"The restaurant world is churning around here," Excelsior Mayor Gary Ringate said this past summer, describing a stretch of Water Street that had spent years being the quietest block downtown. He wasn't wrong, and he wasn't finished. "There's still even a desire for more."
That quote was about restaurants. But it doubles as the best possible preview for Apple Days 2026, which runs September 18 through 20 in downtown Excelsior. If you've lived here through a few of these festivals, you already have a route memorized: park somewhere near the Commons, walk the vendor booths, grab whatever food is open, catch the street dance if you're staying late. That route was built for a downtown where half of Water Street's storefronts sat empty. This year, for the first time in the festival's 91-year run, it doesn't sit empty anymore, and that changes more about your weekend than the schedule does.
The Corner That Used to Go Dark
For most of the years since the pandemic, the busiest intersection in downtown Excelsior, where Water Street meets 2nd, was dark. The restaurants that had anchored it closed and stayed vacant long enough that Jester Concepts co-owner Mike DeCamp described walking past it daily as depressing. That corner is now home to three concepts under one roof: Mirabelle, a coastal-themed supper club; Shiki, a ramen bar; and a Parlour outpost of the Minneapolis cocktail-and-burger spot. Across the street, in the building that once housed the Bacon Drug pharmacy and later Red Sauce Rebellion, chef David Fhima opened Vagabondo, a Sicilian restaurant with a daytime cafe and a sidewalk patio that catches a sliver of lake view.
Here's the timeline that actually matters for anyone planning this weekend:
| Period | Status of the Water & 2nd corner |
|---|---|
| Pre-pandemic | Occupied, part of Excelsior's original dining strip |
| 2020 to 2024 | Vacant storefronts, described locally as the town's dead center |
| Summer 2025 | Reopens all at once: Parlour (fall 2024), Shiki (early summer), Mirabelle (July 28), Vagabondo (late July) |
| Apple Days 2025 | First festival weekend with the corner full again, arriving within weeks of the last opening |
| Apple Days 2026 | First festival weekend after a full winter, spring, and summer of operation |
That last row is the one worth sitting with. Last year's Apple Days landed on a restaurant row that was barely broken in. This year's lands on one that has already answered the question everyone was asking when it opened.
Four Kitchens, One Winter, One Verdict
The original reporting on Excelsior's restaurant boom carried a real note of doubt. Water Street's summer crowds are easy. The open question was whether four new kitchens, all competing for the same foot traffic, could hold on once the patio weather ended and the lake stopped pulling day-trippers into town. As one restaurant designer put it at the time, none of these places wants to be "the sole place on an island somewhere." They needed each other, and they needed the cold months to prove it.
They made it. As of July 2026, OpenTable lists eight restaurants operating in Excelsior, meaning the corner that was dark for years is not just reopened, it's stable enough to be counted as a normal part of the town's dining map rather than a summer experiment. Fhima framed his own ambitions for Vagabondo the same way when he opened it: not chasing a moment, but building something meant to last. That's no longer aspirational. It's a fact you can now confirm by walking down Water Street on a Tuesday in September and finding the lights on.
For residents, that survival changes the math on this particular weekend. Last year, if you strolled down for Apple Days and Vagabondo had a wait, you had three other new spots to try instead, all of them equally new and equally likely to be figuring out their weekend flow. This year, all four have a full season of dinner service behind them, regular customers, and a much better sense of how to handle a festival crowd stacked on top of their usual one. The wait might be just as long. It'll be a different kind of long.
What Actually Changes This Weekend If You Live Here
The festival itself hasn't changed. Apple Days has run since 1935 and keeps its shape: craft booths, a kids' corner, food vendors, an Apple Pie contest that draws serious home bakers, live music from local and regional acts, a beer and wine garden, and the street dance that closes things out. The Minnesota Streetcar Museum runs its non-stop trolley shuttle to the carbarn that weekend too, giving you a look at the 1925 carousel rescued from the old Excelsior Amusement Park, still one of the only vintage carousels running in the state. An 11 a.m. historic walking tour covers the town's steamboat-landing history, and Paradise Charter Cruises typically offers complimentary rides out on the lake during the festival.
What's different is the corridor those activities sit inside. Water Street is no longer just festival ground with a couple of open restaurants at the edges. It's festival ground layered directly on top of a restaurant row that's drawing its own separate crowd, on the same sidewalks, during the same three days.
A few practical adjustments follow from that:
- If you're planning a sit-down dinner at Mirabelle, Shiki, Vagabondo, or Parlour that weekend, treat it like a normal Friday or Saturday night rush and add festival traffic on top. A year ago you might have walked in. This year, call ahead.
- Vagabondo's daytime cafe side, coffee and pastries on the sidewalk patio, is a reasonable way to catch a break from the festival crowd without leaving the corridor entirely.
- If your usual Apple Days parking spot is near the Commons, expect that the restaurant crowd is now pulling from the same limited downtown parking, not just the festival crowd. Arrive earlier than your old routine assumes.
- Maynard's Restaurant, open on Excelsior Boulevard since 1947 and known for its lake-facing dining room and walleye, remains the steady option if the new spots are running long waits. It's been handling festival weekends since before any of the new restaurants existed.
The Season Closes Right Behind It
One more piece of context that locals will feel even if they don't clock it directly: Excelsior Concerts in the Commons, the Wednesday-night series run by the Excelsior Morning Rotary Club through the summer, wraps in late August. By the time Apple Days arrives, that particular weekly draw on the Commons is already finished for the year. Apple Days isn't one of several summer crowd events anymore. It's the last big one, which is part of why it tends to feel like the whole town shows up at once.
The next organized pull on the Commons after that is the Spooky Sprint 5K on October 10, a smaller, later-season event that doesn't carry anywhere near the same restaurant-and-festival overlap. If you're weighing whether to brave Apple Days weekend or wait for a quieter stretch downtown, that gap between mid-September and mid-October is close to your only quiet window before the holiday stretch starts.
None of this is a reason to skip the festival. It's a reason to walk into it with an accurate picture of the town you're walking into, because it's not quite the same one you remember from a year or two ago. The corner that used to be the town's blank spot is now the reason your dinner reservation needs a phone call, and that's a genuinely good problem for a downtown to have.
If you're watching what a fuller, more competitive Water Street means for property values and buyer interest in Excelsior, that's a conversation worth having before next season's market moves. Peter Ice can walk you through what's changed in the neighborhood's numbers, not just its restaurant count, whenever you're ready to talk.
