Every restaurant making news in downtown Wayzata this year is operating out of an address that already existed. Eloise sits inside the same Broadway building as its sister restaurant. Belle & Grey occupies the same dining room that closed under a different name in the spring. The concert making headlines at Macanda is happening at a site that's hosted dinner service for years. What changed wasn't the footprint of downtown Wayzata. What changed is what the city council is willing to let happen inside it.
That distinction matters if you've been trying to keep track of what's actually new this fall versus what's just been renamed, repermitted, or reopened. Here's what the last twelve months of city council votes and restaurant openings actually add up to.
One Building, Two Restaurants, One Architect
The Broadway building at 332 Broadway Avenue South has housed The Grocer's Table since June 2020, a New England-style market, café, and wine bar that became a regular gathering spot for coffee meetings, family lunches, and after-work glasses of wine. This fall, the same building added a second concept: Eloise, a fine-dining restaurant from the same owner, Lindsay Pohlad, and designed by the same firm, Shea Inc, that designed both restaurants and the building itself.
Eloise takes its name from Pohlad's husband's grandmother, and the interior leans into that inspiration with mismatched chairs, navy tones, and a look meant to evoke the years just after World War II. Pohlad has described wanting Eloise to feel like sitting in a friend's dining room, in contrast to Grocer's Table's kitchen-table feel. Reservations went live on Tock on October 4, and the restaurant opened its doors on October 11, with Chef Craig Johnson leading a menu built around locally sourced ingredients.
The part that's easy to miss is procedural. On July 21, the Wayzata City Council voted 4-0 to approve an expanded outdoor sidewalk café permit for the address, letting Eloise add seating along Broadway Avenue for the rest of the 2026 season. No new structure went up. A single vote changed how much of the sidewalk in front of an existing building could be used for dinner service.
A Hotel Restaurant Changes Its Name, Not Its Address
At The Hotel Landing on Lake Street East, the restaurant formerly known as ninetwentyfive reopened on April 8 as Belle & Grey, in the same room, at the same address, under new leadership. Chef de Cuisine Tsu-Hung Liu now runs a menu built around wagyu beef tartare, lobster pot pie, and pan-roasted walleye, and the Star Tribune's roundup of standout Twin Cities dishes singled out the fried artichokes as a highlight of a seafood-leaning, maritime-inspired menu.
The name itself is a small piece of local history. Owner Steve Bohl named the restaurant after his grandchildren, Greyson and Anabelle, while also nodding to the historic steamship Belle of Minnetonka and to Gray's Bay. It's a rebrand built on the same physical bones the hotel already had, refreshed rather than replaced.
That's the pattern so far this year. The two most talked-about new dining experiences downtown aren't new construction. They're existing addresses that got a different name, a different menu, or a different permit.
The Permit Fight at Macanda
Not every vote has gone smoothly, and the friction is its own kind of local knowledge. On June 2, the city council approved a special event permit for HIFI on the Lake, an outdoor electronic dance concert planned at Macanda, 294 Grove Lane East, on a 4-1 vote. City staff had recommended denying the permit. The application had already been tabled once at a prior meeting before coming back for a final vote.
Contrast that with what happened in April, when the council took up a different concert permit tied to James J. Hill Days. That vote restored a headlining concert that had been missing from the festival the year before, after a similar proposal for a 2025 event called WAAM Fest was denied. Promoter Rick Born and RB Productions proposed two ticketed shows at the Boatworks property, with city staff projecting roughly 2,500 attendees each night. City Manager Aurora Yager recommended a 10:30 p.m. cutoff for sound, even though the promoter had requested 11 p.m., citing complaints tied to earlier concerts at the same site. The council voted 5-0 to approve it anyway, bringing live music back to the festival's signature weekend.
Two different addresses, two different votes, one shared thread: what happens at an existing site downtown this year is being decided meeting by meeting, not built into the landscape by new construction. If you've noticed the city council appearing more often in local news than usual, this is why.
What's Actually on the Calendar
Underneath the permit votes and the reopenings, there are two dates worth marking if you haven't already.
Wayzata Oktoberfest lands on Saturday, October 3, at 115 Wayzata Blvd W.
Mpls.St.Paul Magazine's Fall Restaurant Week runs October 20 through 26, with three-course prix fixe menus in the $30 to $50 range at participating restaurants across the Twin Cities, including 6Smith on the Wayzata lakefront.
Neither of those events required a permit fight or a rebrand. They're recurring fixtures, the kind of dates that show up on a downtown calendar every year regardless of what's happening at any single address.
The Old Anchors Are Still Doing What They Always Did
None of this year's changes have touched the places that don't change much. The Narrows Saloon and Luce Line Brewing are still the two reliable spots for live music on a Friday or Saturday night. Blue Water Theatre Company is still the hub for community performances. The Panoway on Wayzata Bay is still where people walk before or after dinner, boardwalk and plaza intact. And the Wayzata Bar & Grill, known locally as the Muni, is still the casual, city-owned option for a walk-and-a-meal kind of evening, the same role it's played for years.
That's worth naming because it's easy to read a season of restaurant openings and permit votes as a downtown in flux. It isn't, exactly. The buildings that anchor a lakeside weekend, the boardwalk, the pub with the patio, the theater company, haven't moved. What's shifted is what's allowed to happen at the addresses around them: a bigger patio here, a new name there, a concert permit that took two tries to pass.
If you're trying to plan a fall weekend downtown, that's the useful takeaway. The map hasn't changed. The fine print attached to a handful of addresses on it has.
If you're the kind of person who tracks what's actually changing on your own block, whether it's a restaurant permit or a property down the street, that's the same instinct that leads to good real estate decisions when the time comes. Turnquist Spilseth Real Estate Group keeps a close eye on both.
