Chanhassen's Restaurant Boom Is Real. Downtown's Turn Hasn't Come Yet.

Drive past West 78th Street and Market Boulevard this month and you will still find four acres behind a chain link fence, the kind of blank lot that used to hold a Country Inn & Suites and the shuttered Chanhassen Cinema. Nothing about that corner has opened this year. Meanwhile, across the rest of town, a run of new names has landed hard enough that Yelp's own "hot and new" list for Chanhassen was still being updated in August: The Copperfield, Mo' Bettahs Hawaiian Style Food, Nature Nook Cafe, Fathead Bill's, Izakaya Kazama, Tasca Madrid, INTI Kitchen & Bar, and Dumpling Eatery all show up on current search results for the city, alongside a new Chanhassen location for Red's Savoy Pizza.

That is the part worth sitting with. The restaurant wave everyone in Chanhassen has been noticing did not come from the construction site downtown. It came from somewhere else, on its own schedule, while the lot that is supposed to eventually hold five new storefronts has produced exactly zero of them so far.

What actually opened this year

The names above are not a rumor. They are pulled straight from Yelp's own Chanhassen restaurant pages, last refreshed in July and August of 2026, which means the churn is current rather than a leftover list from a few years back. Tasca Madrid brought Spanish tapas into the mix, with a menu built around dishes like albondigas and croquetas de jamon. Dumpling Eatery and Izakaya Kazama added two more specific, non-chain options to a corridor that used to lean heavily on the familiar fast casual names. Mo' Bettahs pushed into Hawaiian plate lunch territory. Red's Savoy Pizza, a St. Paul-founded chain that has been expanding steadily since the 2000s, picked Chanhassen as one of its newest two locations alongside Shakopee.

None of this required the Roers Companies redevelopment to finish. None of it is sitting in the ground floor space at 78th and Market. It is scattered around town, in spaces that existed before the cinema came down and will keep existing no matter when Harlow or Bennett open their doors.

The corner that isn't part of that wave

The corner in question is the Roers Companies project, and the city's own project page, last updated in September 2026, lays out exactly what is coming. Two buildings, Harlow to the east and Bennett to the west, are going up on the four acres that used to hold the Country Inn & Suites and the Chanhassen Cinema. Together they will add roughly 310 market-rate apartments, about 408 underground and surface parking stalls, and five new commercial tenant spaces totaling close to 15,000 square feet aimed at restaurants, retail, or other commercial uses.

Harlow is the smaller and faster of the two: five stories, 126 residential units, 175,579 square feet, with 3,029 square feet of ground-floor retail split between two storefronts fronting 78th Street. It is on track for a December 2026 completion. Bennett, the larger building with the outdoor amenity deck along Market Boulevard, is not expected to finish until September 2027.

Here is the part that has not been announced yet, as of the city's most recent public update: no tenant has been named for any of the five retail spaces in either building. Not a coffee shop, not a restaurant, not a nail salon. The redevelopment that residents have been watching rise out of the ground for over a year still has an empty answer to the question of what will actually move in.

The project itself carries a price tag reported at roughly $124.3 million, financed in part through a $6.36 million tax increment financing package the city approved after a February 2024 public hearing where more than a dozen residents spoke, some raising concerns about traffic and parking, others about what the demolition would take with it.

What comes down before anything goes up

What the demolition took with it was a piece of the building itself, not just the building. The Chanhassen Cinema carried a mural of Prince on its exterior brick, painted after his death. City officials confirmed during the 2024 approval process that the artwork could not be relocated because it was painted directly onto the bricks of the structure. There is room on one of the new buildings for a similarly sized wall, and Roers Companies representatives said at the time they had been in contact with the original artist, though no final arrangement had been confirmed.

The mural was never designed to move. It exists on the same bricks that are scheduled to come down, which means preserving it and preserving the building were never both options.

That detail is easy to miss inside a planning document, but it says something the square footage numbers do not: this redevelopment is not adding storefronts to an empty lot. It is replacing a piece of the town's visual memory with storefronts that do not have names yet.

Two more spots that already changed hands

The corner at 78th and Market is not the only place downtown that has been in motion. Golf Zone, the indoor golf spot that shut down suddenly, reopened under new ownership after sitting dark for close to three years, according to Chanhassen Villager business coverage. Chanhassen Brewing Company has also been working toward an opening, though its timeline has shifted before, with one announced date pushed back to mid-April. Neither of these is part of the Roers project. Both are evidence that downtown's business mix keeps turning over on its own timeline, independent of whichever apartment building is currently under a crane.

The weekend that already happened

Two of the bigger draws on Chanhassen's fall calendar wrapped up just before this was written. The University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum's Auxiliary ran its sixth annual Glass Pumpkin Patch from September 17 through 20 at the Farm at the Arb, 3210 W. 82nd Street, with more than 6,200 handmade glass pumpkins on display and for sale, plus live glass-blowing demonstrations timed twice an hour. The city's own Homecoming Parade stepped off on September 25, running from 4 to 5 p.m.

Both of those happened while the five storefronts at 78th and Market sat empty behind construction fencing. The town's fall calendar did not wait on the redevelopment, and neither did the restaurant openings, and neither did Golf Zone's second act. Downtown's rebuild is real, and it is on a clock, but that clock has not started producing anything residents can walk into yet.

Ten weeks stand between today and Harlow's targeted December completion date. Whether either of its two storefronts opens with a tenant already signed is a question the city has not answered publicly, and as of now, nobody outside Roers Companies knows the answer either.

If you have a guess about what belongs in those two storefronts once Harlow opens, Johnny Harvath would like to hear it.