Molly Broder is waiting for me in the corner of her Broders’ Pasta Bar, ready to spill the secrets to founding the trio of Minneapolis’s defining Italian food spots—Broders’ Cucina Italiana (born 1982), Broders’ Pasta Bar (born 1994), and Terzo (born 2013)—all while raising three sons in and around the growing enterprise. Thomas, Charlie, and Danny Broder have stayed in the Twin Cities and live close by. All of them work in the Broders’ businesses and bring the grandkids by for days with Nonna on the regular.
She has a tray of carefully cut Parmigiano Reggiano on a platter next to a pool of good black balsamic vinegar tradizionale. Valentine’s pink and red flowers bloom in vases on every table; the big day is coming. She looks up at me with her impish “Come and play?” smile and asks if I want wine—Molly is also a certified sommelier who has helped build the wine program of the Broders’ empire into one of the most significant Italian-focused lists in the state. Of course I want wine. And all the secrets!
After our chat, I went home to try to put into good order all the elements that make a life. Then, a text from Molly: “What a difference a day makes!” A Minneapolis water main break had flooded Terzo the night before Valentine’s Day, leaving mud, sludge, and destruction. As of this writing, the building may or may not be salvageable, and much of the significant wine collection now looks like something archaeologists pulled out of Pompeii, more like earth and mud and less like commerce. “Party time!” she adds. A party of mysteries, since many of the labels left with the flood, but also of great Broders’ selected taste.
From the tragedy, joy?
“That’s my mom all over,” Charlie, Broders’ co-owner and the front-of-house maestro, tells me. “Her ability to choose happiness is one of the things that I have seen her do all her life. Every time she’s in immense adversity, she survives and overcomes, with an urgency that just puts my jaw on the floor.”
Flood, meet the unstoppable Molly Broder.
Her defining moment of surviving adversity is murmured about in Twin Cities food circles with awe and fear to this day. The year was 1994. Molly and the love of her life, Tom Broder, had decided their fresh-pasta deli wasn’t economically stable enough for their growing family of three boys—then ages 3, 6, and 10—so they were opening their first sit-down restaurant, Broders’ Pasta Bar. They purchased the old gas station across from their deli for cheap—if you look carefully at the front windows today, you can see where cars would drive in for oil changes—found a chef, and eventually invited friends and family in for test meals. “That ended on a Saturday night,” recalls Molly. “I can remember the Sunday morning. I had taken a shower. I had that slightly wet hair, and I was sitting on the back stoop taking in the sun while the kids were riding their bikes up and down the alley and having so much fun. We had been up late reading all the comment cards [from the friends-and-family dinners] and were just kind of high on those. I remember thinking: Just grab on to this happiness. Happiness like this never lasts long. God. I really remember thinking that: Soak it up, it feels great.”
The next day, she walked a few blocks to work when Tom called. “Come home!” He felt sick. Very sick. Home again, she found him paper-white and called 911. Heart attack. Hospital.
What now?
Postpone the opening? Cancel? The Pasta Bar was Tom’s passion. A bigger-than-life force of fun from White Plains, New York, Tom was the booming Irish guy who loved South Jersey hoagies and who seemed to be able to walk into any bar in New York or any coffee counter in Italy and make friends with everyone in the joint.
Molly met him when she was 19, at a college party in St. Louis in 1969. She was a girl from a large French Catholic family in Windsor, Ontario, with long hair in pure Woodstock style, and was more fearless than most. She hitchhiked; she was a feminist already thinking about how a big life and feminism fit together. Tom wooed Molly with pork chop dinners out of Craig Claiborne’s New York Times Cookbook. He was political and adventurous. The two talked immediately of building a life partnership, how their ideals could be lived in a marriage, ideals of fun and food and nurturing themselves and their relationship and others.
