Ask three people in the same house what they want for dinner on a random Tuesday and you get three different answers, followed by the usual compromise: somebody drives to whatever chain sits closest to the highway. That was the Plymouth default for years. The stretch of Bass Lake Road near I-494 was mostly a former Prudential Financial office campus, and the neighborhood's weeknight options were the scattered kind, one strip mall standby here, a pizza counter there, nothing that solved the actual problem of five hungry opinions in one car.
That changed on March 12, 2026, when Coborn's opened Market & Table on that same 75-acre site, now rebranded as The Boulevard. It changed again when a longtime neighborhood tavern a few miles away swapped owners, kept its bones, and added a room built for a different kind of Sunday. If you're still running your week off the 2024 map, you're missing both.
The Argument Nobody Was Winning
The tell that something structural shifted isn't that a new restaurant opened. Restaurants open and close in every suburb every year. The tell is that the new thing solves a coordination problem that used to end in someone driving alone to pick up takeout while everyone else stayed home annoyed.
Coborn's built its answer directly into the grocery store. Market & Table isn't a supermarket with a sad prepared-foods case bolted on. It's a full-service grocery, produce, meat, bakery, deli, the works, wrapped around a food hall with five separate kitchens operating under one roof. That structure matters more than it sounds like it should, because it means the family argument about where to eat stops being an argument. Everybody picks their own kitchen. Nobody drives anywhere twice.
What Actually Opened at The Boulevard
Three of those kitchens sit under the banner "The Global Table," all from Minneapolis chef David Fhima, with a fourth from a chef with her own following and a fifth rounding out the lineup:
- Basta Pasta – Fhima's Italian counter concept
- Abuela's Mexican Kitchen – Fhima's take on Mexican comfort food
- Brother's Burgers – Fhima's handcrafted burger stand
- The Buttered Tin – scratch-made breakfast, lunch and baked goods from founder Alicia Hinze, a former champion on Food Network's Cupcake Wars, opening her third location after two in the northeast Minneapolis and St. Paul areas
- Penny Horse Parlor – rounds out the food hall's dining lineup
Coborn's president Emily Coborn Wright described the store's whole premise around the fact that nobody eats the same way every night, and built the format, sometimes called a "grocerant," to cover cooking from scratch, grabbing something fast, or sitting down to eat without leaving the building. The store also added a floral department, an ice cream shop, a liquor store, a performance stage and a small playground, which turns a grocery run into something closer to an evening out. For a family that used to drive fifteen minutes in three directions to satisfy three appetites, that's not a small convenience. It's the removal of an actual weekly friction point.
Rock Elm Revival's Second Room
A few miles from The Boulevard, a different kind of change happened to a restaurant that had already been a Plymouth fixture for a decade. Rock Elm Tavern, at 16605 County Road 24 East, sold in fall 2025 to Randy Ehlers, a Plymouth resident who relaunched it as Rock Elm Revival on March 1, 2026. Ehlers kept the food that regulars already loved and then did something with the building's layout that changed what the place is for.
The space next to the main dining room used to house golf simulators. Ehlers gutted it and built what he calls the Revival Room, a dedicated area for private events and live music. He's been direct about why that room matters more than it might look on paper.
"That side of the building pays the bills, this side of the building is our gravy. And this is where we have fun, this is where we can really make this restaurant sustainable."
That's a business owner explaining, in plain terms, that the main dining room keeps the lights on while the new room is what makes the place worth coming back to. For a Plymouth resident deciding how to spend a Sunday, that distinction shows up as a real choice: the restaurant now runs an acoustic Sunday brunch with live music alongside its usual scratch-made tavern menu and daily happy hour, something the building simply couldn't offer a year ago because the room didn't exist yet.
Sunday Now Has Two Speeds
Before the rebrand, Rock Elm's Sunday was whatever a tavern's Sunday usually is: a menu, a bar, maybe a game on in the background. Now there's a version of that same morning with a guitar in the corner and a room built specifically so a family or a group of neighbors can linger without competing with a lunch rush at the bar. Nothing about the food changed dramatically. What changed is the option to make a Sunday morning into an actual occasion instead of a quick stop.
That's a small thing to describe and a real thing to live with. A resident who used to treat Sunday brunch as an errand now has a version of it that functions as an outing, ten minutes from home, without a drive into Minneapolis or Wayzata.
The Walk That Doesn't End at Dusk
The third piece of this fits a season rather than a business opening. As days shorten into fall, the usual suburban problem kicks in: the evening walk that felt easy in July starts running out of daylight by 7 p.m. in October. French Regional Park, on the north shore of Medicine Lake, solves that with infrastructure that's been there for years but that residents tend to forget about once summer ends.
The park's Lagoon, Lakeview and Skyline loops stay lit until 10 p.m. through the fall, right up until winter trail operations begin, which typically happens once the area gets two to three inches of snow. That means the evening walk doesn't have to end when the sun does. It's a detail that only matters if you know it's there, and most people rediscover it every October by accident rather than by plan.
Put those three things together and the shape of an ordinary Plymouth week looks different than it did a year ago. Weeknight dinner has an answer that didn't require a car full of disagreement. Sunday has a slower, more intentional version available a few miles closer than the usual brunch spots people default to. And the evening walk, the one that usually gets abandoned by mid-October because the daylight runs out, has a lit path that keeps it alive well into the dark months.
None of these three things replaced anything. They added capacity to a week that used to run on a smaller set of defaults. If your family's routine still treats the Bass Lake Road corridor as an office campus and Rock Elm as the same tavern it was in 2024, you're operating off an old map of a town that's already updated itself twice this year.
If you're weighing what a neighborhood like this is actually worth, beyond the listings and the median price, it helps to talk to someone who tracks these changes as they happen rather than after the fact. That's the kind of local read Mark Geier brings to every conversation about Wayzata, Lake Minnetonka and the surrounding suburbs, Plymouth included. If you're curious what your own home's value looks like against a market that keeps adding pieces like these, request your free home valuation and start the conversation from there.
