"It's the curbs of Grand Avenue that allowed me to have a successful career," Todd Russell told the Star Tribune this spring, days after announcing that his namesake restaurant would close and the building that housed it would go up for sale.
Russell grew up on Grand Avenue. He built a career in commercial real estate reading tenant mixes for other people's developments, then came home in November 2024 to open a restaurant of his own inside the space long occupied by Tavern on Grand, the walleye institution that had run there for nearly 35 years. Eighteen months later, Russell's closed for good on May 9. The building went on the market for $3.85 million. Russell described the restaurant as a love letter to the area, and said it brought the neighborhood to its dining room.
A Landmark That Keeps Changing Hands
The Tavern on Grand closure in 2024 wasn't really about one bad quarter. The family cited the end of their lease, a pandemic-era slowdown that never fully reversed, rising costs, a drop in foot traffic, and the death of the longtime owner. It was a business in transition, not a business in trouble, closing after one last Grand Old Day.
Russell's replaced it that November with a renovated dining room, a nod to the old walleye sandwich reimagined as walleye nachos, and an ambition to bring the neighborhood back to its own dining room table. It worked, for a while. Then the same building that includes the restaurant space also houses Mick's Bottle Shop, residential units, and office space, all part of the package Russell listed this spring. Two different operators, two different concepts, one address that hasn't held a tenant more than a few years since the Tavern's original run ended.
What's Actually Filling In Around It
While 656 Grand sat empty this summer, the smaller storefronts nearby weren't waiting around. OG Zaza opened this spring in the space that once held Grand Pizzeria and, more recently, chef Justin Sutherland's egg sandwich concept Big E. Chef Josh Hedquist, a "Guy's Grocery Games" winner, is behind the New Haven-style pizza operation, which shares its building with Grand Ole Creamery.
A few doors down, the Iron Ranger's former event space became The Vermilion, a late-night cocktail bar pouring craft drinks and Italian wine under owner Tom Forti, who runs the main restaurant next door. GoodThings, the gift and lifestyle shop Russell name-checked as one of the street's steady performers, is expanding into the former Wuollet Bakery space. And Phê Coffee was on track to open nearby by summer, according to Russell's own comments to the Star Tribune in March.
| Recent openings and expansions on Grand Avenue | What it replaced |
|---|---|
| OG Zaza (pizza) | Big E, formerly Grand Pizzeria |
| The Vermilion (cocktail bar) | Iron Ranger's former event space |
| GoodThings expansion | Former Wuollet Bakery |
None of these are large-format, full-service restaurants with a bar program and a private events room. They're a pizza counter, a cocktail den attached to an existing kitchen, a gift-shop expansion, a coffee shop. Smaller footprints, smaller staffs, shorter leases.
The Lease Math Behind Grand Avenue's Turnover
Grand Avenue's closure list from the past few years reads like a corporate retail directory: Anthropologie, J. Crew, Lululemon, Fjällräven, Pottery Barn, Trade Winds, Running Room, Red 6 Games, Poppy. Salut Bar Americain, the French-inspired restaurant that had run on the street for more than a decade, was part of that wave too. Its general manager, Donna Fahs, told KARE 11 the reason plainly: "We couldn't commit to a long-term lease with these interest rates and prices."
That's the mechanism connecting all of it. A full-service restaurant or a national retail brand needs a lease long enough and rent low enough to justify the buildout, the staffing, and the volume required to break even. When borrowing costs and construction prices both climbed, that math stopped penciling for a lot of operators.
Smaller concepts don't carry the same exposure. A pizza counter, a coffee shop, a gift-shop expansion to an existing storefront, these can open with less capital, staff lighter, and survive on a shorter commitment. That's not a story about Grand Avenue losing its appeal. It's a story about which business model can still afford to bet on the street.
The Storefronts That Never Turn Over
Russell pointed to this himself when he announced the sale, naming Hyacinth, Golden Fig, Cafe Latte, and GoodThings as the businesses that kept the avenue's vibrancy alive through the closures. Minnesota Monthly's list of what's thriving adds Red Rabbit, Emmett's Public House, and Saji-Ya to that group.
What these have in common isn't luck. They're smaller-footprint operations, several of them specialty retail or counter-service rather than full-service dining with a bar and private event space. They've been through more than one wave of Grand Avenue closures already and are still there. The address at 656 Grand, by contrast, is sized and priced for the last generation of anchor tenant, the kind that needs a big dining room, a full kitchen, and years to recoup the investment. That's exactly the format the street has been shedding.
What This Means for the Walk Down Grand This Fall
A dark storefront on Grand Avenue this year is as likely to mean a format mismatch as it is to mean the street is struggling. The businesses opening this spring and summer, OG Zaza, The Vermilion, the GoodThings expansion, Phê Coffee, are proof that operators are still choosing this address. They're just choosing a different size and structure than the one 656 Grand was built for.
The building at 656 Grand is still on the market as of this writing. Whoever buys it will decide whether Grand Avenue's most storied storefront gets another shot at being a full-service anchor, or whether it finally gets carved into the smaller spaces the rest of the street has already proven can work.
If you're watching this stretch of Grand Avenue because you're thinking about a home nearby, the storefront turnover is worth reading correctly. The Hays Baker Team pays attention to these details because they shape what a neighborhood feels like to live in, not just what it looks like on a map.