Water Street Has Six New Restaurants. Excelsior Still Runs on Wednesday Nights.
On Wednesday, the Excelsior Morning Rotary Club closed out its 2026 season at the Commons with Rumours & Dreams, a Fleetwood Mac tribute act, playing the same lawn where the series had run since June 3. Food trucks were scheduled to open at 5. The band was scheduled to start at 6:30. Admission was free, same as it had been for all seven shows that summer. Water Street looks almost nothing like it did a couple of years ago.
That contrast is the story. A visitor scrolling restaurant reviews before a weekend trip would come away thinking Excelsior's whole identity got rebuilt around a handful of ambitious new kitchens. A resident knows better. The town's actual clock, the one that decides what a Wednesday feels like versus a Saturday, still runs on a volunteer-organized concert series and a festival that predates the recent restaurant boom by roughly nine decades. The new money changed what you can eat here. It hasn't touched who decides when the town gathers.
Concerts in the Commons has no cover charge, no ticket tiers, and no restaurant attached to it. It's run by the Excelsior Morning Rotary Club on the banks of Lake Minnetonka in Excelsior Commons Park, and the proceeds from beer, wine, and food truck sales go to Community for the Commons, the volunteer group working to improve the park itself. Among the local sponsors this summer were Waytek for the June 3 opener, Chad Babcock's State Farm agency for the July 1 show, Blaze Credit Union for the Prince tribute band on July 29, Youngstedts for The Suburbs on August 12, Garda Capital Partners for the Fabulous Armadillos on August 19, and Oppidan Investment Company for the Wednesday Fleetwood Mac finale.
None of that money touches a restaurant's bottom line. It's a closed loop between local businesses, a civic club, and a public park, and it's been running long enough that most of the sponsors are repeat names from year to year. If you want a read on what Excelsior actually values on a Wednesday night in August, it's not a reservation. It's a lawn chair and a free show that funds its own upkeep.
The commercial calendar tells a different story, and it's a real one. As the Star Tribune reported, the corner that anchors downtown Excelsior once sat dark. Restaurants that had occupied the space closed after the pandemic and stayed empty for years. The Star Tribune quoted Mike DeCamp, co-owner and chef at Jester Concepts, saying walking past that vacant storefront every day was hard to watch: "Every day, coming down here and not having a restaurant in the main entrance of the city was depressing."
That corner, at 200 Water Street, is now home to three concepts under one roof: Mirabelle, a coastal-themed supper club; Shiki, a ramen and noodle bar; and a lower-level outpost of Parlour, Jester's cocktail and burger concept. A few doors down, in the space that once housed Red Sauce Rebellion, chef David Fhima, known for his Minneapolis restaurants, opened Vagabondo, a Sicilian spot that runs as a cafe by day. Colleen Anderson's Old Southern BBQ Smokehouse moved in next to Excelsior Brewing Co.
The new arrivals on Water Street include:
None of this displaced the town's older anchors. Maynard's, open on the water since 1947 and in the Stevens family's hands for the last 27 years, is still pulling boats up to its dock for lobster and walleye. Jack Stevens, whose family runs it, is hopeful the new energy will help carry the town through the sleepy winter months that have closed restaurants here before. "This feels like a turning point," he told the Star Tribune. Layline, the New American spot at 301 Water Street, has settled into its own rhythm alongside the newcomers rather than competing head-on with them.
Here's what a scroll through restaurant reviews won't show you: these two systems, the free civic calendar and the new reservation economy, don't fight for the same hours. Concerts in the Commons runs early evening on Wednesdays, a slot most fine-dining kitchens treat as a slower midweek night anyway. The new restaurants on Water Street do their real business Thursday through Saturday, when the concert series is dark and the lawn at the Commons sits empty.
That's not an accident so much as a town naturally sorting itself. A family with young kids can grab a folding chair and free music on a Wednesday, then book a table at Mirabelle two nights later without the two experiences ever competing for the same evening. The restaurants get their busiest nights on a calendar the concert series doesn't touch, and the free civic tradition keeps its slot without needing to compete with a menu. Excelsior gets both because neither one had to give up its night.
The bigger test of that arrangement comes next month. Excelsior Apple Days runs September 18 through 20 this year, staged at 12 Water Street, directly along the same strip that now houses Mirabelle, Vagabondo, and Old Southern BBQ. The festival dates back to 1935, which makes it 91 years old this fall and one of the longest continuously running community festivals in the Twin Cities metro. It's organized by the Excelsior-Lake Minnetonka Chamber of Commerce and presented this year by Youngstedts, the same sponsor that backed the August 12 concert at the Commons.
The weekend opens Friday at 5 p.m. with vendors and a beer and wine garden, and Saturday brings the Apple Day Historic Water Street Walking Tour at 11 a.m., a guided look back at the town's origins as a steamboat landing in the 1800s. The Happy Apple Kids Corner runs all weekend, along with the pie-eating and baking contests that have been a fixture of the event for decades, and the festival closes with a street dance that's as much a tradition here as the apples themselves.
What's worth noticing is what hasn't changed about it. Apple Days has never needed a chef with a Minneapolis pedigree or a supper club concept to draw a crowd. It's craft booths, a kids' corner, and a dance in the street, the same formula that's worked since before Maynard's opened its doors. The new restaurants along Water Street will absolutely benefit from the foot traffic that weekend brings, and reservations at Mirabelle or Vagabondo will likely be harder to land during Apple Days than on an average September Saturday. But the festival itself doesn't depend on them. It ran for 90 years without a restaurant row on Water Street and it would run without one again.
That's the part a newcomer researching this town from the outside tends to miss. The restaurant openings make for a better headline, and they're genuinely reshaping what a Friday night here looks like. But the calendar that actually organizes life in Excelsior, the one that tells you when to bring a lawn chair and when to make a reservation, is still set by a Rotary club and a 91-year-old apple festival. The new money moved in around that rhythm. It didn't rewrite it.
If a town that can hold onto a free Wednesday-night tradition and a supper club renaissance at the same time sounds like the kind of place you'd want to call home, Jim Schwarz knows Excelsior and the rest of the Lake Minnetonka corridor from the inside. Schedule a private consultation to talk through what living here actually looks like, season to season.
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