Say "the Boulevard" to a Plymouth resident five years ago and there was no ambiguity. You meant Plymouth Boulevard: the parade route, the stretch that closes for concerts, the road that curves past City Hall toward the Ice Center. Say it in 2026 and you need a follow-up question, because The Boulevard is also a 75-acre redevelopment at I-494 and Bass Lake Road on the former Prudential campus, and since March it has been the reason a lot of people cross town for dinner.
That naming collision is funny. What it points at is not. Plymouth added a meaningful amount of restaurant capacity this year, and almost all of it landed in the same two dayparts: breakfast and lunch. For a city of roughly 80,000 residents that has never been short on weeknight dinner options, the thing that actually changed in 2026 is the morning.
The east side got a room to sit in
Coborn's Market & Table opened on Thursday, March 12, its closest store yet to Minneapolis, and framing it as a grocery opening undersells what happened. Inside are five separate food operations. Minneapolis restaurateur David Fhima built three of them, packaged together as The Global Table: Basta Pasta, Abuela's Mexican Kitchen and Brother's Burgers. The Buttered Tin, Alicia Hinze's scratch bakery and breakfast-lunch counter, opened its third location there after northeast Minneapolis and St. Paul. Penny Horse Parlor scoops Kemps as a retro ice cream counter.
The detail that matters for a resident is the seating. Food-court-style tables indoors, outdoor seating in warm months, a performance stage, and a small playground. That is a room you can linger in on the east side of Plymouth, ordered at a kiosk or a counter, which is not something the neighborhoods off Bass Lake Road previously had within a five-minute drive.
It is also the front end of a much longer build. Summit Orthopedics was the first tenant to open on the site. Roers Cos. and Scannell Properties are partnering on a project that eventually contemplates up to 800 housing units, a business campus and a park, with Belterra at the Boulevard, a 207-unit building, expected to finish in 2027. Anyone who has watched this corner for the last three years should read the food hall as a milestone rather than a finish line.
Highway 55 answered with mornings
The most interesting business decision in Plymouth this year came from the city's oldest restaurant, and it was defensive in the smartest possible way.
Latuff's at 10820 Highway 55 has been open since 1971. Quang Nystrom bought it from the Latuff family in 2024, the same stretch of time in which Pannekoeken Huis served its last Dutch pancake in St. Louis Park after its lease ran out. Nystrom acquired the rights to the Pannekoeken name and recipes, brought in former owner Derek Moberg to run mornings, and rehired staff from the St. Louis Park dining room. He has said plainly that he did not want to open one more American breakfast place next door to the Original Pancake House. Bringing back a name people already had a memory of solved that problem.
Executing it took a roughly 1,000-square-foot kitchen addition with dedicated breakfast equipment, a dining room refreshed in stages so the restaurant never closed, and a payroll of about 40 people running two concepts under one roof. The Star Tribune's account of the tasting sessions is worth reading for the part where the breakfast pizza was an instant yes and the pizza pannekoeken, red sauce folded into the batter, was not.
Here is how the day actually splits, which is the part no one tells you before you show up at 10:45 wanting lasagna:
| What you want | When to go |
|---|---|
| Pannekoeken and breakfast | Tuesday through Sunday, 7:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. |
| Both menus at once | Daily from 11 a.m. |
| Pizzeria and Italian | Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. |
| Sunday | Doors close at 2:30 p.m. |
There are no breakfast reservations. The waitlist runs by phone at 763-545-2914, and the weekend rush behaves like a restaurant with two decades of goodwill attached to it, because it is one.
The third piece of the 2026 map sits on the west side. Hippo Pockets, the pressed-pocket concept from Centro Restaurant Group, opened at 1400 County Road 101 at the end of May with expanded breakfast pocket offerings and longer operating hours. Count the additions together: a bakery-breakfast counter at I-494, a Dutch pancake house on Highway 55, breakfast pockets on 101. Plymouth did not add dinner this year. It added mornings, in three places, on three different sides of the city.
The road math reversed direction
Everyone who drives Highway 55 remembers last summer, when the road closed from Revere Lane to West Medicine Lake Drive and the regional detour pushed traffic onto I-494, I-394 and Highway 169. The reasonable assumption was that 2026 would be worse.
