Excelsior's Restaurant Row Survived Its First Winter. Apple Days Weekend Shows What's Next
The restaurants that once anchored downtown Excelsior's busiest corner closed during the pandemic, and the storefront sat empty for years afterward. Mike DeCamp, the chef and co-owner behind Jester Concepts, has said walking past that vacant space every day felt genuinely discouraging.
That corner filled back in during the summer of 2025, when a handful of established Minneapolis restaurateurs opened multiple concepts within steps of each other on Water Street, turning a stretch of small-town lakefront into something closer to a suburban restaurant row. More than a year later, the boom hasn't faded. It's grown. As of July 2026, OpenTable counted eight restaurants operating in Excelsior, more than existed when this all started. Apple Days weekend later this month is this stretch's second full test, and the question isn't whether the newcomers can survive a Minnesota winter. They already have. It's whether the momentum holds now that there are even more restaurants competing for the same slow season.
Jester Concepts took over the sprawling building that once housed an Irish pub and split it into three distinct spaces. Mirabelle occupies the main floor as a supper club with a coastal theme, built around rotating comfort-food specials like lasagna, meatloaf and fried chicken. Shiki, a tiny 30-seat ramen bar with bold colors and a late-night feel, shares the space and serves noodles and dumplings for lunch and dinner. Below both of them, in the lower level, sits a second outpost of Parlour, the group's cocktail bar and burger spot already known elsewhere in the Twin Cities.
Across the street, chef David Fhima opened Vagabondo in the building that used to house Red Sauce Rebellion and, before that, Bacon Drug Store. Fhima built his reputation on Fhima's Minneapolis and Maison Margaux in the North Loop, and Vagabondo is his Sicilian concept, a cafe by day and a Mediterranean restaurant by night. Two well-known Minneapolis chefs opened new restaurants within days of each other, on the same historic strip, in the same summer. That kind of concentration doesn't happen by accident.
For years, Water Street had a lake-town charm but comparatively little culinary reputation, especially next to its bigger neighbor Wayzata on the north shore of Lake Minnetonka. What's happening now isn't a handful of first-time owners testing a concept and hoping it works. These are operators who already run successful restaurants in the city center and chose, deliberately, to bring a second or third concept to a stretch of shoreline most Twin Cities diners didn't think of as a food destination a few years ago.
Excelsior's mayor, Gary Ringate, put it plainly when asked about the pace of openings.
"The restaurant world is churning around here. There's still even a desire for more."
Brent Frederick, owner of Jester Concepts, has described the former Irish pub building as having the potential for something no other spot in the area could offer once split into three concepts. That bet already has more than a year of data behind it. Every one of these places opened into a Minnesota summer, when patios are full and out-of-towners are driving in for the lake, and every one of them has since made it through a full winter on the other side.
Alongside the new openings, Water Street still has anchors that have already answered the winter question, some of them for decades. Maynard's has faced the water since 1947, and its walleye and fresh Minnesota fish specials are the reason locals keep returning across generations, not just tourists in July. Haskell's Port of Excelsior, the bar and grill attached to the liquor store, has a corner patio that locals treat like reserved seating for a lake view. Excelsior Brewing sits next to Old Southern BBQ Smokehouse, the counter-service barbecue joint founded by the family behind Famous Dave's and now run by his son James, an award-winning pitmaster in his own right. Red Bench Bakery has built a following on scratch cooking, lattes and music nights that pull people in well past patio season.
The newer names filling in around them include Layline, a New American spot at 301 Water Street, along with Yumi Japanese Restaurant & Bar, El Bodegon, Coalition Restaurant, The Table, and 318 Cafe, which doubles as a live music venue. Between the established places and the new ones, Water Street now has enough variety that eating your way down the block from morning coffee to late cocktails is genuinely possible in one day.
Here's what makes the next few weeks matter more than any other stretch of the calendar. Excelsior's built-in summer draws are already winding down. Concerts in the Commons, the Rotary-run Wednesday night series at Excelsior Commons, wrapped its seven-week run in late August. The weekly farmers market is seasonal too. By the time September settles in, the town's regular outdoor programming has mostly gone quiet, which means the restaurants that opened into a full summer calendar are about to find out what a normal weeknight looks like without a festival or a concert pulling people downtown.
Apple Days, running September 18 through 20 this year, is the last big concentrated weekend before that quiet sets in. It's one of the oldest continuous community festivals in the Twin Cities metro, and it still runs the way it always has: a historic Water Street walking tour departing at 11 a.m., extended tours of the Minnesota Streetcar Museum's carbarn, an apple pie baking and eating contest, complimentary community cruises on Lake Minnetonka from Paradise Charter Cruises, and a single-stage lineup that closes with an old-fashioned street dance.
The weather works against complacency too. Late September in the Twin Cities brings highs in the mid-60s and nights that can drop into the 40s, which puts Apple Days right at the edge of reliable patio weather. A light jacket is the sensible plan for the evening, and after this weekend, the calendar shifts toward the Chamber's cold-weather promotions like the Hot Cocoa Stroll and Trick or Treat the Street rather than anything built around eating outside.
This is the second Apple Days weekend Water Street has faced since the boom started, and it's walking in with more restaurants than the first one had. That's the detail worth sitting with. Surviving one winter is a data point. Adding restaurants heading into a second one is a trend.
The restaurants aren't in trouble. They've already held on past one Labor Day. What's worth watching now is whether the count of eight keeps climbing or whether that's close to what a town this size can support on an ordinary Tuesday. If you've been meaning to try Vagabondo's menu or grab a seat at Shiki before Layline's next menu refresh changes the conversation again, the weeks around Apple Days are still the easiest stretch to get a table without a long wait. Once the shoulder season fully sets in, reservations may loosen up, but so will the energy that's carried this stretch of Water Street through its first full year.
Whatever happens by December, this is the kind of shift that reshapes how people think about a place, not just where they eat dinner. If you're watching Excelsior change from the inside and start wondering what that means for your own home's value or your next move in this market, the team at Nicole Stone Real Estate knows this stretch of Lake Minnetonka block by block. Reach out anytime you're ready to talk about what's next.
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