The divider next to the bar at Apa Sushi was in the room before the restaurant was.
There was a planter box in that spot when the family took the space, and it took up too much room. So it came out, and something slimmer went in, narrow enough to give the tables beside it a little more air. The shelves the sake bottles sit on are handmade too. Same person, same empty room, before anybody walked in.
He is not a carpenter. He is Rinpo Yak, he runs the kitchen, and when the planter box was in the way he built the fix himself.
He left Tibet at fifteen.
He went on foot, with uncles, in a group, behind someone who knew the way. You go through the passes and you try to stay safe.
His family came in the 1990s, a few years behind the first Tibetans here, which meant somewhere to pray and somebody who knew who was hiring.
Other people's rooms
Before Rinpo ever had a kitchen of his own, he set up other people's rooms. Solera, the Spanish place downtown, ran events, and his job was the room itself — the chairs, the lighting, everything standing ready before anybody walked in. And he cooked: Marshall Field's, Italian, American, kitchens with somebody else's name over the door. He wanted his own the entire time. He tried it once as a partnership. It did not take.
His brother Sonam arrived in the 2000s and spent five or six years behind sushi counters in New York, Atlanta and California, collecting a network of chefs and owners who knew his work.
Then the brothers bought a hibachi truck. That was 2017.
He has one every single day
Sonam designed most of what you will order tonight. He likes sushi. He is not crazy about it.
What he is crazy about is momo. He has one every single day. Not as a treat, not as nostalgia — it is the thing that makes a meal a meal. Which explains why a sushi restaurant in Maple Grove sells a Momo Roll. He is in Japan right now.
It is the first time he has ever been.
The lease was not supposed to start yet
Then Momo Sushi caught fire.
Summer of 2025. It started in the kitchen, and nobody ever pinned down exactly what set it off. They could not go back into the building.
It was the busiest thing the family owned, and more than half the staff lost their work. A few could pick up shifts elsewhere. The kitchen could not.
A space was available in Maple Grove. They took it and opened in November instead of the following spring.
Rinpo's daughter Tenzin Legden does not know who made that call, and is not certain there was a call to make. Nobody stopped to argue about it.
There was nothing to argue about. The question was how to take all these people somewhere.
Apa Sushi opened on November 7, 2025. Nearly every employee came from Momo Sushi.
In the kitchen they do not call him Rinpo. They call him Cho Cho. It means brother.
Which fish needs what
Read the menu and you can see where one brother stops and the other starts. The sashimi, nigiri, poke bowls and chef's rolls are Sonam's. The hot side comes out of Rinpo's kitchen. The Tibetan half belongs to both — momo, mokthuk, shapta.
Order the dragon roll and notice where the heat stops — enough to register, not enough to bury what is under it. Sea urchin gets the same treatment. It arrives looking like an orange tongue in a spiked shell and tastes like the sea, so it gets citrus, until what you taste is the butter instead.
The newest rolls are not Sonam's. They belong to Rinpo's son, who is the one inventing things now: snow crab, dried lemon, lime. He keeps reaching for citrus. Sushi chefs learn which fish needs what, and this is a kitchen where that gets handed down.
Floater
Rinpo's daughter hires people. She seats them. She fills drinks and runs food and stops at tables to ask how everything is, at this restaurant and the family's others.
Sit down with her and none of it stops. She will keep talking while she gets up to greet someone, keep talking while she sets down a bowl of soup she decided you needed, and keep talking when she sits back down.
Before any of this, Tenzin spent four years in the Air Force. Nurses from the hospital come in and ask whether Apa offers a medical discount. It does not. It offers a veterans discount.
Ask what to call all that and she will talk you down. Not general manager — she turns that one down flat. Owner's daughter, maybe. What she offers instead is floater. Wherever a restaurant needs her, that is where she goes.
And one family already comes every week.
That is the thing they are watching for. Not the review. The second Tuesday in a row.
The planter box is gone. He built something slimmer so more people would fit.
Nobody sitting there knows.
Apa Sushi is at 15607 Grove Circle North in Maple Grove, serving lunch and dinner, with dine-in, takeout and delivery.