Stand at the corner of Water and Second Street on a Wednesday evening this August and you'll wait for a table. Not because the weekend crowd is in from Minneapolis, but because half the storefronts on that corner didn't exist before last summer, and this is the first year locals have had a full twelve months to settle into the new routine.
That corner used to be the quietest spot on Water Street. Understanding how it filled in, and what's happened to it since, tells you something about how an Excelsior week actually works this summer, and it's not the story the tourist guides tell.
The Corner That Sat Dark
For years, the restaurants that had once anchored downtown Excelsior closed and stayed closed after the pandemic. Mike DeCamp, co-owner and chef at Jester Concepts, described what it was like walking past that empty corner: "Every day, coming down here and not having a restaurant in the main entrance of the city was depressing." That's not a line from a press release. It's how a longtime restaurateur talked about his own town's main intersection sitting dark for years, before he decided to do something about it.
The turnaround happened in less than a year, starting with Parlour's basement debut in the fall of 2024 and closing out with Vagabondo's opening in early August 2025. In between, Jester Concepts took over the sprawling former Irish pub space at Water and Second and turned it into three concepts under one roof. Across the street, in the building that used to house Red Sauce Rebellion (and before that, Bacon Drug), chef David Fhima opened a Sicilian restaurant built around his grandmother's recipes. Two well-known Minneapolis restaurateurs, working independently, opened new places on the same short block within days of each other.
What Moved In
Here's what's actually on Water Street now, alongside the places that were already there before the boom:
- Mirabelle (200 Water St.) – Jester Concepts' supper club, coastal-themed, with nightly rotating specials like meatloaf and fried chicken
- Shiki – the ramen and dumpling shop tucked into the same corner as Mirabelle
- Parlour – Jester's cocktail and burger spot on the lower level of that same building
- Vagabondo (205 Water St.) – David Fhima's Sicilian restaurant by night, cafe by day, with a sidewalk patio and a partial lake view
- Old Southern BBQ Smokehouse – a counter-service barbecue joint next to Excelsior Brewing, the chain's fifth metro location
- Maynard's (685 Excelsior Blvd.) – open since 1947, still facing straight onto Excelsior Bay
- Haskell's Port of Excelsior – the bar and grill attached to the liquor store, known for its corner patio seat with a lake view
- Red Bench Bakery, 318 Cafe, Coalition, Yumi, and Lobby Coffee & Leisure – the daytime and coffee-shop regulars that kept the block alive before the newcomers arrived
- Licks Unlimited – the ice cream stand locals have been walking to for years
None of this happened by accident. Excelsior's own mayor, Gary Ringate, put it plainly when the boom was still fresh: "The restaurant world is churning around here. There's still even a desire for more."
Wednesday Already Had Its Own Tradition
Here's the part that makes this summer different from the last one. Excelsior didn't need new restaurants to have a Wednesday tradition. The Excelsior Morning Rotary Club has run Concerts in the Commons for years, seven Wednesday nights each summer at Excelsior Commons Park on the shore of Lake Minnetonka, with food trucks and beer and wine starting at 5 p.m. and music running 6:30 to 8:30. It's free, it's local, and it's the kind of event where you bring your own lawn chair and see people you know.
What's new is that you can now do something before or after the show that wasn't possible a summer ago. As of today, three Wednesdays remain in the 2026 lineup:
| Date | Act |
|---|---|
| Aug 12 | The Suburbs, with opener Monica Livorsi |
| Aug 19 | Fabulous Armadillos featuring Chris Hawkey |
| Aug 26 | Rumours & Dreams, a Fleetwood Mac tribute, with opener Frankie Torres |
A Wednesday that used to mean packing a cooler and heading straight to the park now has a warm-up act built into it. Grab a table at Vagabondo's patio for an early dinner, walk two blocks to the Commons for the show, and you've turned one weeknight into an actual evening out, something the old dark storefronts made impossible.
Thursday Is The Quiet Follow-Through
The week doesn't stop when the music does. The Excelsior Farmers Market runs Thursdays from 2 to 5 p.m. in the east parking lot of Excelsior Elementary School, behind the library. This year's season runs from June 18 through August 27, which means it and the concert series are both winding down within days of each other. If you're the kind of resident who treats Wednesday and Thursday as the real backbone of an Excelsior summer week, you've got three more of each before both traditions go quiet until next year.
The Weekend Belongs To Everyone Else
Weekends in Excelsior work on a different clock, and they always have. Art on the Lake, the juried fine art show that drew more than 130 artists to Water Street on June 13 and 14 this year, is a visitor event through and through, and so was Crazy Days, the sidewalk sale that took over downtown July 16 through 19. Those weekends are good for the town's businesses and genuinely fun if you want to be part of a crowd, but they're not when a local gets a table without a wait or finds street parking without circling the block twice.
That's the actual insight for anyone who already lives here: the restaurant boom didn't just add options, it gave residents a reason to treat a Wednesday or Thursday night like the good night out, while the weekend stays reserved for whoever's driving in. Last summer, on a late afternoon at Haskell's, regular customer Amanda Bell, who drives in from Jordan a few times a week, was already eyeing a corner table at Vagabondo instead of her usual patio seat. That pull hasn't gone away. As of this July, OpenTable still lists Vagabondo, Mirabelle, and Parlour among the handful of restaurants taking reservations in Excelsior, alongside Maynard's.
What's Coming Before The Leaves Turn
Apple Days, the Chamber's harvest festival, returns to downtown later this September, which will mark the last big weekend gathering before Excelsior settles into its quieter season. When the Star Tribune profiled this block last fall, the open question was whether a dining scene built around a warm-weather crowd could make it through a Minnesota winter. It has, at least once: the same restaurants are still on the map this July. The tougher test is whether they hold through a second winter, and that's tied to bigger moves already underway, including the new parking garage and additional apartment units, coworking space, and medical offices the city is counting on to keep people downtown on ordinary weekdays, not just for festival weekends.
For now, though, the pattern holds. If you live in Excelsior and you've noticed Water Street feels different on a Wednesday than it did two summers ago, it's because it is different, and the difference has now made it through a full year.
If watching this corner of downtown fill back in has you curious what it's meant for home values two or three blocks off the water, that's exactly the kind of hyperlocal read Mark Geier tracks day to day. Request your free home valuation and get a straight answer grounded in what's actually happening on the ground here, not a generic market snapshot.