The next thing you know, they were married and living in a tent behind a French restaurant in upstate New York. Was the restaurant lifestyle for them? Friends from college lived on the Iron Range and convinced them to visit Minneapolis, land of Hubert Humphrey and intentional urban planning. “I really liked Minneapolis because it was the most Canadian city I’d seen in the U.S.,” she notes. “And Tom was a big urban planning and politics guy, so he loved it.”
However, the young couple’s first move ended up being to Chicago, and they struggled as they looked for the right way to build an intentional life until Tom had a eureka moment. “Italian!” he declared one day, Molly recalls. “I was like: ‘Frank Sinatra, that kind of Italian?’” He said no; he had found a cooking class in Italy with the living legend Marcella Hazan. They could go and take it. “Well, OK, that I’m up for,” Molly remembers saying, and so they went to learn at the side of the master. When she and Tom first met, they thought they didn’t want kids—the world was already overpopulated—but they changed their minds. “After a decade together, we thought, This love is too big for two people; now we have to share it,” says Molly.
They knew they didn’t want to be closing down restaurants at 2:00 in the morning with little kids at home, so they homed in on the idea of a daytime-hours fresh pasta shop. People would buy fresh pasta, sauces, imported cheese, a few scoopable salads from a deli case. They found a former Wuollet Bakery building, where they have now been since 1982, and at the time nearly went broke. At first Minneapolis thought the pasta shop was a strange concept, kind of snooty. They opened a second location, which further challenged their financials, so they decided to sell the second location and use the money that came in to buy a deck pizza oven to sell pizza slices.
“That’s when everything changed—
1984,” recalls Molly. “Suddenly the guys from the gas station across the street were coming in. We weren’t hoity-toity anymore; we were a place for regular guys. Tom was back there, always perfecting his New York pizza. Then we started selling South Jersey hoagies, because Tom’s mom was from Ocean City, and he used to spend summers there as a kid.” The now legendary Broders’ was really launched with those pizza slices. People would come in for lunch and grab some fresh pasta to take home, and the doors closed at 6:00 at night so the Broders could have family time.
Amidst the buzz of this growing business, the heart murmur Tom had been diagnosed with in high school never entered the family’s thoughts, until the day the Pasta Bar reservation books were full for the opening and Tom was in the hospital.
“We’re too ready. We have to open,” Molly recalls Tom telling her. So, she went to stand at the host stand, and Tom told her not to worry about the little heart repair he’d have on opening day; it would be nothing.
But that friend from Hibbing who convinced the young Broders to come to Minneapolis went to the hospital, pretended to be Tom’s sister, read the chart, and found that Tom had nearly died that day.
“She came to the Pasta Bar, sat on a stool, waited for everyone to go home, and told me,” remembers Molly. “We stayed up till three in the morning, crying, trying to figure out what to do next.” The friend from Hibbing took the boys north for a few days. One woman cannot parent three kids who are second grade and younger and oversee a restaurant opening at the same time.
The pattern for the family’s life was upended and reset that day. At first, Tom tried to run the business even though he wasn’t well. He was told he might be a candidate for a heart transplant, and the young family found it hard to believe. “At first we were kind of stuck: I knew the kids’ schedules; I was the primary person in all that,” says Molly. “He was the primary person at the business. But I was having to do both. Finally, I broke. I told him: ‘I cannot do both. You have to take your head out of the business, and we have to switch roles.’ It was a real come-to-Jesus moment in our marriage. We had to figure it out. But that’s life; these things happen.”
Molly Broder took over the business, and Tom became primary parent. In 1997, Tom got a heart transplant.
“Five days a week, my dad was making family dinner. I’d go with my mom to work to make gift baskets. That’s how I remember it,” says Charlie now. “There’s Molly Broder, getting things done. She has this sense of urgency, generally. If there’s something to do, let’s do it; let’s go. She has this gift. I remember as a kid, I’d have to get a project for school done tomorrow. She’d say, ‘What?’ Then stay up with me, get it across the line, and it’s perfect. That’s how she is with the restaurants. ‘Oh my gosh, there’s a catastrophe over here? Let’s fix it; let’s go.’”
