Remembering Beloved Northside Sandwich Shop Owner Sammy McDowell

Friends and loved ones share memories of a dedicated entrepreneur, community builder, and gifted gospel singer

Sammy McDowell, owner of North Minneapolis cafe Sammy’s Avenue Eatery, died suddenly on April 21, after collapsing during a Sunday morning church service. He was 48. WCCO was first to report the news.

Hundreds of tributes to McDowell have poured onto his Facebook page in the days since his death, as his loved ones remember a brother, uncle, cousin, friend, and entrepreneur who went far out of his way to lift up his family and community.

McDowell opened his cafe on Broadway Avenue, North Minneapolis’s main business district, in 2012, building on a long career in the restaurant and catering industry.

His food was immensely popular with neighbors — he served a particularly stellar breakfast sandwich, layered with fluffy eggs and cheese — but Sammy’s Avenue Eatery was as much a community hub as a sandwich shop, and local organizers, arts groups, and business owners met there frequently. Community members guarded the cafe during the civil unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd; in the weeks that followed, it became a hub for mutual aid donations. McDowell also ran a steady catering business, and recently launched a pop-up at St. Paul’s Golden Thyme cafe.

Sammy’s Avenue Eatery was featured on the YouTube Series Small Business Revolution in 2021. In it, McDowell speaks to the influence that his grandmother — who, he says, “was always the person to initiate people coming together” — had on his career trajectory. “I’ve always worked in the food industry,” he says in the series. “I had a steady paycheck, I was movin’ and groovin’. But my personality is a lot bigger than that world was, and I found myself suppressing who Sammy was sometimes.” So he took a leap to open his restaurant, his own way of bringing people together.

Part of McDowell’s mission was to expand fresh food options for the Northside community. But he also had an expansive vision for the West Broadway business district, where he saw other local entrepreneurs like himself giving back to the community and supporting younger generations. “Small businesses are so important. They can hear the heartbeat of the community a little better,” McDowell says in the series. “If you create a pathway to meet the needs of the people, I believe with all my heart we can be an example for the rest of the country.”

Courtesy of Sheltonn Johnson

McDowell also worked closely with other chefs and restaurant owners around the Cities. He’s a longtime friend of pastry chef Lutunji Abram, of Lutunji’s Palate Bakery & Cafe. “He would challenge me to forge forward and to learn until you cannot learn anymore,” Abram says. McDowell was a relentless supporter as she got her bakery off the ground, directing her to resources and helping her navigate the pitfalls of the pandemic. “I can go on and on about his tireless encouragement, his tireless ways of wanting to sit down, and create, and dream,” she says. “What he meant to our community was everything. That’s the word I want to use, everything.”

Chef Gerard Klass was another of McDowell’s friends. “Sammy McDowell is proof that one person can make a difference,” he wrote in an email. “[He was a] modern day hero and mentor who fed a community fresh food in a food desert, created jobs and a space for us to belong. Sammy was hospitality personified and he will be deeply missed.”

McDowell was very involved at his church, Shiloh Temple — he was known, his friend James Grear says, as a powerful gospel singer and soloist in the choir. “The church played a huge role in his life,” Grear says. “He was a minister, not necessarily a licensed minister thats gets up to preach. He ministered through song.” McDowell played a somewhat ministerial role at Sammy’s Avenue Eatery, too, always offering a listening ear to those who passed through the cafe, and offering words of encouragement that were sometimes spiritual and sometimes “just good directions in life,” Grear says.

Sheltonn Johnson, McDowell’s close friend and business partner, says that McDowell’s goal was to build community by bringing people together, whether they were “Black, white, in business, poor, rich — whoever.” If a customer couldn’t afford a meal, he’d feed them. “People that may not have wanted to listen to one another, he was able to get to communicate, to find commonality,” Johnson says.

As busy as McDowell was running his restaurant and catering business, he had an insatiable wanderlust. In the last six or seven years of his life, he traveled frequently, visiting Mexico and the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa. He loved the water and the sand, Johnson says, so much so that lately, he’d begun to do business beachside. “He always said that God intended for us to be to live, to enjoy life, and to be peaceful,” Johnson says. “That’s what he exuded.”

As painful as it is to lose his friend, Johnson says he takes comfort knowing that McDowell was satisfied with his life. “He would talk about it — ‘If I’m going, I’m good, I’m OK,’” he says. “That’s something I have to laugh about now, as I’m crying, and know that that’s genuinely been him this whole time.”

A picnic in Sammy McDowell’s honor is planned for April 23 at Shiloh Temple, according to MPR News; a memorial service will likely happen in early May. This story will be updated when details on that service are finalized.

Courtesy of Lutunji Abrams