For years, downtown Wayzata worked like a Saturday town. You drove in, walked Lake Street, ate lunch somewhere with a view, and left. The lakefront itself was a parking lot with a train track running through it.
Summer 2026 is the first season where that description is fully obsolete. A finished Lakewalk, three operator-driven restaurants on or near the water, and a Wednesday-through-Sunday rhythm of small standing events have quietly turned the bay into a walkable evening neighborhood. If you live here, the interesting question is no longer what to do on a Saturday. It is what to do on a Tuesday at seven.
What actually changed on Lake Street this spring
The most concrete shift is the dining lineup at the water's edge. The hotel restaurant at 925 Lake Street East, known for years as ninetwentyfive, relaunched on April 8, 2026 as Belle & Grey, with a refreshed dining room and a menu that leans lighter and more seasonal for spring and summer service. The name references the Belle of Minnetonka, the late-19th-century steamship that used to work the lake. As of June 2026, the restaurant is open seven days a week for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and weekend brunch, and it added live music on Thursdays from 6 to 9 p.m. starting June 4.
A block west, chef Kamal Mohamed's L.A.-inspired organic cafe Parcelle is bringing its first suburban outpost to the Wayzata lakefront this year. The Star Tribune reported in late January that the 800-square-foot space is designed as a small grab-and-go cafe near the water, engineered around takeout for a walk on the Lakewalk or a seat on the patio.
And on Broadway, Lindsay Pohlad's Eloise continues to fill the evening slot next door to her original concept, The Grocer's Table. The pairing works the way people wish restaurant groups worked: coffee and market food during the day, a proper dinner-and-cocktails room by 4 p.m., both under the same operator.
If you have lived here long enough to remember when Bellecour closed and left a Del Prado-shaped hole on Broadway, note that Josefina has been operating in that footprint for a while and is a functioning pasta room now, not a rumor.
The Lakewalk is doing something the parking lot never did
The 1,200-foot Panoway Lakewalk between the Broadway Docks and the Depot Docks officially opened in July 2024, but 2025 was the first full summer it was in service and 2026 is the first year it has been fully absorbed into how people move through downtown. The engineering matters more than it sounds. The walk was built as a series of bridge-like spans to limit pilings, each piling wrapped in custom steel ice skirts that break up spring ice as it flows north across the bay. That single design choice keeps the boardwalk open through the winter and prevents the aeration that would otherwise disrupt the ice sheet the Chilly Open and other winter events depend on. The decking is Kebony wood carrying a 20-year warranty uncommon for a natural wood system in a lakefront installation.
The practical result for a resident: you can walk from the CoV patio at Broadway to the Depot without touching Lake Street traffic, and the same route works at 10 p.m. in July as it does at 10 a.m. in January.
Phase 3 is the piece still ahead. The Section Foreman House has been rechristened the Sandvold Learning Center, and the Wayzata Conservancy is working toward the roughly $11M needed to finish the Eco Park and Depot Park improvements around it. Construction commences within the next couple of years, per Kraus-Anderson, which built Phase 2.
A Wednesday-through-Sunday cadence
The reason the downtown feels different this year is not any single opening. It is that the weekly calendar finally sustains itself between the big festivals. As of this month, a resident with no particular plan can string together a week without repeating a venue:
- Tuesday and Thursday evenings, 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. CoV's summer music series runs on the patio at 700 Lake Street East, with dates carrying through late August.
- Wednesday evenings, July and August. The Wayzata Rotary's 2026 Music by the Lake series is six consecutive free concerts at the historic Depot. Food and drink service opens at 6 p.m., bands play 6:30 to 8 p.m., brat dinners and beer for sale.
- Thursday evenings, 6 to 9 p.m. Belle & Grey's live-music night at The Hotel Landing, added when the restaurant relaunched this spring.
- Sunday morning. The Lakewalk is quiet enough for an actual walk before the boat traffic picks up on the bay.
None of these individually is a headline. The point is that they run every week, and a resident does not have to plan around them.
Two weekends to plan around
If you did not make it to the Wayzata Art Experience on June 27 and 28, you missed the two-day festival with 150-plus juried artists on Lake Street, a Saturday evening boat light parade past the Lakewalk, and free Sunday morning sailboat rides through Wayzata Sailing. The event has been anchoring the last weekend of June since 2004.
The one still ahead is bigger. James J. Hill Days is the 52nd annual, and this year the calendar puts it on September 11-13 (the weekend after Labor Day, which falls on September 7). The Wayzata West Metro Chamber of Commerce is expecting somewhere between 75,000 and 80,000 visitors over the three days. If you have been here more than a few years, most of the components are familiar:
| Weekend fixture | When | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Rails & Ales Craft Beer Festival | Friday evening | Wayzata Depot |
| Street Market (175+ vendors) | Friday 5 p.m. through Sunday | Lake Street |
| Sandvold Stage live music | All three days | Minnetonka Avenue and Lake Street |
| Lake Minnetonka Carnival | All weekend | Downtown |
| Dachshund Races (41st annual) | Saturday | Dog Park zone |
| Pickleball tournament & drop-in | Saturday and Sunday | Wayzata Depot Pickleball Plaza |
| Fireworks over Wayzata Bay | Saturday night | Bay |
| Parade | Sunday, 3 p.m. | Lake Street |
Two additions worth flagging. The Wayzata City Council approved a special event permit for two concerts alongside the festival, restoring a live-music component that had faded in recent years. And the Depot's freshly paved pickleball courts are now a scheduled feature of the weekend rather than an afterthought.
If you own on Lake Street or east of Barry Avenue, that Friday-through-Sunday window is the one to plan around for deliveries, contractors, and anything requiring a curb. Road closures follow the same footprint as in previous years.
One quieter signal
Buried in the June civic news was a small announcement with long implications. Kevin Klapprich was named Wayzata's first full-time fire chief, effective June 29, 2026. He has served with the department since 1978 and been chief since 2006. The role was previously part-time. A town does not create a full-time fire chief position because things are getting quieter. It creates one because the daytime population, the density of downtown activity, and the coordination load with neighboring departments have crossed a threshold.
That is the sentence to sit with if you are watching how Wayzata is changing. The Lakewalk, the operator-driven restaurants, the two-festival summer, the standing weekly music, and now a full-time chief are all pointing in the same direction. The town is being run as if more people are here more of the time, and behaving accordingly.
If you are watching the neighborhood closely
The pattern worth tracking for the rest of the summer is which of the new operators sticks. Belle & Grey has the harder problem: taking a hotel restaurant that most locals had stopped thinking about and turning it into a neighborhood room. Parcelle has the easier problem and the smaller footprint. Eloise has already answered its own question. By Labor Day, three months of dinner service will have separated the concepts that read the room from the ones that did not.
If you are considering a move within Wayzata, an entry from the first-ring suburbs, or a sale in a market where the walkable-lakefront thesis is finally showing up in buyer behavior, Isaac Kuehn works this bay and the downtown Minneapolis condo market with equal attention to detail. Get your free Minneapolis Condo & Loft Guide, or reach out for a conversation about what the new downtown Wayzata means for your property.
