Drive down Lake Street in Wayzata this month and you will pass at least three storefronts that look like new business, fresh paint, expanded patios, updated signage, chalkboard specials nobody has tried yet. Walk it instead of driving and you will notice something the windshield misses: half of those "new" places are run by people who already had a restaurant two doors down.
That is not a coincidence, and it is not just a Wayzata thing. Across the lake in Excelsior, the same pattern is playing out on Water Street. The restaurant scene around Lake Minnetonka looks like it is expanding this summer. Look closer and what is actually happening is consolidation. A handful of operators who already know these two downtowns are opening their second, third, and in one case fourth room within a few blocks of their first, and the reason has less to do with ambition than with how little room there physically is to grow.
The Wayzata Pattern: Same Address, Same Owner, New Sign
Start with the most literal version of this. The Hotel Landing's longtime restaurant, ninetwentyfive, which had operated at 925 Lake Street East since the hotel opened, relaunched on April 8, 2026 under a new name. It is now Belle & Grey, with a refreshed dining room and a menu built to keep the brunch and steakhouse dishes regulars already relied on while adding lighter, lake-friendly plates for spring and summer. Same address. Same ownership group. New name, new coat of paint, same seats.
A few blocks away, Lindsay Pohlad did something similar with more square footage. She opened The Grocer's Table, a New England-style market, café, and wine bar, in 2020, and it became, in her words, a gathering place for people meeting up for coffee or grabbing lunch or a glass of wine. When the space next door came open, she did not bring in an outside operator. She built Eloise there herself, a "darker, intimate, moodier" counterpart, with chef Craig Johnson developing the menu and Grocer's Table general manager Meghan Walsh overseeing both restaurants, according to Bring Me The News. Eloise opened in October 2024. Pohlad has said she wanted the new room to feel like sitting in a friend's dining room rather than a friend's kitchen, a deliberate contrast to what she had already built next door, as she told Lake Minnetonka Magazine.
The third example is Daniel del Prado and Aaron Switz, who already ran Josefina in Wayzata. Rather than open somewhere new, they built Macanda on the same stretch of lakefront, a Latin-inspired concept with a mango motif and an attached vinyl lounge called Macanda's HiFi, according to Wayzata.com. It is a full second concept from the same team, on the same few blocks, competing for the same evening crowd Josefina already draws.
The Permit Is the Bottleneck, Not the Idea
Here is the part a casual visitor would not know to ask about. None of this expansion happens without the city signing off, seat by seat.
On July 21, 2026, the Wayzata City Council voted 4-0 to approve a new outdoor sidewalk café permit for Eloise, letting the restaurant add seating along Broadway Avenue for the rest of the 2026 season, per Wayzata.com. The expanded patio is expected to open toward the end of August, once furniture arrives. But the permit is not permanent. Public Works required that the new furniture and planters come down by November 1 each year so they do not interfere with snow removal, and the council can decline to renew it in a future cycle if circumstances change. Councilmember Dan Koch summed up the council's mood during the vote:
"I love the idea. I'm totally supportive of outdoor seating and maximizing the benefits of being outside and being able to eat outside."
Mayor Andrew Mullin added that the city should support locally and independently owned businesses, and thanked Pohlad for coming to answer the council's questions herself. That detail matters more than it sounds. In a downtown this small, the person expanding the patio is often the same person standing in front of the council asking for the extra ten feet of sidewalk. Even Macanda's more ambitious idea, a two-night outdoor concert called HIFI on the Lake, needed a special event permit that the council initially tabled before approving it 4-1 over a staff recommendation to deny it, according to the same Wayzata.com coverage. Growth here is not zoned in advance. It is negotiated, restaurant by restaurant, permit cycle by permit cycle.
That is the actual mechanism behind this summer's "boom." There is no new commercial block being built along the water. The footprint is fixed. So growth takes the form of the same names asking for more of it, one council meeting at a time.
