Walk east from Fairview on a Thursday evening and count storefronts. The pattern that emerges is not the one national trade press has been assigning to Grand Avenue for the last three years. Yes, a handful of larger boxes are still dark. But between Dale and Cretin the corridor is quietly mid-swap, trading national chains and legacy tenants for owner-operated concepts run by people with a direct tie to the street. If you already live on Summit Hill, Crocus Hill, or Macalester-Groveland, you have a front-row seat to it, and this summer is when the pattern gets legible.
The thesis is simple. Grand Avenue isn't recovering. It's re-sorting. The new operators are choosing this stretch because they grew up on it, cooked on it, or want to be inside a neighborhood where diners actually walk to dinner. That is a different story than the vacancy narrative, and it changes what your Saturday looks like.
The Tavern On Grand corner, now Russell's
The most visible swap on the avenue is at 656 Grand. When Tavern On Grand's family announced the closure, the space could have gone almost any direction. It went to Todd Russell, a Grand Avenue kid who grew up at 1145 Grand, went to Linwood Elementary, St. Luke's, and Highland Park High School, then spent his career in commercial real estate before buying the building. Russell has been open about why he did it. In an interview with the Star Tribune, he framed his motivation plainly:
"I think the direction should be that we return to our roots. Grand Avenue has, historically, been known for some of the best Mom and Pop shops in the Twin Cities and I think that we need to return to that place, and introduce these great, locally owned concepts."
The restaurant that opened in that space is not a nostalgia project. The menu leans comfort food slightly elevated, with dry rub chicken wings, tuna tartare, a smoked chicken salad with apple and cranberry, and a NY Strip at $40 coming out of Chef Antonio Murray's kitchen, formerly of The Lexington up the street. If you have been on Grand for any length of time, that chef pipeline matters. The Lex to Russell's is exactly the kind of internal talent movement that keeps a corridor's cooking honest.
There is also a small, funny nod to what came before. The kitchen kept a version of the walleye on the menu, serving Walleye Nachos with tortilla strips, walleye in red salsa, and avocado mousse. It shouldn't work. It does.
Pizza is back at Grand Ole Creamery
The other headline this spring happened four blocks west. OG Zaza opened its sixth Twin Cities location in March 2026 in the space that most recently housed Justin Sutherland's Big E egg sandwich concept, which itself had replaced the longtime Grand Pizzeria in 2023. For anyone who has been getting a scoop next door for years, the reunion is the point. Grand Ole Creamery once again shares a roof with a pizzeria, which is how most residents first knew that address.
The operator is Twin Cities chef Josh Hedquist, who has appeared on Food Network's "Guy's Grocery Games" and other competitions. What's on the menu is New Haven-style pies out of a brick oven, and Hedquist has been public about the kitchen's ingredient discipline. The pies are scratch-made with unbleached flour, no dough conditioners, and a sauce that is essentially just crushed tomatoes and olive oil. The room is already stretching its hours. Lunch service on Thursday afternoons and burger pop-ups are in the mix.
If you have been walking past that corner and wondering whether the ice cream line and the pizza line would coexist again on a summer Saturday, they will. That was the whole reason the building worked in the first place.
The bread question, answered at St. Albans
There is a shape of business Grand Avenue has been missing since well before COVID: a real neighborhood bakery-plus-wine-and-sandwiches you can visit three times a week without noticing. That gap is closing. Minnesota Monthly's writeup of Russell's opening tucked in a line that mattered as much as the headline itself: "Cafe Latte is thriving, as is Golden Fig, Hyacinth, Red Rabbit, Emmett's Public House, and Saji-Ya, with a new bread/sandwich/wine cafe Ravaza Bread coming soon."
Ravaza's name is a small St. Paul history lesson on its own. Razava is a dark, nutritious bread from Eastern Europe made from hearty flour that keeps more of the grain's natural goodness, and Henry Baldinger brought the recipe to Saint Paul in 1888, turning it into a dense rye at his family bakery on Carroll Avenue, just over a mile from the new home at Grand Avenue and St. Albans Street. That is the kind of story that only lands if you already know the neighborhood geography. A bakery walking a 138-year-old recipe roughly a mile south to Grand is not a national chain siting decision. It is a St. Paul decision.
