Excelsior's Restaurant Boom Already Survived One Winter. Here Comes a Bigger Test.
August 20, 2026
August 20, 2026
Water Street on a Tuesday in August looks like it always has this time of year: farmers market tables lining the sidewalk, a line forming for frozen custard, boat traffic idling near the dock. What's different is what happens after the market packs up. A few years ago, that same stretch would go quiet by 7 p.m. Now there's a wait for a table at Vagabondo, a hostess stand at Mirabelle, and a line spilling out of Shiki's 30-seat ramen counter. If you live here, you've already noticed. What you may not have clocked is that these places already made it through one Minnesota winter, and the city is still adding more restaurant space on top of them for the next one.
That's the thread worth pulling. Not "Excelsior has new restaurants," which every regular already knows firsthand, but that the boom survived the exact test its own mayor worried about out loud, and now faces a second, bigger version of that same test with even more seats coming online.
Go back a few years and the busiest intersection in downtown Excelsior was the opposite of busy. The restaurants that once anchored that corner had closed after the pandemic and sat vacant for a long stretch, an empty storefront at the literal center of town. Chef Mike DeCamp, co-owner of Jester Concepts, has talked about how deflating it was to walk past that dark entrance every day.
That corner is unrecognizable now. Jester Concepts took over the sprawling former Irish pub space and split it into three: Mirabelle, a coastal-leaning American supper club, upstairs; Shiki, a tight ramen and dumpling bar, tucked beside it; and a Water Street outpost of Parlour, the group's cocktail bar and burger spot, in the lower level. Company owner Brent Frederick has said bringing three concepts into one building was the only way to make full use of the space and give Excelsior something the town didn't have before.
Across the street, in what used to be Red Sauce Rebellion, chef David Fhima opened Vagabondo, a Sicilian restaurant by night that turns into a coffee and pastry counter by day, with a sidewalk patio angled for a peek at the lake.
If you haven't kept a running list, here's what landed on the strip in the summer of 2025, alongside the standbys that were already there:
All four of the newcomers are still on the strip and still turning up in reviews on OpenTable, Yelp, and Tripadvisor into the summer of 2026, which is the first real evidence that this wave is different from past ones. That's a lot of new capacity to keep filled in the same stretch of sidewalk, and it's exactly the math that has business owners and the city thinking harder than usual.
Restaurant openings are easy to notice. What's harder to see, unless you're paying attention the way locals eventually do, is the seasonal cliff every one of these places had to clear just to still be here. Excelsior Mayor Gary Ringate put it plainly last fall, as the wave of openings was still fresh: the restaurant world was churning, and there was still a desire for more, but as the leaves changed and foot traffic slowed, the real test was whether the town could sustain it year round. That test has already happened once. The restaurants are still standing.
Fhima said something similar about Vagabondo around the same time. The opening buzz wouldn't last forever, and neither would the warm, strollable summer nights that make Water Street feel like a movie set. His stated goal wasn't to be the trendiest table in town for one season. It was to still be open in five years, after the next hot restaurant has come and gone. A year later, that's still the plan, and so far it's held.
There's also a counterintuitive piece of business logic at play. Amanda Maday, whose firm Studio Grey designed both Mirabelle and Vagabondo, has made the point that no single restaurant wants to be the only draw on an isolated block. New openings need other local businesses around them for the whole strip to work, because running a restaurant here is hard enough without doing it alone. That's part of why so many concepts landed within weeks of each other rather than one at a time. Clustering is the strategy, not an accident.
Here's the part that doesn't show up in a dinner reservation but matters more to whether any of this lasts. Excelsior isn't just hoping the restaurant boom survives winter. The city is actively trying to grow its year-round population and daytime foot traffic so restaurants aren't purely dependent on tourist season.
A new parking garage downtown has already opened, and more apartment units, medical offices, and coworking space are reportedly in the pipeline. Mayor Ringate has said every business will hit tough stretches, and the hope is that they've got the backing to get through them. That's a city trying to build the customer base a restaurant needs on a random Tuesday in February, not just a Friday in July.
The restaurant real estate pipeline backs this up. There's a project planned for 10 Water Street, and another slated for a former gas station site nearby, both expected to bring more dining options downtown. Developers don't commit to more restaurant space in a town that's betting on a single good summer. They commit when they think the underlying demand is structural.
If you want evidence that Excelsior can draw a crowd outside of peak boating season, and that the first winter wasn't a fluke, you don't have to guess. The town has been doing it for decades, just not always in a restaurant.
Concerts in the Commons, organized by the Excelsior Morning Rotary Club, runs seven Wednesday nights between June and August on the shore of Lake Minnetonka, with food trucks and drinks opening at 5 p.m. and music from 6:30 to 8:30. It's free, it's packed, and it has nothing to do with any of the new restaurants.
Then there's Excelsior Apple Days, a Chamber of Commerce tradition dating back to 1935, set for September 18 through 20 this year. It brings craft booths, food vendors, live music, and an apple pie contest to downtown well after the boating crowds thin out. The Minnesota Streetcar Museum runs its own apple harvest trolley weekend alongside it, and the same museum brings out a costumed Halloween trolley run in late October, with Witches Night Out turning Water Street into a costume party the same month.
None of that depended on Vagabondo or Mirabelle existing at all. It's proof the town already knew how to pull a crowd downtown after Labor Day before either restaurant opened, and it's likely part of why both made it through their first winter. That same rhythm is what the next wave of restaurant space, at 10 Water Street and the former gas station site, will be counting on too.
For residents, the useful move this fall isn't picking a favorite among last year's openings. It's watching whether two more restaurant buildouts, on top of a strip that already added four newcomers in one summer, can all find a winter customer base at once. Watch who trims hours gracefully instead of going dark, who leans into a slower Tuesday with a locals' special, and who shows up at Apple Days on September 18 through 20 instead of treating it as someone else's event. That's usually the signal for who's building a regular customer base versus who got lucky with one good summer.
Excelsior has been the cultural center of the south Lake Minnetonka area since it was founded in 1853, and it's carried that role through a lot of quieter decades than this one. A city of roughly 2,300 people doesn't often add four notable restaurants to one downtown strip and then keep building more. Whether the second wave holds the way the first one did depends less on any single kitchen and more on whether the daytime population Excelsior is trying to build keeps showing up once the patios close for the year.
If you're the kind of person who already has an opinion about which of these places earns a spot in your regular rotation, or you're watching how this corner of town keeps changing and want to talk through what it means for property here, I'm always glad to compare notes. Reach out through Johnathan Harvath and let's connect.
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