Excelsior Is Running the Same Play, With a Different Landlord
A short drive around the lake, Excelsior's version of this story has a different name attached but the identical shape. The new addition to Water Street this year is Mirabelle, described as a warm, welcoming neighborhood restaurant joining sister concepts Shiki and Parlour, all from Jester Concepts. That is three restaurants from one group anchoring the same corner of downtown, with Mirabelle serving classic American comfort food, rotating nightly specials like lasagna and fried chicken, and dinner service seven nights a week inside a building with a preserved cast iron fireplace and a mezzanine for private gatherings.
The difference between the two towns is who is doing the permitting. Wayzata's summer calendar is driven by private hospitality groups negotiating with the City Council over sidewalk footage. Excelsior's is still largely run by volunteers and the city itself. Concerts in the Commons, the free Wednesday night lakefront series with food trucks and beer and wine starting at 5 p.m. and music from 6:30 to 8:30, is organized by the Excelsior Morning Rotary Club in partnership with the City of Excelsior, with proceeds going back into park improvements. Crazy Days, the sidewalk sale that ran July 16 through 19 this year according to the city's own calendar, is a chamber-organized promotion, not a private venture. Even the farmers market, which sets up behind the Excelsior Library in the east parking lot of Excelsior Elementary, is community-run, with the historic streetcar running alongside it on Thursdays between June 18 and August 27 this year, offering rides from the Water Street platform.
Two towns on the same lake, roughly the same size of downtown, and two completely different economic engines behind their summer identity. Wayzata's is hospitality groups reinvesting in their own real estate. Excelsior's is still, for now, closer to a small town main street where the city and its volunteers set the calendar and restaurants fill in around it.
Here's the Quick Comparison
| Operator | First concept | 2026 move | What actually changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lindsay Pohlad (Wayzata) | The Grocer's Table, 2020 | Eloise, opened Oct. 2024, patio expansion approved July 21, 2026 | A second room next door, then more sidewalk seating on the same block |
| Daniel del Prado & Aaron Switz (Wayzata) | Josefina | Macanda plus Macanda's HiFi | A full second concept a few doors down |
| The Hotel Landing (Wayzata) | ninetwentyfive, 2017 | Relaunched as Belle & Grey, April 8, 2026 | Same address, same team, new name and menu |
| Jester Concepts (Excelsior) | Shiki and Parlour | Mirabelle, Water Street | A third concept on the same corner |
The one real outside entrant worth naming is Parcelle, the L.A.-inspired organic café out of northeast Minneapolis. Chef Kamal Mohamed is bringing his first suburban outpost to the Wayzata lakefront as a small, 800-square-foot grab-and-go spot with no alcohol service, according to the Star Tribune. It is telling that the one outsider chose the smallest possible footprint and skipped the liquor license entirely. That is arguably the only way to enter this market without a permit fight.
What's Actually Open This Week
If you are trying to plan the rest of your summer around the lake, here is where things stand as of early August:
- The Excelsior farmers market's Thursday rhythm continues through August 27, tied to the historic streetcar's runs from the Water Street platform.
- Concerts in the Commons still has Wednesday nights left before its run wraps in late August.
- The ELMCC Golf Outing at Deer Run Golf Club in Victoria runs August 10, one of the last dates on Excelsior's community calendar before the pace shifts toward fall.
- Excelsior's Apple Days, a tradition dating to 1935 with craft booths, history tours, and an apple pie contest, lands September 18 through 20, and the chamber is already previewing it.
- Eloise's expanded Broadway Avenue patio is expected to open toward the end of August, giving Wayzata one more outdoor seating option before the November 1 teardown date arrives.
None of this is really about restaurants. It is about how a fixed, small downtown handles growth when it cannot simply build outward. The names change less than the signage suggests, and the permits matter more than the menus.
If a summer of reopened dining rooms and expanded patios has you thinking about your own place near the lake, whether that means updating what you have or seeing what a move within Wayzata or Excelsior might look like, The McNamara Group pays attention to these blocks as closely as we pay attention to the market. Reach out anytime for a free home valuation and a conversation grounded in what is actually happening here, not the generic version of it.
