Walk past 200 Water Street on a Thursday night in September and you will wait for a table. The corner is lit from three directions at once, one building holding three restaurants that did not exist two years ago. A year ago this same walk prompted a different kind of attention. Local reporters wanted to know if the sudden burst of openings on this stretch of Excelsior could make it through a Minnesota winter once the boats stopped pulling up to the dock and the sidewalk traffic thinned out. That question has since been answered, not by anyone's opinion, but by the calendar itself. The restaurants that opened in the summer of 2025 are still serving dinner in the fall of 2026, and enough new ones have joined them that the block now functions as something closer to a proper restaurant row than a cluster of bets.
The Question Everyone Was Asking a Year Ago
In September 2025, the Star Tribune ran a piece on what was happening to Water Street, framing it around a real tension. Four new restaurants had opened within days of each other, all from established Twin Cities restaurateurs, and nobody quite knew if a small lake town could support that much new capacity once summer ended. Excelsior's mayor at the time, Gary Ringate, told the paper the restaurant world was churning around here and that there was still even a desire for more. Amanda Maday, whose design firm Studio Grey built out both Mirabelle and Vagabondo, put the risk more plainly, saying new restaurants need other local businesses to help support them because it is a tough business. Jack Stevens, whose family has run Maynard's on the Excelsior waterfront for 27 years, struck a more optimistic note, saying he was hopeful the newcomers could bring energy to the town especially in winter.
That was the state of things heading into the off-season. Nobody was pretending the answer was obvious.
What's Actually on the Block Now
The clearest answer sits in a restaurant guide that checked booking status and hours directly against official restaurant pages in August 2026. By that count, ten restaurants operate on Water Street across eight street addresses. Lago Tacos holds down 30 Water Street. The building at 200 Water Street contains three separate concepts under one roof: Mirabelle serving American comfort food, Shiki serving ramen and dumplings, and Parlour running the basement as a diner and cocktail bar. Vagabondo sits directly across the street at 205. Yumi is at 217, Coalition at 227, Layline at 301, 318 Cafe at 318, and Miyabi at 400.
That is a lot of density for one block in a town of Excelsior's size, and it is worth knowing before you plan an evening out that not every one of those ten shows up if you only check a reservation app. As of July 2026, OpenTable listed just eight restaurants for all of Excelsior, not ten. Parlour does not take reservations at all. It runs walk-in only, with a waitlist once you check in with the host in person. If your plan for the night is built entirely around what pops up in a booking app, you will miss a real option two doors down.
The newer names carry their own stories. Vagabondo, chef David Fhima's Sicilian restaurant in the old Bacon Drug Store building, established itself in 2025 and was still running a live menu update on Yelp as of September 2026, a small but telling sign that a kitchen is still actively working rather than coasting. Layline, from InnerBloom Hospitality, the same group behind Wayzata's Josefina and Macanda, opened back in 2023 with a dining room built around bold wallpaper and fresh oysters, making it the elder statesman of the new wave rather than the newest arrival.
The Regulars Who Were Already There
None of this happened on an empty street. Maynard's has faced Lake Minnetonka from 685 Excelsior Boulevard since 1947, and Stevens' family has run it for 27 of those years. Haskell's Port of Excelsior, the bar and grill attached to the liquor store, still holds a corner patio seat with a clean view of Lake Minnetonka. Down the block, boats still pull right up to the dock at Maynard's, where the salmon bowl and ceviche remain the draw. Old Southern BBQ Smokehouse, founded by the family behind Famous Dave's and run today by Dave's son James, keeps a takeout window running next door to Excelsior Brewing, useful if you are grabbing a beer and don't want to sit down for a full meal. Red Bench Bakery has been pouring lattes with flavors like cereal milk and strawberry cheesecake since 2022. Licks Unlimited has scooped ice cream since the 1980s and remains the kind of place a family walks to on a summer night out of habit rather than novelty.
These older businesses are the reason Maday's warning about restaurants needing neighbors never fully played out as a risk. The newcomers did not land on an island. They landed next to places that already had decades of regulars, and Fhima seemed to understand that from the start, telling the Star Tribune he was settling in for the long game rather than counting on opening-week buzz to carry him through.
Why the City Wanted This to Work
Excelsior's interest in this was not just about restaurant tables. The corner at 200 Water Street had sat dark for years after the restaurants that previously anchored it closed following the pandemic. City leaders have been trying to grow the town's year-round population and daytime foot traffic precisely so the summer lake crowd is not the only thing keeping storefronts open. A new parking garage downtown proved successful enough that more apartment units, medical offices, and coworking spaces are now in the pipeline, the kind of everyday foot traffic that keeps a lunch counter busy in February when the lake is frozen and the tourists are gone.
The Next Test Isn't Winter, It's Density
Winter turned out not to be the hard part. The next stretch will test something different. Two more projects are reportedly in the works for downtown Excelsior, one at 10 Water Street and another on a former gas station site, both of which could bring additional restaurant space to a block that already holds ten. More options mean more reasons to walk downtown on a Tuesday, but it also means the same pool of regulars gets split across more tables. Stevens framed this as competition that keeps everyone hungry rather than a threat, and so far the data backs him up. Nobody who opened in 2025 has closed.
This Fall on the Block
Excelsior Apple Days just wrapped for the year, running September 18 through 20 on Water Street, an event the town has held every September since 1935. The festival grounds sat at 12 Water Street, right along the shoreline, with a Historic Water Street Walking Tour, a Paradise Charter Cruises complimentary boat ride, an apple pie contest that draws serious home bakers, and a street dance closing out the weekend, a tradition that has mostly disappeared everywhere else. The Excelsior-Lake Minnetonka Chamber of Commerce keeps a fall calendar running past Apple Days too, including seasonal Water Street programming that gives the newer restaurants another reason to keep their patios open into the cooler months.
None of this answers whether Excelsior's dining scene keeps expanding at the same pace it has for the past year. But it does answer the question that hung over the block a year ago. The restaurants that opened into an uncertain winter are still open, the older ones are still serving the same regulars they always had, and the town is still building the kind of daytime population that makes a Tuesday lunch rush possible in a place that used to empty out after Labor Day.
We've watched this corner of Water Street fill back in table by table over the past year, and we're partial to it, partly because our office has been a few blocks from this exact stretch since 2004. If you're weighing in on the new menu at Vagabondo or arguing about which patio has the better lake view, Stafford Family Realtors would love to hear where you land. Stop in and tell us.