The Cathedral Hill spillover
Grand Avenue and Cathedral Hill are technically different neighborhoods, but every resident of Summit Hill treats them as one restaurant map. The most anticipated 2026 opening in that shared map is Aubergine. Megan and Bjorn Jacobse ran Aubergine as a pop-up dishing pâté en croûte and Lyonnaise cooking at Bûcheron, Hyacinth, and other rooms around town before opening a permanent restaurant in March 2026 in the former St. Paul Revival space in Cathedral Hill. Visit Saint Paul's own summary of the room describes it as an elevated French-inspired bistro on Selby Avenue with a rotating menu of 15 savory dishes drawing on 19th-century French technique combined with modern flavors.
For Grand Avenue residents, the practical read is that the Selby cluster now anchors your walkable Friday night the way Grand used to on its own. A dinner at Aubergine and a nightcap back down the hill at Emmett's is a real routine now.
Cathedral Hill has also added a Spanish bakery worth knowing. A new Spanish bakery and deli has opened in the former Handsome Hog space in the Cathedral Hill neighborhood, offering fresh sourdough loaves, sliced meats and cheeses, and grab-and-go Spanish goods. That is your Saturday sandwich problem solved without driving.
The operators still holding the middle
The temptation with a "what's new" post is to imply the old anchors are receding. On Grand, the opposite is true. The corridor's re-sort works because a spine of long-tenured operators keeps foot traffic steady while the new tenants find their footing. If you moved here in the last few years and have not yet built your own rotation, this is the working list to start from:
- Cafe Latte at Victoria, across the street from Bread & Chocolate since 1984, cafeteria-style with seven soups, five salads, twelve sandwiches daily, plus the cakes and the Pizza & Wine Bar upstairs.
- Bread & Chocolate, one of Saint Paul's first bakery-cafes, joining the scene in 1982, still doing fresh baked goods, custom sandwiches, and lattes.
- Grand Ole Creamery, an essential Twin Cities ice cream shop that former President Obama stopped at when he visited Saint Paul in 2014, with a line down the block on summer nights.
- The Lexington, a Grand Avenue institution since 1935, still an esteemed neighborhood gathering spot, and one of the only rooftop patios on this stretch.
- Saji-Ya, Saint Paul's oldest sushi kitchen, 40-plus years of fresh sushi and modern Japanese on Grand.
- Red Rabbit, Hyacinth, Emmett's Public House, and Golden Fig, the four names Minnesota Monthly grouped with Cafe Latte as the current thriving core of the avenue.
You do not need me to tell you Cafe Latte is good. You may need me to tell you that a resident's version of this corridor is those seven names plus Russell's, OG Zaza, and Ravaza, all inside about a twenty-minute walk. That is not a struggling street.
What to put on the August and September calendar
For newer residents, the two neighborhood dates worth marking are on either side of the summer's shoulder.
- Grand Old Day recap. Since 1973, the Grand Avenue Business Association has hosted Grand Old Day, drawing over 200,000 people along 30 blocks from Dale Street to Fairview Avenue, with 150-plus food vendors, an art district, a parade, and live music. This year's edition ran June 7. If you missed it, note that it is always the first Sunday in June, so it is worth blocking off now for 2027.
- Paws on Grand, September. Grand Old Day is not a dog event because of the crowds, but the Avenue hosts Paws on Grand in September as an event specifically designed for four-legged residents. For anyone with a dog, this is the corridor's most useful day of the fall.
A last read on the corridor
If you have been reading city write-ups about Grand Avenue and coming away worried, the on-the-ground evidence is different from the trade-press summary. The Avenue has seen a bit of an exodus of national retail brands, and a handful of larger restaurant spaces have struggled to find new tenants like the former Salut. At the same time, Cafe Latte is thriving, along with Golden Fig, Hyacinth, Red Rabbit, Emmett's Public House, and Saji-Ya, and the Avenue needs some juice that this cycle of openings might supply. That is a fair description of what a walk down Grand actually feels like in the summer of 2026: two conversations, both true, but the operator-run one is winning the block-by-block count.
For residents already here, the practical takeaway is that your neighborhood is denser with independent kitchens than it was two years ago, run by people whose names are attached to their front doors. That is what makes a corridor sticky, and it is what makes homes on the blocks north and south of Grand hold their character over time.
If you own on Summit Hill, Crocus Hill, or the Grand-Macalester blocks and are curious how this corridor's next act is shaping demand on your street, Contact David & Wren to discuss your next move at David K. Wells III Real Estate. Our office at Coldwell Banker Minneapolis Lakes tracks these micro-shifts closely, and we are happy to walk you through what they mean for your block.
