine. There’s a mushroomy meatiness to the bread, the aroma of hazelnut and toasted marshmallow, an orange marmalade note here, an apple-y note there. It’s elemental: earth and the wind above the earth. The three-day sourdough is so moist and airy, so subtle from the three days the little sour beasties took to eat everything they wanted to eat, it’s like an exercise in tasting the difference between a new wine and an aged one, a new cheese and an aged one, but rendered in bread: mellow, subtle, delicate.

The 100 percent rye pumpernickel is in the Danish style, moist and almost tempeh-like in density, remarkably tangy with sour of the sourdough starter, fragrant like someone handed you an apricot plucked from wine casks while you were in a windy fall meadow noticing the smoke of a distant bonfire—that sort of thing. This pumpernickel is the necessary ingredient for all of you wanting to put out smørrebrød spreads. Your fussed-over gravlax, your good gouda deserve bread this thick and good. 

Aki Berndt’s favorite bread is his tangy currant rye absolutely stuffed with fruit, baked so that some of the currants swell up with sweet moisture and others go black within the crust. This creates a rainbow of currant flavors in every slice, sweet and light, dark and charred, like a Christmas stollen for people who have no sweet tooth but do have an average Wednesday morning to humbly glorify. “That is my bread growing up, and now it is my Sunday bread,” Berndt told me, as he shaped pretzels as fast as a woodpecker pecks wood. He worked on one of the half a dozen maple butcher-block bread tables that now produce the Twin Cities’ most significant German artisanal breads. 

Breads that you can have as part of a sandwich now! Welcome to the domain of Aki Berndt’s new business partner Nancy Marone. It’s easy to confuse her with Berndt’s wife Nancy, but they are different people. The two Nancys were friends, and once soccer teammates, at Osseo Senior High School, and kept in touch. Marone had built, and sold, a couple of businesses, mainly in the area of scrapbooks, and was looking for her next project. At a party, Aki Berndt, thinking about his expiring lease, joked, “Do you want to buy a German bakery?” Not exactly. 

Now Marone is in charge of WunderBar, the new wine bar part of the operation. She’s doing something I appreciate a lot: bringing a handful of good German and Austrian wines to Berndt’s excellent breads and pretzels and making a humble little affordable restaurant.

Get the soup. It changes every day. It’s made by Jim DuRose, who ran the long-gone Countryside Family Restaurant in Roseville for 40 years. He makes a ham and cabbage soup supremely velvety and hearty, with your choice of a pretzel stick or brötchen, a hearty, crusty German roll. Get the warm sandwiches made with Aki’s bread and smashed in a panini press with good cheese and more—maybe gouda, apple, and prosciutto? They change every day. Get a side salad, a MN Bratwerks bratwurst in an Aki’s bun, or the outrageously fun “pretzel quiche,” which is basically a pinched pretzel filled with egg and cheese—so rich, so filling, so simple. My teenage son pushed away from his pretzel quiche, with a side of hot pretzel, saying, “I wish this was near our house!” For less than a movie ticket, he got more good food than he could finish. If you’re living on a student’s budget, please note you could come here, get a bowl of soup and a loaf of bread, and eat like a king, or at least like a German baker around the year 1111, which is eating pretty well. 

For more highfalutin pleasures, consult the wine list. A Schwedhelm Scheurebe is a silky white German wine offering flourishes of thyme and apricot from within its well-knit delicacy. Aki’s WunderBar also offers an Alsatian Gewürztraminer from Gustave Lorentz, which tinkles with the sort of lively pie spice and energy you want beside a platter of good charcuterie and breads. The spot opened with an Austrian sparkling rosé, a dry German pinot noir, and, from outside the northern European wine strongholds, a dozen more wines— Italian Sangiovese, Argentinian Malbec, and so on. With her first effort, Nancy Marone is unsure what people really want and is eager to find customers, so Northern wine people: Go. I’ve always heard that Minnesota buys more German wines, and particularly German whites, than almost anywhere in the country except New York, but do we have a German wine bar? Alas, no. But we have the beginnings of one! There’s a once-in-a-generation opportunity to go and raise our voices. Riesling-heads, sing out!

Aki’s also has beer, of course, including several bottled Hofbräus. As of this writing, Berndt is currently brewing a WunderBier in collaboration with next-door neighbor Broken Clock Brewing. Berndt says it will be a northern German–style pilsner, which will be hoppier than a typical pilsner and good with… pretzels. 

The gangbusters pretzel thing, by the way, mystifies Berndt. He started out in pursuit of bread—it’s Aki’s BreadHaus, not Aki’s PretzelHaus—and he’s found himself clinging to the runaway stallion of the pretzels going and going, stronger and stronger. As he flips and whips tray after tray of pretzels, he makes a very German face of: Many things happen, and we try to keep up. 

I could make that face too, because I know that no matter what I write about the excellence of the Bauernbrot and currant bread, what’s really going to happen at Aki’s WunderBar is that people are going to go and sit at the tables in the mornings and type out their emails with one eye on the pretzel pegboard, and when bakers come out to load up fresh pretzels, people are going to rush the counter, and that’s what Aki’s WunderBar will be famous for. And then in the evenings, people are going to go for a beer and a hot pretzel, and that’s what it will be famous for, too. 

I mean, just ask yourself: Are you one of the 1.8 million Minnesotans with a German ancestor? I am. Some Berlin Jews from a line of family I never met fled Germany in the 1880s, and every day I’m grateful they did, though I never stopped before today to wonder: Is this why I just really, really like to stand at a party near the bowl of Old Dutch pretzel sticks? 

Yes, Old Dutch was founded by a St. Paul German by the name of Carl Marx, who likely guessed his name was famous in the wrong ways because of an unrelated sound-alike fellow German, and so blended into the melting pot of Minnesota, that melting pot that I didn’t realize was so very bobbing with pretzels until I stepped into a bit of new wunder by the river.

1712 NE Marshall St., Mpls., 612-578-7897

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