Tom died in 2008, two weeks after their youngest son, Danny, graduated high school. The family had a long time to figure out how to handle Tom’s death before it finally arrived. Molly prepared by reading, particularly The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch and Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams. Tom’s body was embalmed and brought to the house for the visitation.
“We had a three-day wake, black fabric draped over the Pasta Bar,” recalls Charlie. “Three days of visitation, always a line out the door. I stood there next to Molly, who shook a thousand hands, right next to my father’s body. I would peel away to drink some beers and smoke a joint outside, but she never did. The transplant gave us 10 years of life with my dad we never would have had, and when he died, it was the one time I really truly saw her sad and crushed. But she was also teaching us: ‘This is how we do it. We raise a glass and laugh and talk about the good times.’”
Charlie recalls how people flew in from all over the world to pay respects. “The mayor came. My dad was larger than life, a connector of communities, and my mom gave every person who came time, because that’s what my dad would have done. I was living there; I was a teenager and not handling it well. One night we’re drinking wine, saying good night to dad, and somebody got the idea there needed to be ice packs in the coffin. My mom woke up; my dad was in there with bags of frozen peas. She was just laughing: ‘What is happening? That’s not a thing.’ That’s how Molly Broder rolls—life is fun and funny. I’m so grateful I’ve seen that in life. Have fun; choose happiness.”
“I was the littlest when my dad got sick,” notes Danny Broder. “So, I was at home for all of it, and what I remember is my mom really being an angel of a human, and that instilled in me what it’s like to have a relationship with another human, what care looks like in practice.”
Vincent Francoual, the French chef and founder behind the foundational Minneapolis spot Vincent: A Restaurant who now co-owns and runs Restore Restaurant Holdings, with the French restaurant Chloe and Italian restaurant EaTo, was one of Tom’s best friends and has since stayed close to Molly. “I’m always amazed at Molly’s strength,” he says now. “She went through so much, always with a smile. Tom was this loud kind of guy, always pumped up. He’d argue politics with you. It was a good time. I remember having dinner at their house when her oldest was 5 or 6. I was so amazed how she was so involved with the restaurant and the family at the same time. She’s been a mentor for me, mainly about staying positive and seeing the positive side of life. Yes, they created a sense of community; yes, they brought real Italian food to a town that didn’t have it, but she would tell a 5-year-old to go to sleep, and they went to sleep!”
Molly’s strength has left a lasting impression on him. “She calms everyone around her,” he says. “If I am struggling, I call Molly. The strength of this woman is unparalleled. The Buddha of the restaurant business. So many times, I look at what she is handling: I would be freaking out. But Molly—mother, entrepreneur, and widow, unfortunately—she is always thinking farther ahead. She’s a good example of having a full life, and I always say that when I grow up, I want to be like Molly. There’s a cohesion in her life—it’s not a job and going home; it’s all one thing. I look at her and I see a story of how to go through life. No matter how hard the times are that come, Molly is like, ‘OK, we’ll figure it out.’”
The day of the Terzo flood, Broders’ employed 170 people. That represents the growth that Molly oversaw until she stepped away from the business recently, leaving it in the hands of the kids while she takes on more of an advisory role. One of her last big moves in the business before she left was setting up a packaged foods arm of Broders’. You can now find Broders’ packaged sauces at Kowalski’s and other locations and can get its lasagna and stromboli airmailed to you through Goldbelly. If you want to know the secret to the empire’s success, try the marinara sauce Sugo Betti, named for Tom’s childhood bestie Ray Betti, at whose house Tom began his lifelong fascination with Italian food that transformed the Twin Cities.
