Pick a Friday night in St. Louis Park and you have a real decision to make before you've even left the house. Do you head to West End for steak at Boketto or ramen at Crave? Do you swing over to Texa-Tonka for wood-fired pizza at Rosalia? Or do you stay closer to Excelsior, grab a cocktail at Copperwing, and walk it off at Mill Valley Kitchen? Nobody in St. Louis Park drives to one downtown strip and calls it a night, because the city never built one. What's changed this year is that all three of its scattered commercial pockets are filling up, renovating, and adding new tenants at the same time, which means the old habit of picking a side of town for errands and dinner doesn't really apply anymore.
A city built on three storefronts, not one
St. Louis Park has always lacked a single Main Street. As the Star Tribune put it in its coverage of the West End's growth, the city is instead defined by a network of commercial districts: West End, the Historic Walker Lake area, and the Excelsior Boulevard corridor. That's usually a liability for a suburb, since a diffuse commercial footprint tends to mean each district is a little underfed compared to a city with one obvious center of gravity.
The numbers from late 2025 tell a different story. The Star Tribune reported West End's office vacancy at 12.8 percent in the third quarter of 2025, against 22.1 percent across the Twin Cities metro and 30.8 percent in downtown Minneapolis. West End was also one of the few submarkets in the metro to add tenants rather than lose them that year, logging close to 12,000 square feet of new leases. A district without a monopoly on foot traffic is outperforming the neighborhood that's supposed to have it built in.
| Area | Office vacancy, Q3 2025 |
|---|---|
| West End (St. Louis Park) | 12.8% |
| Twin Cities metro average | 22.1% |
| Downtown Minneapolis | 30.8% |
Offices, apartments, a movie theater, and a restaurant row within the same 49 acres put West End in an unusual position among Twin Cities suburbs.
West End is getting a redo, not a patch job
The list of what's changing in West End reads less like maintenance and more like a second build-out of the 49-acre district. There's a $6 million revamp underway at the movie theater. New mixed-use apartments have gone in. And Hempel Real Estate broke ground on Terasă, a six-story, 223-unit project at 5401 Gamble Drive, the former site of a West End office building across from Punch Bowl Social. The plans call for 21,000 square feet of retail anchored by a grocery store, with major construction expected to start in early 2026. Hempel is also weighing a second redevelopment on a vacant corner within the Shops at West End itself, this time topping ground-floor retail with four to six stories of office space.
Ben Krsnak, an executive vice president at Hempel, summed up the appeal in one line: "It's where the suburbs meet the urban core."
The dining lineup already reflects that density. Boketto, a Japanese-inspired steakhouse with seating for 250 in nearly 8,000 square feet, opened at 1607 West End Boulevard from Kam and Keyvan Talebi, the brothers behind the nearby Crave American Kitchen & Sushi Bar at 1603 West End Boulevard. Yard House and The Loop Bar + Restaurant round out the sit-down options, and The Local West End has been pouring pints as the district's Irish pub since 2019.
Texa-Tonka's mural is doing double duty
A few minutes away on Minnetonka Boulevard, Texa-Tonka Shopping Center is having its own moment, and this one comes with a hundred years of local backstory attached. Built in 1951 by St. Louis Park resident Adolph "Bob" Fine, the center went through a full mid-century renovation and restoration between 2019 and 2020. Its east side now carries a mural by artist Jake Dwyer that folds the shopping center's history into the storefronts around it, including a nod to Red Owl and Piggly Wiggly grocery stores that once anchored the block and a fictional shop called Mike Zoss, a pseudonym the Coen brothers have used in their films. Joel and Ethan Coen were born in St. Louis Park, and the mural treats that fact as neighborhood trivia worth putting on a wall rather than burying in a footnote.
The renovation brought in new tenants alongside longtime holdouts like AxMan Surplus and Erik's Bike Shop, and this February it landed its biggest culinary addition yet. Rosalia, the third location for DDP Restaurant Group, opened February 12 inside Texa-Tonka at 8000 Minnetonka Boulevard, serving wood-fired Sicilian pizzas, small plates, and pastas alongside a dedicated gluten-free crust program. It's part of a stated plan by DDP to expand the Rosalia name across the metro, which means the shopping center that's been leasing space "to local people" since 1951, according to the original 1951 announcement in The Dispatch, just picked up a restaurant with regional ambitions.
The stretch in between has its own identity
Between West End and Texa-Tonka sits the Excelsior Boulevard corridor, home to what locals have taken to calling the city's unofficial distillery district. Copperwing Distillery opened there in March 2017, the work of two engineers and a family physician, Kyle Kettering, Chris Palmisano, and Brian Idelkope, who wanted to make a bourbon mash distilled like vodka. The result, Vodskey, is still the house signature, and the distillery sources nearly all its ingredients locally, down to the Minnesota white oak used for its barrels.
The corridor has kept adding to its drink menu. St. Louis Park's city council approved liquor licenses for Boketto and for Punch Neapolitan Pizza, and granted off-sale licenses to two local breweries, Ullsperger Brewing and Haggard Barrel Brewing Co. On the food side, Mill Valley Kitchen anchors the corner of Excelsior and France with a Northern California-inspired menu built around dishes like miso-glazed seabass, and Hazelwood Food & Drink holds down Excelsior and Monterey with a brunch and dinner menu that keeps a regular crowd coming back for its walleye tacos.
One town, three places to end up
None of these three districts is trying to be the others. West End is adding apartments and office space at a scale the rest of the city isn't. Texa-Tonka is leaning into its own history while adding a regional restaurant brand. The Excelsior corridor is quietly building a drinks scene around a distillery that's been at it since 2017. What ties them together is timing: all three are mid-renovation, mid-lease-up, or mid-opening in the same year, which is not something a city with one downtown gets to say. If you live in St. Louis Park, that means the question isn't which side of town has what you need tonight. It's which of the three you feel like walking into.
If you're curious about what else is filling in around West End, Texa-Tonka, or the Excelsior corridor, or you just want to compare notes on where to eat this week, Jesse James Forsell keeps a close eye on what's opening in St. Louis Park and is always happy to talk shop about it.
