Twenty years ago, a small detail changed everything.

Before we signed the lease twenty years ago, my wife, Desiree and I were not sure.

It was 2006. We had been looking for a while. We needed something cool and something cheap, in a neighborhood nobody was paying attention to yet. We did not need foot traffic because we were not a restaurant. Northeast Minneapolis fit.  

The space that would become the Dining Studio was a former art gallery. Before that, apparently, a chop shop. Stolen parts for Ferraris, Mercedes and Jaguars, right there in northeast Minneapolis, eighteen months before we moved in. The neighborhood was a gamble. Industrial, overlooked, not yet the arts district it would become. Nobody had done what we were trying to do—we were making it up as we went, and we were nervous.

Desiree and I have a number. It is 19. It is our number, the way some people have a lucky color or a song that means something. It has followed us through our lives in ways that are hard to explain and easy to feel.

We were walking through the space, taking it in, when one of us spotted something on the wall. A small tag, the kind left behind in an industrial space numbering something. It said 19.

We looked at each other and that was it. We did not need to see another space. We signed the lease.

Twenty years later, that room has held more than we ever imagined when we stood in it that first afternoon. Weddings. Memorials. Birthdays that became the stories people tell for years. Sunday Suppers that started as a way to fill a slow night and became a community we never planned for. Strangers who sat down at a long table and left as friends.

It has been a big warm hug, no matter what kind of evening people brought through the door.

Twenty years is a long time to love a room. We are grateful for every moment that happened inside it.

And now we are rebuilding it. Not because what it was was not enough. Because what it was deserves to become something more. The walls are coming down. Something new is going up. And when it is finished, the 19 will still be there, framed and in its place of honor, the way it has always been.