Grand Avenue Quietly Added Three New Places to Eat and Drink. The Ford Site Just Got Its First Real Deadline in Years.

What actually changed on Grand Avenue this year, and what's happening six blocks south that most regulars haven't clocked yet?

Ask someone who walks Grand Avenue every week what's different in 2026 and they'll mention the new pizza place before they mention the construction site at Ford Parkway and Cretin. That's understandable. A new restaurant is a Tuesday-night decision. A stalled 122-acre redevelopment is background noise you've learned to tune out after a decade of "coming soon." But this fall, both of those threads are hitting a moment at the same time, and the quieter one is the one that actually matters more.

Three New Storefronts, Zero Fanfare

Grand Avenue added three new places to eat and drink in under two years, and none of them got the kind of fanfare a brand-new build usually gets, because none of them are new buildings. They're old ones with new names.

Russell's opened in the space that housed Tavern on Grand for decades, a location so identified with one restaurant that its closing felt like the end of an era. The new owner, Todd Russell, grew up on Grand Avenue and has been part of Winter Carnival planning since 1989. He's said the goal is a place that will "not only bring families together but also revitalize this historic street." Russell's kept a wink to the old menu too, swapping Tavern's famous walleye for a walleye nachos dish, tortilla strips and red salsa and avocado mousse standing in for the old fry basket.

A few storefronts down, OG Zaza opened in March, taking over the space that housed Justin Sutherland's Big E egg sandwich concept, which itself had replaced the longtime Grand Pizzeria back in 2023. That's three concepts in one address in three years, which tells you something about how fast turnover moves on this stretch even when the street looks unchanged from the sidewalk. OG Zaza is the sixth Twin Cities location for chef Josh Hedquist, a Guy's Grocery Games winner known for New Haven-style pies made with scratch dough and a sauce that's nothing more than crushed tomatoes and olive oil.

Then in April, The Vermilion opened next door to Iron Ranger, taking over what had been an event space and turning it into a late-night cocktail bar, a category Grand Avenue has historically lacked. Most of the street closes down by 10. The Vermilion is a small bet that there's demand for something later.

The Other Half of the Story Nobody Puts in the Same Article

Here's the part that rarely gets mentioned alongside the openings. Grand Avenue has also lost ground since the pandemic. National retail brands have pulled out. Some of the Avenue's larger restaurant footprints have sat empty for stretches, the former Salut space among them, too big and too expensive for most independent operators to take on.

That's the actual shape of Grand Avenue right now. Not a comeback story and not a decline story, but both running in parallel. Small, food-and-drink-focused spaces are getting picked up fast, sometimes within months of a closing. Large-format retail and destination-dining spaces are sitting open longer than they used to. If you're trying to read the Avenue's health off one metric, that's the wrong instinct. It depends entirely on square footage.

Six Blocks South, a Different Clock

While Grand Avenue has been cycling through tenants on a scale of months, the Ford Site has been running on a scale of decades, and for most of that time, "years behind schedule" was the only update available.

That May 2025 vote is worth sitting with for a second. A developer asked the city to cut the taxable value of its own land by more than half just to make the numbers pencil out enough to keep building. Ryan's own senior vice president for development described the project as lagging behind where it should be. That's not spin. That's the developer saying it out loud to the city council.

The building at the center of that gateway block now has a name. It's called The Albert, after Albert Kahn, the architect behind the original Ford assembly plant, and it's designed to fold pieces of that history back in. Salvaged friezes from the old plant facade are being installed on the building's east wall, the side that faces the new civic square.

"We are going to be using sections of the Ford plant along the east facade of the multifamily building that faces Civic Square," said Sean Ryan, the developer overseeing the site for Ryan Companies.

The Albert is a four-story building with 97 apartments and 14,000 square feet of ground-floor retail. Construction on it began in June 2025, and as of the most recent update to the city's Housing and Redevelopment Authority, it remains on track for tenant turnover on October 26, 2026.

The Fall Dates Worth Actually Circling

Put the calendar in front of you and this is what's landing in the next two months, all within the same half-mile of Grand Avenue and Ford Parkway:

• September 13: Paws on Grand, the Grand Avenue Business Association's annual pet event, with adoption booths and the wiener dog races that have become the closing tradition of the Avenue's outdoor event season.
• This fall: The civic square at Ford Parkway and Cretin Avenue, under construction since early June, is expected to be finished, connecting by a diagonal walkway to the larger plaza and water feature at the center of Highland Bridge.
• This fall: Crunch St. Paul Highland Park, a $6 million, 35,000-square-foot gym at 2128 Ford Parkway, opens as the fourth Twin Cities location for franchisee The Undefeated Tribe.
• October 26: Forecasted tenant turnover date for The Albert, the gateway building anchoring the Ford Parkway corner of Highland Bridge.

None of these are rumors or renderings. They're dated commitments from the businesses and developers behind them, which is a different category of information than the "coming soon" signage this site has carried for most of the last decade.

It's also worth knowing that the total scale of Highland Bridge has shifted since the master plan was first drawn up. Ryan Companies has described a full build-out near 3,800 residences, but a May 2026 briefing to the city's Planning Commission put the current working range closer to 2,600 to 2,800 units. That's not a broken promise so much as a plan that's been resized against a decade of financing reality, the same reality that produced the tax break vote in the first place.

Why This Fall Actually Means Something

Grand Avenue's turnover is a fast, low-capital signal. A restaurant lease is a year-to-year bet, and three new operators making that bet inside eighteen months tells you there's still enough foot traffic and rent tolerance to justify trying. That's useful information, but it's the kind of information that can reverse itself by next spring.

The Ford Site is the opposite kind of signal. It's slow and expensive to start and even slower to stop once it's moving. A civic square that breaks ground in June and finishes construction by fall isn't a maybe. Neither is a residential and retail building with a specific October turnover date reported to a public body. When both kinds of signal, the fast one and the slow one, land in the same season and the same half-mile, that's less a coincidence than a read on where actual demand is pointing.

For anyone who's lived near this corridor through years of empty storefronts and stalled cranes, that's the update worth having before winter. Not which restaurant is newest. Whether the thing next to it is finally real.

If you're weighing what any of this means for a move along Grand Avenue, Highland Park, or the wider Ford Parkway corridor, that's exactly the kind of hyperlocal context Karin Rice-Duncanson tracks block by block. Let's Connect.