What's Actually New on Wayzata's Lake Street This Late Summer

If you moved onto the Lake Minnetonka side of town before the Lakewalk opened, the last two Augusts probably felt like one long construction detour. This one won't. The boardwalk is done, the docks are back, and the storefronts that spent 2024 and 2025 watching the sidewalks get torn up are finally programming into the finished street. What that means for you, as someone who already walks a dog past the Depot a few nights a week, is that a Tuesday evening in late August 2026 is a genuinely different Tuesday than it was in 2023.

The through line for the season isn't a single opening. It's that Lake Street and Broadway are being used the way the Panoway plan drew them up. The physical work is over. The programming is what's new.

The lakefront finally has a coffee tenant designed for it

Phase 2 of Panoway, the 1,200-foot Lakewalk that stretches along the restored shoreline of Lake Minnetonka from Broadway Avenue to the Depot with two lakeside seating step-downs and new community docks, was completed in June 2024. For most of the two summers since, the boardwalk has been a beautiful place to walk with nothing to hand you a cup of anything. That gap is what the incoming Parcelle location is built to fill.

Kamal Mohamed, the chef behind the northeast Minneapolis flagship, confirmed in January that his L.A.-inspired organic cafe would open its first suburban outpost on the Wayzata lakefront as a small, grab-and-go cafe near the water, in an 800-square-foot space designed for takeout, with easy food to pick up before a lakeside walk or a sit on the patio in warmer months. Read that footprint against the storefronts on Lake Street. Eight hundred square feet is smaller than most of the sit-down rooms downtown. It's a counter, not a destination. That's the whole point. The Lakewalk needed a service tenant sized for people who are already outside.

The interesting local read isn't the menu. It's the direction of the traffic. Grocer's Table pulls people off the sidewalk into a room. A grab-and-go on the water pushes them back out onto the boardwalk with something in their hand. If you live within walking distance of the Depot, that shifts your default evening route.

Eloise's Broadway patio is the July council decision worth caring about

Two blocks up from the water, the other change to notice is on Broadway. The Wayzata City Council approved a substantial expansion of the outdoor patio at Eloise on July 21 by a 4-0 vote, allowing the downtown restaurant at 332 Broadway Avenue South to add seating along Broadway Avenue for the remainder of the 2026 season.

The timeline matters if you're planning around it. The expanded patio is expected to open toward the end of August, depending on the timely arrival of its tables, chairs and other furnishings, and once installed the new seating area will remain open through the balance of the outdoor dining season. Public Works recommended, as a condition of approval, that the furniture and planters associated with the expanded portion of the patio be removed by Nov. 1 each year so they do not interfere with snow removal and winter maintenance.

Roughly ten weeks of sidewalk seating on Broadway. Not a season. A window.

That window is the story. Eloise sits next door to The Grocer's Table under Lindsay Pohlad's ownership, the same operator who told Lake Minnetonka Magazine she took the space next door because she could be in two places at once under one roof, with chef Craig Johnson, known for his work at The Grocer's Table, running the kitchen. What was an evening-only room with an interior feel is, for the last stretch of summer, going to spill out onto Broadway itself. If you've walked past the block a hundred times without much reason to slow down after 8 p.m., that's the block that changed.

A week you can actually walk

The programming that ties the new tenants to the finished lakefront is already scheduled. Here's what's live between now and the end of James J. Hill Days weekend, all within a few blocks of each other:

The Music by the Lake concert at the Wayzata Depot at 402 E. Lake Street on Wednesday, August 5, 2026, from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. is hosted by the Wayzata Rotary Club. CoV Wayzata, at 700 Lake St E, is running summer music evenings on Tuesday, August 18 and Thursday, August 20 from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. Wayzata's lakeshore will come alive September 5–7 as the community gathers for the 51st annual James J. Hill Days. The three-day event includes over 150 vendors across categories from Business to Health & Wellness to Home & Garden to Non-Profit to Arts & Crafts to Sports + Fitness. The Wayzata Fire Department will welcome the community to its 9th Annual Pancake Breakfast on Sunday, September 14, from 8 a.m. to noon at 600 Rice Street East, a family-friendly fundraiser featuring pancakes, French toast, sausage, coffee, juice, and a raffle, with all proceeds going to the Wayzata Fire Relief Association.

Two things to notice in that lineup. First, the geography. Depot, CoV, Panoway Plaza, Broadway. Every single anchor is inside a fifteen-minute walk of the Broadway Docks. You do not need to drive between them. That's the Phase 2 dividend showing up in your calendar.

Second, the sequencing. The first three weeks of August are quiet-evening programming, small scale, one venue at a time. Then Eloise's patio flips on. Then Hill Days lands on top of everything. If you have out-of-town family coming through Labor Day, the answer to what to do with them stopped being a shrug two summers ago.

The logrolling and the dachshund races are back

James J. Hill Days weekend is the one people who don't live here plan around, so if you do live here, the useful thing is knowing which pieces are new to Panoway Plaza and which are the ones the town keeps around because they work. Logrolling is back at James J. Hill Days, with the rolling pool positioned right out on Panoway Plaza. That single detail is a good example of the finished lakefront paying for itself. Two years ago the plaza wasn't there in a usable form. Now it holds a pool.

Free entertainment runs all weekend on the Sandvold Stage located at Minnetonka Avenue and Lake Street. That corner is a five-minute walk from Broadway. If you're eating on Eloise's new sidewalk seats and want to catch a set, you can hear it before you finish your drink.

The parade, the dachshund races, the street market, the food trucks including Bad Rooster, Cancun Paradise, Firehouse Foods, and Let's Thai It by Sawatdee — the fabric of the weekend is familiar. What's new is that the fabric has a finished floor under it.

Why this matters if you already live here

There are two ways a small downtown can improve. It can add square footage and hope for tenants, or it can add usable public space and watch how the existing tenants adapt. Wayzata just spent about a decade doing the second thing. The Wayzata Conservancy formed in 2016 as a nonprofit between private residents and city leaders, about four years after the Panoway concept design was born in 2012. That's a long runway. The payoff isn't a ribbon cutting. It's the fact that a takeout cafe now makes economic sense on a stretch of shoreline where five years ago there was nothing but a parking lot, and that a full-service dinner room next to a market cafe can justify ten weeks of sidewalk furniture on Broadway.

If you're a homeowner within walking distance, what changed for you this summer isn't a listing or a comp. It's how often you have a reason to leave the house on foot after seven o'clock. That's the thing the portals don't measure and the thing that quietly shows up in how much you like living here.

When you're ready to talk about the block you're on

If the shape of downtown is changing the way you use your own neighborhood, and you've started to wonder what that means for the home you own or the one you're thinking about, Nicole Stone Real Estate has been working the Wayzata and Lake Minnetonka streets long enough to tell you what a Panoway-adjacent address actually adds up to in a listing conversation. Schedule a free consultation and we'll walk it with you.