Excelsior Added Four Restaurants This Summer. Now Comes the Test.

How many restaurants does a town of under 3,000 people actually need?

That question has been sitting quietly under Water Street all summer while four new kitchens opened within blocks of each other, all from chefs and restaurant groups with real reputations outside the west metro. If you live in Excelsior, you've probably already eaten at one of them, or at least peered through the window while walking to Licks Unlimited for ice cream. What you may not have clocked yet is that the answer to that question won't come from a review or a reservation app. It's going to show up on the calendar this weekend, at a festival that's been running since 1935.

A Very Small Strip Got a Very Big Summer

Water Street has spent years as Excelsior's steady, familiar commercial row: a lakefront liquor store and grill, a longtime seafood spot, a brewery, a scoop shop. That corner of downtown went dark for a stretch after the pandemic, with storefronts sitting empty. This year it filled back in fast, and not with the usual suburban rotation of chains.

Mike DeCamp, known for his Minneapolis restaurant work, opened Mirabelle, leaning into prime rib and pasta portions built for cold weather. David Fhima, another familiar name to Twin Cities diners, brought Vagabondo to the same stretch. Colleen Anderson opened Old Southern BBQ Smokehouse right next door to Excelsior Brewing Co., counting on the brewery's foot traffic and her own catering business to carry her through slower months. Jester Concepts, the group behind several well-known Minneapolis spots, landed Parlour Bar in the basement level that used to house Bull & Wren. DeCamp also has Shiki nearby, which he's already described as more of a wintertime draw than a July destination.

Four full-service concepts, all opening within roughly the same season, on a downtown strip that's a little over a square mile. Excelsior's mayor put it plainly to a reporter this year: the restaurant scene is churning, and there's still an appetite in the market for more.

The Quiet Part Restaurant Owners Actually Said Out Loud

What's notable isn't just that Excelsior got a run of new restaurants. It's that the people who opened them are talking openly about whether the town can hold onto them once the lake stops pulling in day-trip traffic.

Amanda Maday, whose design firm Studio Grey worked on both Mirabelle and Vagabondo, made the point directly: a single new restaurant on an otherwise quiet block is exposed. It needs other businesses around it pulling people in, because running a restaurant alone in a small town is hard even in a good year. Anderson is leaning on Old Southern's neighbor, Excelsior Brewing, to send drinkers her way for barbecue, and on catering to fill the gaps when foot traffic thins out. DeCamp built Shiki's identity around the idea that people want soup and heavier plates once the patios close, not another burger stand.

None of this is doom and gloom. It's the specific, practical math that restaurant owners run in their heads every October in a town whose population triples on a July Saturday and shrinks back down once the boats come out of the water. Jack Stevens, whose family has run the lakefront restaurant Maynards for 27 years, said he's optimistic that having more restaurants nearby, not fewer, will help everyone get through what he called the sleepy months. That's a specific bet: that critical mass beats scarcity when the season turns. Nobody in that reporting seemed sure it would work. That uncertainty is the actual story.

Why This Weekend Is the Hinge, Not Just a Festival

If you want a concrete way to watch that bet play out, you don't need to track reservation numbers or read a food blog all winter. You just need to notice what happens this weekend.

Excelsior Apple Days runs September 18 through 20 this year, put on by the Excelsior-Lake Minnetonka Chamber of Commerce in downtown Excelsior. It's been a fixture since 1935, built around craft booths, a kids' corner, food vendors, an apple pie contest, live music, and a street dance that closes things out. It's the kind of event that feels like pure nostalgia, and mostly it is. But it also happens to sit at the exact point on the calendar where Excelsior flips from a town running on lake traffic and day-trippers to a town running on the people who actually live here.

Before Apple Days, a restaurant on Water Street can lean on warm-weather crowds walking over from the beach or off a boat. After it, that traffic mostly disappears until next spring, and the businesses that are left are the ones residents choose to keep visiting on a random Tuesday in November. Four new restaurants just went through their first, easiest test: opening into a summer already full of built-in customers. The next few months are the harder one, and it starts the moment this festival's street dance wraps up and the folding tables come down.

That's not a knock on the town or the new restaurants. It's just the structure of how a small lake town's economy actually works, and it's worth understanding if you've watched Water Street fill in this year and wondered whether it's a permanent shift or a very good summer.

What to Actually Watch For

If you're curious whether Excelsior's restaurant boom sticks, a few concrete things are worth paying attention to over the next couple of months, more useful than any single meal:

Whether Old Southern BBQ Smokehouse leans harder into takeout and catering once patio season ends, since that was Anderson's own stated plan for surviving winter. Whether Shiki's heavier, cold-weather menu actually draws locals in the way DeCamp is betting it will. Whether the restaurants on that block start cross-promoting the way Maday suggested they'd need to, since none of them can really carry the street alone. And simply whether the crowd at this year's Apple Days street dance is made up of the same faces you'd see at any other town event, rather than the day-trip crowd that shows up for one weekend and doesn't come back until next June.

None of that requires a spreadsheet. It just requires living here and paying attention, which residents are already doing better than any outside reporter could.

A Town Worth Watching Closely

Excelsior has always punched above its size, a one-square-mile village with two bays of shoreline and a downtown that feels bigger than its population. This year it got handed a real experiment: can a town this small support a restaurant row with the ambition of a much bigger city, once the lake traffic thins out. The people who opened these restaurants clearly think the answer is yes, or they wouldn't have signed leases. The next few months, starting with this weekend's festival, will start to show whether they're right.

If you're already part of this community, that's a story worth following for its own sake. And if you're the kind of person who's been quietly wondering whether Excelsior is becoming a place you'd want to put down roots, watching how a town handles its own growing pains, honestly and in public, tells you more about its character than any brochure ever could.

Ulrich Real Estate Group has spent decades getting to know Excelsior and the rest of the Lake Minnetonka shoreline block by block, season by season. If you're curious what a home search in this part of the west metro could look like, reach out and start your home search whenever you're ready.