This Fall, Downtown Wayzata's New Restaurants Are Mostly Old Addresses

"We have always believed the best restaurants belong to their communities."

That's how the ownership team behind Eloise explained the decision to close their own restaurant for four days at the end of August and reopen it as something else entirely. The line reads like marketing copy until you look at what actually happened on Broadway Avenue this year, and then it reads more like an accurate description of the whole strip. Almost nothing downtown got bigger this fall. What changed was who's standing behind the counter, and in one case, whether the counter exists yet at all.

The Same Room, With the Front Wall Gone

Eloise closed at 326 Broadway Avenue South on August 31 and came back four days later, on September 4, as Bar Eloise. Same address, same owner in Lindsay Pohlad, same kitchen. What's different is almost everything about how you walk in the door. The new front window opens completely onto Broadway rather than sitting fixed in place, so the dining room blends into the sidewalk instead of separating from it. The patio got bigger. There are televisions in the bar section now, aimed at the kind of guest who wants a game on with dinner rather than a hushed dining room. A meaningful chunk of the seating, inside and out, is held for walk-ins rather than reservations, which is a real shift for a restaurant that used to run more formally.

The hours reflect the same repositioning. Bar Eloise is open Tuesday through Thursday from 4 to 9 p.m. and Friday and Saturday from 4 to 10 p.m., closed Mondays, with Sunday brunch starting September 20 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Grocer's Table, Pohlad's other Wayzata restaurant, is the stated model for the new menu direction: shareable plates, handhelds, and hearty mains built around the same seasonal sourcing Eloise always used, just less precious about it. Nobody added square footage on this block. They rearranged what the existing square footage was for.

Rustica Grew a Lunch Menu, Not a New Building

A few blocks over, Rustica's Wayzata location has been quietly doing something similar since it opened last year, expanding its well-known pastry lineup into a proper lunch program. This year that expansion picked up real momentum, with a fuller breakfast and lunch offering built out under chef Arash Pashaei while the original bread and pastry program stays under Shawn McKenzie back in Minneapolis. The goal, by all accounts, isn't to turn Rustica into a sit-down restaurant. It's to make a bakery that was already good at coffee and croissants also good at the 11:30 a.m. decision of where to eat something more substantial. Again: no new storefront, no new lease, just an existing address doing more with the space it already had.

The One Truly New Address Took Longer Than Everything Else Combined

Here's where the pattern breaks, and where it gets more interesting for anyone tracking downtown Wayzata closely rather than glancing at a headline.

Parcelle Organics, the Northeast Minneapolis cafe known for its smoothie menu and organic sourcing, announced back in January that it planned a small grab-and-go location at 641 Lake Street East, an 800-square-foot spot designed for takeout before a walk along the water. Owner Kamal Mohamed told the Star Tribune he was hoping for a spring opening. Spring came and went. In April, Timberwolves center Rudy Gobert was announced as an investor in the brand, and the company reiterated plans for Wayzata alongside new locations in downtown Minneapolis and the North Loop, with a target of sometime in 2026. By July, the downtown Minneapolis location at LaSalle Plaza had opened, but the Wayzata and North Loop spots still had no announced date and remained listed as "opening soon." A June Star Tribune feature on Wayzata's dining scene described Parcelle the same way months later: opening soon, not open yet.

As of the most recent listing on Parcelle's own ordering page, the Wayzata location is still marked "Coming Soon, Summer 2026." Restaurant buildouts run long for all kinds of ordinary reasons, and an 800-square-foot lakefront space still has to clear permitting, construction, and staffing before it can open its doors. But it does mean that the single genuinely new food and beverage address promised for downtown Wayzata this year is the one still not open, while three existing operators quietly changed what they were doing inside spaces that already had tenants.

What "New" Actually Meant on Lake Street

The other arrival worth naming is Tono Pizzeria and Cheesesteaks, which opened May 29 at 810 Lake Street East in the space that used to hold D'Amico & Sons. It's the chain's twelfth location in seven years, which tells you something about how Tono expands. This isn't a concept testing whether Wayzata wants pizza and cheesesteaks. It's a proven format moving into a spot that had just gone vacant, filling a gap in the same footprint rather than creating one.

Put together, the fall lineup on Lake Street and Broadway looks less like growth and more like turnover managed well. A restaurant closes, reopens under new branding within the same week. A bakery adds a kitchen shift. A national mini-chain slides into a space another restaurant just left. The one business promising something the strip didn't already have has spent most of the year being "coming soon."

The Anchors Aren't Moving

None of this touches the restaurants that didn't change this year, which is worth remembering before assuming the whole strip is in flux. 6Smith is still running its dock patio and steak frites happy hour. Gianni's Steakhouse and Seafood and McCormick's Pub and Restaurant are still doing tableside salad and fish and chips along the promenade the way they have for years. CoV's happy hour still gets busy enough in peak season that you wait for a table by the water. Grocer's Table is still the any-hour option for coffee and a full lunch. Josefina runs its daytime coffee and pastry operation as Fina's, and Toastique remains the only Minnesota location of that chain. The Wayzata Design District, home to Fox & Willow and Highcroft and Near + North and the consignment shop Fashion Avenue 2, hasn't rearranged itself at all. The Depot's G-scale garden railway still runs its trains on summer weekends the way it always has.

The Lakewalk, the 1,200-foot path completed in 2024 that connects Broadway to the Depot along the restored shoreline, is still the thread tying all of this together on foot. What changed this fall is what you find when you step off it, not the path itself.

What to Actually Do With This

If you're planning a weekend around downtown right now, the practical takeaway is simple. Bar Eloise's Sunday brunch launched September 20, so this coming weekend is only the second one it's actually running as advertised. If you're used to needing a reservation at Eloise, you can walk in now, since a meaningful share of seating is held for exactly that. Rustica's lunch menu is worth trying if you've only ever stopped for coffee and a pastry. And if you've been checking Parcelle's website hoping for an opening date, none has been posted yet.

Downtown Wayzata isn't short on places to eat. It never has been. What's shifted this fall is who's behind a handful of familiar doors, and the one door that was supposed to be brand new still hasn't opened.

Ulrich Real Estate Group spends as much time on these blocks as anyone who lives here, which is how we noticed the pattern before it became one. If you want the next update on what's actually changing downtown, not just what a press release says is coming, keep an eye on this space.