On March 1, a Plymouth resident named Randy Ehlers reopened a neighborhood tavern under a new name and told almost no one outside his regulars. Eleven days later, Minnesota's oldest grocery chain opened as the anchor tenant of a 75-acre development built by two real estate firms, with a food hall, a bakery, and an ice cream shop built into the front of it. Both events count as "new restaurants opening in Plymouth this year." Neither one explains the other.
That's the part worth sitting with if you already live here and you're trying to figure out where to eat this fall. Plymouth didn't get one wave of new dining. It got two, running on completely different fuel, arriving close enough together that they blur into a single headline unless you look at who actually wrote the check.
A Grocery Store Anchoring 75 Acres
The bigger of the two stories is The Boulevard, a mixed-use redevelopment going up at Interstate 494 and Bass Lake Road on what used to be Prudential Financial's corporate campus. Roers Companies and Scannell Properties are behind the build, and the plan eventually stretches to up to 800 units of housing, a business campus, and a park on top of the retail piece already open.
The anchor tenant is Coborn's Market & Table, which opened March 12 as Coborn's closest store yet to Minneapolis. It's not a conventional grocery run. The store's "grocerant" format puts a working food hall inside the building: Basta Pasta, Abuela's Mexican Kitchen, and Brother's Burgers, three fast-casual concepts developed by Minnesota chef David Fhima under the banner The Global Table. The Buttered Tin, the bakery known for scratch breakfasts and lunches under founder and former Food Network "Cupcake Wars" champion Alicia Hinze, runs its third location out of the same building, after outposts in northeast Minneapolis and St. Paul. There's also Penny Horse Parlor for Kemp's ice cream.
None of that food hall existed a year ago. It exists now because a development group with an eventual 800-unit housing plan decided a grocery store needed a dining concept to anchor foot traffic before the housing even arrives.
Eleven Days Earlier, Down County Road 24
The other story started smaller and moved slower. Rock Elm Tavern had been a fixture on County Road 24 for about a decade before Randy Ehlers, a Plymouth resident, bought it last fall. On March 1, he relaunched it as Rock Elm Revival, keeping the tavern's regulars and its bones while rebuilding the parts he wanted to change.
The kitchen added an overnight smoker that turns out fresh brisket and pulled pork daily, with anything unused at closing tossed rather than held over. The menu picked up items like Revival Shrimp in a dynamite sauce and the Vat 17 Burger, topped with white cheddar, arugula, and candied bacon, alongside a Pitmaster Full Smoke plate of brisket, pulled pork, hot link, gouda hash browns, and slaw. The bigger structural change happened next door, where Ehlers converted a space that used to hold golf simulators into what he calls The Revival Room, a dedicated area for private events and live music, with a permanent stage planned. Rock Elm now runs an acoustic Sunday brunch there alongside its regular tavern menu and daily happy hour.
Ehlers didn't build anything from the ground up. He bought something that already existed and decided which parts of it were worth keeping.
Two Playbooks, Side by Side
| The Boulevard / Coborn's Market & Table | Rock Elm Revival | |
|---|---|---|
| What changed hands | Vacant 75-acre corporate campus, redeveloped from scratch | An existing decade-old tavern, purchased and rebranded |
| Who's behind it | Roers Companies and Scannell Properties, with Coborn's as anchor tenant | One local resident, Randy Ehlers |
| What opened | A grocery store built around a food hall (three fast-casual concepts, a bakery, an ice cream shop) | The same building, same kitchen footprint, new menu and a converted event space |
| Timeline | Opened March 12, 2026 | Relaunched March 1, 2026 |
Read the table straight through and the pattern is obvious: one is capital finding an empty campus and building a destination into it before the surrounding housing even exists. The other is capital finding something that already worked for a neighborhood and betting it can work better without tearing it down.
The Third Kind of New
There's a smaller, quieter version of growth showing up too. Hippo Pockets, the pressed pocket sandwich concept from Centro Restaurant Group, opened a Plymouth location on County Road 101 in late May, with expanded breakfast offerings and longer hours than its other spots. This isn't a from-scratch development and it isn't a local buyout. It's a multi-location group filling a storefront the way it's done in other suburbs, treating Plymouth as one more good address on a list rather than a project or a personal bet. Worth knowing about if you're hungry on 101. Not the kind of story that tells you much about the neighborhood itself.
The Market Moved a Few Blocks Too
Here's where the old and new parts of Plymouth actually touch. The city's Wednesday farmers market runs its regular season at Parkers Lake Playfield, but on three dates this year, July 15, Aug. 12, and one more coming Sept. 16, it relocates onto Plymouth Boulevard itself, the same corridor The Boulevard development sits on. A market that's run in some form for years is, on those particular Wednesdays, setting up folding tables within walking distance of the new food hall. Nobody planned this as a symbolic gesture. It's a scheduling decision. But it means the city's oldest recurring dining tradition and its newest grocery-anchored destination will share the same stretch of pavement one more time this fall before the market's season ends Sept. 30.
Still on the Calendar This Fall
If you're deciding what to actually do with a free evening or Wednesday afternoon between now and the end of September, here's what's confirmed:
- Sept. 16: The Wednesday farmers market sets up on Plymouth Boulevard instead of its usual Parkers Lake location, 2 to 6 p.m.
- Sept. 19: Rhythm & Brews lands at the Hilde Performance Center, the same venue that's hosted the city's free summer concert series all season.
- Ongoing: Rock Elm Revival's acoustic Sunday brunch and Coborn's Market & Table's food hall are both open daily, so either one works as a standing plan rather than a one-time outing.
Neither One Erased the Other
The easy version of this story would say Plymouth's dining scene got a big shiny upgrade this year. That's not quite right, and it's not quite what happened. A development group built something that didn't exist before on land that had been sitting empty. A local guy bought something that already existed and kept most of it intact while changing what needed changing. Both are true at the same time, in the same city, in the same six-month stretch, and neither one required the other to fail.
If you've lived in Plymouth long enough to remember Rock Elm as a tavern before it was a revival, that continuity is probably worth more to you than a grand opening ever will be. If you're the type who wants to see what a 75-acre redevelopment actually turns into once it's finished, The Boulevard is still a few years from done and worth watching. There's room in this city for both kinds of new, which says something better about Plymouth than a single grand opening could.
For a longer look at how Plymouth's trails and green space fit into daily life here, the outdoor living guide covers the parts of the city this post doesn't. And if a friend or neighbor ever mentions they're thinking about buying or selling in Plymouth, Randy Kellogg has spent enough time watching this city change to have an honest opinion about it. Get 100% Randy on your side when that conversation comes up.