It is the opposite. Highway 55 stays open to traffic through all of 2026. The Station 73 TRIP closures moved off the highway and onto the streets residents use as shortcuts. Since March 30, County Road 73, Old County Road 15 and Zachary Lane have been closed south of Highway 55, with detours running Highway 55 to Highway 169 to I-394 to Zachary Lane, or Sunset Trail to Xenium Lane to County Road 6 to Highway 55. North of the highway, work along South Shore Drive and 10th Avenue closed that intersection on May 11. The south-side closure is expected to last until fall, and the project's phasing runs into late 2026 or early 2027. The city's project page keeps a hotline at 763-251-1010 for specific access questions.
What the $15 million federal RAISE grant is buying is not a wider road. It is a trail underpass beneath Highway 55, in-line bus stops, a realigned County Road 73, roundabouts at South Shore and 10th and at Sunset Trail and Zachary Lane, and 1.2 miles of Eagle Lake Regional Trail. Council Member Joel Spoonheim put the payoff in terms any parent in that quadrant will recognize:
Our kids are going to be able to cross 55 safely on their bikes by using the tunnel.
The practical read for the rest of this construction season: the corridor destinations are reachable again, and the neighborhood streets around them are the ones to check before you leave. Latuff's sits inside that work zone, which is why some of its regulars this year have described showing up specifically to support a business on a torn-up stretch of 55.
Six weeks and one street-name trap
The calendar from here to the end of September is thinner than July was, and denser than most residents assume.
- Friday, Aug. 28: the Hilde Nights season closes with the Fabulous Armadillos and opener The Holy Rocka Rollaz, 6 to 10 p.m. at the Hilde Performance Center, 3500 Plymouth Blvd. Free. Bring chairs, and bring a card or cash for the food trucks.
- Monday, Aug. 31: submissions close for the annual Picture Plymouth photo contest.
- Wednesdays through Sept. 30: seven markets remain in the Plymouth Farmers Market season, 2 to 6 p.m. at Parkers Lake Playfield, 15500 County Road 6. The market accepts EBT tokens and matches SNAP purchases through Market Bucks.
- Wednesday, Sept. 16: the only remaining Market on the Boulevard. This one is on Plymouth Boulevard, the street, not at the redevelopment. Three markets moved downtown this season, on July 15, Aug. 12 and Sept. 16, and this is the last of them.
- Late September: Plymouth on Parade returns to Plymouth Boulevard with the free family block afterward around the Hilde, the Ice Center and Life Time. The date shifts year to year, so confirm it on the city events calendar before you plan around it.
The two-Boulevard problem is not hypothetical. Someone in your group text will suggest meeting "at the Boulevard" on Sept. 16 and half the group will drive to Bass Lake Road. Sort it out in advance.
What this actually tells you about the city
Three restaurant additions in a single year, weighted toward mornings, spread across I-494, Highway 55 and County Road 101, is not a coincidence of timing. It is a read on where daily traffic patterns have moved and where the gaps were. The Boulevard bet on people who work and live on the east side and want to eat where they already stop. Latuff's bet that a name people remembered from St. Louis Park would fill a dining room at 8 a.m. on a Tuesday. The Station 73 work is a bet that a tunnel and two roundabouts will change how people move through the Highway 55 corridor for the next thirty years, and it is being built in the middle of that corridor's ordinary business hours.
Elsewhere in the city, the quieter version of the same pattern keeps showing up. Nedia Hair Loss Salon settled into what its owner, Alisa Halek-Schoenack, calls its permanent home at 15650 36th Ave. N. in June after stops in Crystal, Minnetonka and Plymouth's Aurora Tower. Sunshine Factory has now been at it more than fifty years. Emagine Willow Creek and Luce Line Brewery remain the two names that end most last-minute Friday debates.
For anyone tracking what these shifts mean for property values along the Highway 55 corridor or near the Bass Lake Road redevelopment, the useful conversation is a specific one, not a general one. Mike Steadman and the Steadman Team have spent three decades reading how infrastructure and new commercial anchors reprice the streets around them across Plymouth and the Lake Minnetonka corridor. Request a private consultation and valuation, and we will walk your block, not the market average.