“Are you going to be the new Rao’s?” I ask Charlie, referencing the Italian food brand that grew from a New York City Italian restaurant and eventually sold for nearly $3 billion to Campbell’s. “We are trying not to be the new Rao’s,” Charlie tells me. “Sustainable. For ownership and employees, we continue Molly’s legacy by growing with integrity. If we just wanted to make money, we could replicate the pasta bar a thousand times. I get that question every time I meet someone from a far suburb. It’s flattering, but we try to make the public understand that caring deeply about them means making Broders’ sustainable and rooted in integrity. As teenagers, us kids were really filled with angst and anxiety, like all teenagers, but we also had this medical trauma in our lives, and it affects how we do everything. We choose happiness over a quick buck or quick growth. We look down the road to see if we can get to happiness, and that’s what guides us.”
It’s a good strategy for this close family. Molly watches her 3-year-old granddaughter Frankie two days a week and makes it to the older three grandkids’ school concerts and such during the days. It’s a good strategy for business continuity and retention, too. Some of the Broders’ employees have been with the company for 40 years.
“I’ve been working side by side with her in the business for 20 years,” says her oldest son, Thomas. “She really provides the perfect balance of coaching and mentoring when you need it and giving you freedom otherwise. Terzo was the chance for Charlie, Danny, and I to do things on our own, and she really gave us the freedom to explore. We opened without pasta on the menu, which was probably a mistake, but we wanted to show that Terzo had more to offer.”
In retrospect, says Thomas, Terzo really only found its footing when the porchetta sandwich lifted the bar business and pasta amped up the dinner business. “But what we were really learning was, as entrepreneurs, how to be resilient in the face of challenges. We learned for ourselves what we had seen in her model: that you have to be resilient in the face of challenges, that there’s always a path forward. We’re going to face hard stuff—everyone does in life—and she gave us that freedom to practice that on our own.”
One aspect of Molly’s life that’s hard to capture is her gifts as a chef. The restaurants have always been very traditionally Italian, making those foods that are often hundreds of years old and as such don’t really read as chef-touched to a modern audience.
“It’s a joke in the family how opinionated she is about what pasta shape best goes with which sauce, but you really taste how good of a cook she is when her respect for seasonality meets that technical excellence,” says Thomas, a trained chef. “Every summer, she makes this raw golden tomato sauce—it’s just olive oil, yellow tomatoes, basil, salt, and pepper, and you toss the room-temperature puree with hot pasta, but it’s perfect, and I look forward to it all year long. She’ll spend hours making tiny tortellini for 22 people at Christmas. She’s very dedicated to upholding the traditions of Italy, which includes this sense that the family is sacred. When the family is on her back patio, we try to leave the business on the corner. These Italian ways of connecting food and people, it’s what she does. I can look out the window anytime and think, Oh, spring is coming; she’ll be making her fava bean crostini.” A very Italian way to live.
On Valentine’s Day, while her sons were mucking out the Terzo basement, dragging ruined coolers to the dumpster and salvaging what mud-crusted bottles of wine there were to be salvaged, Molly spent the day with her grandkids, and then Danny dropped by and they all made heart-shaped ravioli. She sent everyone home with enough ravioli for the family’s dinner.
“They were delicious, and the kids were so proud,” recalls Charlie. “Of course, none of us had time to make ourselves dinner that day, so it was appreciated on that front, too. Restaurants have killed plenty of people trying to reach that Michelin-star glory, but that’s a high-stakes game. I don’t want that for my family or my kids. I want what I learned from Molly, that there’s also a world of food and family where you’re not alone and you can’t be alone. You need to trust people and be honest with people, and when you think about other people and get them involved, that’s choosing happiness.”
After I’d talked to her kids, and long after our lovely lunch, I realized I had seen how Molly Broder chose happiness again and again, over a lifetime, but I’d never asked her where it came from. I phoned her up. “Watching my own kids, I do believe people arrive with much of their personalities,” she laughed. “But after Tom died, and after the crazy days of celebration, I thought: I have two choices here: I can wallow or I can find something every day that’s joyful. And when I went looking, I found it.”
And she shared it, and kept sharing it, which really might be how the unsinkable Molly Broder became a Twin Cities icon—of food and much, much more.