Tomorrow night, the Fabulous Armadillos Party Band featuring Chris Hawkey plays Excelsior Commons. That show was supposed to happen back on June 17. It got moved to August 19 instead, which means the second-to-last Concerts in the Commons date of the season lands this week, with the Fleetwood Mac tribute act Rumours & Dreams closing things out on August 26. Free shuttles will run between the Excelsior Public Library on Water Street and the Commons, food trucks open at 5 p.m., and the music starts at 6:30.
None of that is new information if you've lived here a while. What's changed since last summer is where you go afterward.
Last fall, the story about Excelsior wasn't the concert series. It was Water Street itself, and whether the sudden wave of new restaurants filling in a corner that had sat dark since the pandemic could actually make it through a Minnesota winter. The Minnesota Star Tribune posed that exact question in September 2025, watching Mike DeCamp of Jester Concepts turn a sprawling former Irish pub, the old Bull & Wren space, into three restaurants at once, while chef David Fhima opened a Sicilian spot called Vagabondo directly across the street. The reporting was skeptical in a reasonable way. Restaurant booms are common. Restaurant booms that survive their first off-season are not.
It's now August 2026, deep into a second summer, and the honest answer is that not only did the original wave hold on, the roster kept growing after the reporters left.
What was actually opening a year ago
Worth being precise about what happened, because "restaurant boom" undersells how concentrated it was. DeCamp's company, Jester Concepts, took over that empty corner property and stacked three concepts into it: Parlour Excelsior in the basement, serving the same double-patty Parlour Burger and craft cocktails that made the Minneapolis original a regular destination, and Mirabelle and Shiki sharing the main level above it, a coastal-themed supper club paired with a ramen bar. Across the street, in a space that had cycled through a few identities including Red Sauce Rebellion, Fhima opened Vagabondo: a daytime cafe serving coffee and pastries on a sidewalk patio with a partial lake view, and a Sicilian dinner spot by night.
Layline, the oyster and cocktail room from InnerBloom Hospitality (the same group behind Wayzata's Josefina and Macanda), had already been on Water Street since 2023, so it wasn't part of the sudden wave, but it gave the corner a head start. Add in longtime fixtures like Maynard's, with its dock where boats pull up for salmon bowls and ceviche, Haskell's Port of Excelsior next to the liquor store, Licks Unlimited scooping the same rotating flavors it's served since the 1980s, and Old Southern BBQ Smokehouse, run by James of the Famous Dave's family, sitting next to Excelsior Brewing, and you get a fair picture of downtown Excelsior as of last September.
Excelsior's mayor, Gary Ringate, put it plainly at the time: "the restaurant world is churning around here." The designer behind both Mirabelle and Vagabondo, Amanda Maday of Studio Grey, made the more interesting point, that none of this works if a restaurant tries to go it alone. "You don't want to be the sole place on an island somewhere," she said. New apartments, a parking garage, and plans for more development were already in motion to support the density.
The part that's changed since then
Here's what wasn't in last fall's coverage: Yelp's July 2026 ranking of new and hot restaurants in Excelsior runs to ten names, and several of them, including El Bodegon, The Table, and Yumi Japanese Restaurant & Bar, don't show up in either of the Star Tribune's two 2025 pieces on the boom. Coalition Restaurant, at 227 Water Street, is also active and drawing current reviews as of August 2026, giving the corner another full-service kitchen the original reporting didn't dwell on. Meanwhile 318 Cafe, at 318 Water Street, has become enough of a fixture that it now hosts its own ticketed evening shows, a $15 acoustic set called Heartfelt among them.
None of that reads like a shakeout. It reads like a corner that kept filling in.
There's a simple, checkable way to see how far this has come. As of July 1, 2026, OpenTable lists eight bookable restaurants in Excelsior, with Vagabondo and Maynard's among the customer favorites. Compare that to a downtown that, per the Star Tribune's own framing, wasn't long ago defined by a dark, vacant intersection at its busiest corner. That's the actual shift: not a single splashy opening, but a sustained accumulation of kitchens on a stretch of Water Street small enough to walk end to end.
Why the winter question had an obvious answer in hindsight
The clustering logic Maday described last year turns out to explain the last twelve months better than any single opening did. Restaurants on Water Street aren't really competing for the same table on the same night the way two identical chains might. Vagabondo's daytime cafe crowd isn't the same crowd ordering ramen at Shiki. Haskell's patio regulars, the ones who've claimed what one regular calls "prime realty" for the lake view, aren't necessarily the ones booking a table at Mirabelle for a Saturday brunch. A three-restaurant stack from one operator next to a Sicilian spot from another gives the whole corner more reasons for someone to make the trip out from Minneapolis or Jordan, not fewer.
That's also why the Highway 7 corridor running through the middle of town matters more than it might seem. Excelsior's small enough, at around 2,300 residents, that its restaurant scene depends on pulling people in from outside city limits, and Highway 7 is the road that does it. A corner with one restaurant is a destination. A corner with eight is a reason to plan an entire evening around it, concert included.
This week, specifically
If you're planning around tomorrow's Fabulous Armadillos show or next week's season finale, the logistics are the same either night: shuttles run from the library on Water Street to the Commons, food trucks and beer or wine start at 5, and the band goes on at 6:30.
| Date | Act | Sponsor |
|---|---|---|
| Wednesday, Aug 19 | Fabulous Armadillos Party Band ft. Chris Hawkey (rescheduled from June 17) | Garda Capital Partners |
| Wednesday, Aug 26 (season finale) | Rumours & Dreams, a Fleetwood Mac tribute, with opener Frankie Torres | Oppidan Investment Company |
Grab dinner before the music starts and you've got more real choices than you did before last summer's opening wave:
- Parlour Excelsior, Mirabelle, or Shiki, all under one roof at the corner that used to sit empty
- Vagabondo, for the daytime cafe patio or the Sicilian dinner menu
- Layline, for oysters and cocktails if you got there before the crowd did
- Coalition Restaurant at 227 Water Street, or newer names like El Bodegon, The Table, and Yumi
- Maynard's, if you'd rather eat where the boats tie up
- Licks Unlimited afterward, because a concert on the Commons isn't complete without it
What this actually tells you
The interesting thing about Excelsior right now isn't any single restaurant. It's that a downtown small enough to cover on foot absorbed a full year of new competition without losing anything from the original wave, and kept adding to it anyway. That's a different story than the one the Star Tribune was watching unfold last September, and it's a better one, because it answers the question they were asking before anyone knew the answer.
Whether you're headed to the Commons tomorrow night or just curious what's changed on Water Street since last summer, that's the read: this wasn't a moment. It was the start of something the town had room for all along.
If you want the fuller picture of what makes this stretch of Lake Minnetonka tick, from the shoreline to the school district boundaries, our Excelsior neighborhood guide has more. And if a summer of good dinners out has you thinking about what it would take to actually live within walking distance of all of this, that's a conversation Randy Kellogg is glad to have. Get 100% Randy on Your Side.
