St. Paul's Slowest Openings Are Finally Landing At Once

Drive Selby Avenue this month and you will find a French bistro with a fifteen-item menu and reservations gone through the end of the month. Drive Payne Avenue and you will find a century-old furniture store wrapped in scaffolding, one summer away from becoming a food hall. Drive down to the West Side and you will find the same two restaurants that have anchored District del Sol since the 1960s and 1970s, still doing exactly what they have always done.

None of this looks connected from the street. But all three are the same story told at different speeds. St. Paul has spent years building toward this particular season, and the reason it feels like so much is opening right now is that so much actually is, just not for the reasons a typical roundup would tell you.

Cathedral Hill got its restaurant back after five years

Restaurant Aubergine opened this spring at 525 Selby Avenue, in the space that used to hold Revival's fried chicken and a black wall with a graffiti-style mural. The husband-and-wife team behind it, Megan and Bjorn Jacobs, did not just decide to open a restaurant. They spent years testing the idea in public first, running pop-ups at Bûcheron, Mucci's and Hyacinth while Bjorn cooked professionally in Portland and Montreal and Meg ran the front of house at Meritage. By the time they signed a lease on Selby, the concept had already been road-tested for years in other people's dining rooms.

The wait shows in the details. The menu holds at fifteen items. Pricing runs from smaller plates in the mid-teens to larger format dishes over one hundred dollars, with an 18 percent hospitality charge shared across the full team rather than tacked on as a tip line. By at least one longtime local food writer's count, it is the first fine dining opening inside the 651 area code since Karyn Tomlinson's Myriel arrived back in July 2021.

A few doors down, the former Handsome Hog space has become a Spanish bakery and deli, filling the same corridor with fresh sourdough, sliced meats and cheeses, and grab-and-go Spanish staples. Selby remains what it has been for over a century, a street that fills its vacancies with chef-driven concepts rather than chains. What changed is the pace. Two long-gestating ideas landed on the same four-block stretch within months of each other.

What is currently open on Selby Avenue in Cathedral Hill:

• Restaurant Aubergine, 525 Selby Avenue, evening service Tuesday through Saturday
• A new Spanish bakery and deli in the former Handsome Hog space, serving sourdough loaves and grab-and-go Spanish staples

Payne Avenue has been under construction since a 2024 groundbreaking

If Cathedral Hill's timeline is measured in a chef's pop-up circuit, Payne Avenue's is measured in public financing rounds. Plaza del Sol, the food hall, commissary kitchen and event center taking shape at 990 Payne Avenue, broke ground in early 2024 after the Latino Economic Development Center bought the building out of foreclosure. The project pulled together roughly 11 million dollars from a state bonding grant, loans from Minnesota's economic development arm and Alerus Financial, and contributions from Propel, the St. Paul and Minnesota Foundation and LISC Twin Cities.

The original target was an opening by the end of 2025. That slipped. By April 2026, LEDC's own construction updates put the building at roughly 65 percent complete with full completion expected that same month, while a separate report described construction as nearly finished but still affected by federal immigration enforcement activity in the area. As of this summer, the project's own site now lists the opening as this summer, with the market hall already booking vendor space for three food stalls and two full-kitchen restaurant spaces, plus an event floor built to hold up to 250 people.

The building itself dates to the early 1900s, and LEDC has said it is preserving the original tin ceiling and wood floors rather than stripping them out. At the 2024 groundbreaking, State Representative Athena Hollins captured why the corridor mattered enough to fund this way, saying "we can get empanadas on one corner and laab on the other."

That mix is already there. Payne Avenue's current lineup includes Brunson's Pub, Tongue in Cheek and Bymore Supermercado, alongside the long-running Morelli's Market. Plaza del Sol is not introducing a food scene to Payne Avenue. It is finishing the largest single investment that corridor has seen in decades, two years after the sledgehammers came out.

District del Sol already knew how this works

While Cathedral Hill tests concepts through pop-ups and Payne Avenue waits on grant cycles, the West Side's District del Sol has been running the long game since before either of those neighborhoods started theirs. El Burrito Mercado, opened by the Silva family in 1979, and Boca Chica, opened by the Frias family in 1964, have been fixtures on Wabasha and Cesar Chavez for a combined total of well over eighty years between them.

This is the part of the story a typical restaurant roundup skips, because nothing there is new this month. But it is the reason the pattern on Selby and Payne makes sense. District del Sol is what patience looks like once it has finished paying off. The area still hosts what is recognized as the largest Cinco de Mayo celebration in Minnesota, one of the ten largest in the country, built entirely on businesses that took decades rather than seasons to become institutions.

Cathedral Hill and Payne Avenue are not catching up to a trend. They are catching up to a model the West Side has quietly run for two generations.

What this means for your next few weekends

If you have been waiting for one big reason to cross St. Paul this month, there is not one. There are three, moving at three different speeds, and knowing which stage each one is in changes how you plan around it.

1. Cathedral Hill is open now. Aubergine is taking reservations, and the Spanish bakery on Selby is already serving. If you want the payoff of a multi-year pop-up circuit, this is the one you can act on this weekend.
2. Payne Avenue is close but not open. Plaza del Sol is booking vendors and events for later this summer, but the market hall itself has not announced a public opening date yet. Worth watching, not yet worth planning around.
3. District del Sol needs no timeline. El Burrito Mercado and Boca Chica are running exactly as they have for decades, which is the whole point of visiting them.

A few more additions are landing on the same clock. Dogwood Coffee, already established in Minneapolis, is opening its fourth St. Paul location by early September. Over on University Avenue, Pho Oanh is finishing a remodel of a former office building ahead of its own opening. Neither is dramatic on its own. Together with Selby and Payne, they point to a city where several separate, unrelated efforts happen to be crossing the finish line in the same handful of months.

That is worth knowing if you live here, because it means this particular stretch of St. Paul's calendar will not repeat on the same schedule next year. Some of what opens this season took two years of construction financing to arrive. Some of it took a chef five years of pop-ups to get right. The next wave, whenever it comes, will move at its own pace too.

If you are watching this stretch of the city because you are also thinking about where you might want to live in it, that is a conversation worth having with someone who tracks these corridors as closely as the openings themselves. Samuel Boatman works St. Paul and the east metro every day, and can walk you through what a street like Selby or Payne actually means for a home's long-term value, not just its next six months of foot traffic. Reach out for a free home valuation whenever you are ready to talk specifics.