Professional announcing the straightforward however controversial signal that notifying them whether or not a community is sweet or tough

An author has shared what she claims is a strange but reliable tip that denotes whether a neighborhood is nice or unpleasant.

Ann Bauer shared advice that she said was given to her by Philip Roberts, a successful Minnesota businessman.  

‘MN restaurateur Phil Roberts (Buca di Beppo, Oceanaire, Manny’s) told me when scouting locations for a new concept he looked in windows,’ she wrote on X. 

‘If the houses nearby had curtains, he considered. If they had shades, blinds, sheets or nothing, he moved on. Crazy how often I use this rule.’ 

The advice proved divisive, with one commenter asking what to do if a house had both curtains and blinds on its windows. 

‘Interesting,’ Bauer replied. ‘If they’re the cheap, Target variety that are always tilted, that’s a tell.

‘The BIGGEST red flag, according to Phil, was big expensive house, cheap blinds. That says “I don’t know what I’m doing and will soon be in foreclosure”.’

Roberts should know of what he speaks, as he sold his restaurant Buca di Beppo to Planet Hollywood International for $28.5 million in 2008. 

Throughout his career, Roberts created a unique repertoire of concept-heavy restaurants with kitschy touches, like the parodic fortune cookie messages at Chino Latino and the year-round Christmas lights at Buca di Beppo.

As Roberts himself has observed over the course of his career, results of his strategies may vary. 

Mozza Mia, Chino Latino, Salut Bar, Burger Jones, Il Gatto and several others have shut down due to various reasons – most of them related to the COVID-19 Pandemic, as well as spikes in maintenance costs.

Roberts’ vision for Buca di Beppo was ‘real Southern Italian immigrant cooking,’ heavily borrowing from Italian places on the East Coast 

The original Oceanaire, Roberts’ upscale seafood restaurant, was located in the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Minneapolis

In 2020, Roberts’ hospitality group Parasole Restaurant Holdings was almost bought by Private Equity firm FS Funds, but the deal fell through amidst the pandemic and was never finalized, according to the Minnesota Monthly. 

Today, Parasole Restaurant Holdings owns five businesses which includes two steakhouses and a hotel bar across Minneapolis and Edina. Buca di Beppo, his chain of ‘immigrant southern Italian,’ has since been sold off. 

‘Buca is down to 40 locations from over 100 at its peak, sold multiple times and bankrupt,’ a user wrote in response to Bauer.

‘So how ’bout them curtains now?’

Bauer retaliated that Roberts has been traveling through Europe for years on the money he made from selling Buca to Planet Hollywood.

‘Hugely successful guy and kind of an icon in the Twin Cities. Crude as hell, but I learned a ton from him,’ she said in another post. 

Bauer has spent a significant chunk of her career attending Minnesota restaurant openings and events – ‘schmoozing with buff chefs and the same handful of wealthy foodies who showed up at every venue,’ she shared on her Substack earlier this year. 

In 2010, Roberts was a source on Bauer’s Twin Cities Business feature on the rise and fall of Seven, another old-glory restaurant in Minneapolis which has since shut down following a series of pandemic-related struggles and legal battles. 

Phil Roberts used a ‘curtain’ trick when picking locations for his restaurants in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis

Roberts skipped locations f they had shades, blinds, sheets or nothing in the windows

Phil Roberts is a prominent restaurateur in the Twin Cities food scene, and is behind many memorable staples like Chino Latino, Buca di Beppo, and Figlio

On Roberts’ blog, Wine Travel Food (abbreviated to WTF), he shares restaurant reviews from his travels over the past few years. 

Moscow, London, Paris and Vienna are among some of his international destinations, as well as New York and Boston on the domestic front. 

Despite the successes or failures of Roberts’ ventures, many in the comments dismissed his modus operandi as classist and superficial. 

‘Makes sense if all you care about is chasing material wealth. Typically his clientele. What a legacy,’ X user Zech Deboteler commented on Bauer’s post, ‘it’s mostly just funny because the areas he avoids are typically the residences of his employees. It’s just ironic.’ 

Another user said: ‘Implying what? Curtains = cultured cosmopolitan with expendable $ vs. blinds = poor provincial serfs?’

Starting all the way back in the 1970s, Roberts has introduced demure Midwesterners to a vibrant, concept-driven mélange of cuisines from near and far.

Roberts’ portfolio includes the Oceanaire, a swanky 1930’s style supper club, Chino Latino, an Asian-Latin American fusion restaurant, and Salut Bar Americain, two ‘Frenchified’ bistros serving dishes easy enough for Americans to pronounce, with names that poke fun at the snootiness of the French, according to Restaurant Business back in Roberts’ heyday.

The Uptown neighborhood in Minneapolis suffered heavily during the pandemic and never came back as lively as it once was, and Roberts’ Chino Latino and Figlio were two casualties of this change. 

The Oceanaire was sold and has since become a chain across the country

Roberts’ restaurants Figlio and Chino Latino ‘still haunt Uptown,’ residents said

In 2024, Mpls St Paul published a piece with the headline ‘Does Figlio still haunt Uptown?’ 

‘Can the neighborhood ever be as it once was—specifically, when the celebrated restaurant held court on the corner of Lake and Hennepin in the mid-1980s?,’ author Stephanie March wrote. 

The late Salut Bar Americain of St Paul was located in historic Summit Hill, known for its walkable streets and Victorian architecture. The Minneapolis location was on a shopping strip in Edina, an affluent first-ring suburb. 

The remaining Buca di Beppo location in St Paul is tucked away in a remote location in Highland Park, its only neighbor being a construction company they share a parking lot with. 

As Jacob Carter pointed out on X, the spot where the St Paul Buca Di Beppo is located ‘must have been a lot nicer back in the day.’

Since then, Figlio has been replaced with a sports bar, the building that held one of the Salut Bar Americain has been boarded up, and what was once Burger Jones is now home to an outpost of a Midwestern BYO salad chain, Crisp and Green.

The Daily Mail has reached out to Phil Roberts and Ann Bauer for comment.