2025
opened 1980s
Kowloon Restaurant
A Cantonese mainstay on Washington Avenue near the U of M, gone after a long run. Yelp marked it closed in 2026.
Restaurants close. So do bars, theaters, galleries, music venues, and bookstores. Some were open for decades and some for two years. All of them mattered to somebody. This is the running list, kept honestly, with no editorializing about why or what should have been.
A Cantonese mainstay on Washington Avenue near the U of M, gone after a long run. Yelp marked it closed in 2026.
Sixty-four years on Lyndale Avenue South. The family menu carries forward at D. Fong's in Savage, where David Jr. has cooked since 1996.
119 years on Cedar Avenue. Esquire named it one of the best bars in America in 2014. The kind of room that defined what a Twin Cities dive bar could be.
Trannys, the house cover band, played here for years. The kind of room that smelled the same in 2024 as it did in 1974.
The St. Paul Ethiopian standby on Snelling. Twenty-nine years of injera and the metro's best mesir wat.
The cafe upstairs from Marvel Bar. Nordic-leaning brunch, good light, the kind of room that made the North Loop feel like the right neighborhood. Never reopened post-pandemic.
Lake Street vinyl institution. Generations of Minneapolis kids learned about music in those crates.
Jorge Guzmán's pan-Latin tasting menu in a small Nicollet Avenue room. Four years of one of the more inventive kitchens in town.
Tyge Nelson and Stephan Hesse's modern Mexican spot. Six good years on West Seventh.
Sixteen years of breakfast biscuits and one of the best chocolate chip cookies in the metro. Owners declined to renew the lease and headed for Grand Marais.
The Seward distillery shut its public cocktail room. Production may continue but the small workshop-feel taproom is gone.
Michelle Gayer's pastry program. The signature passion-fruit meringues, the wedding cakes with a national following. Both Mpls and St. Paul locations gone.
The Eat Street location closed; the original North Loop room remains open. The coal-oven Italian sausage pizza lives on, just on Washington Ave.
Twenty years of fishbowl mai tais, Hawaiian shirts, and the largest river patio in the metro. Owner Leslie Bock retired the tiki torches at 1900 Marshall after a long run.
Joe and Holly Hatch-Surisook's Bangkok-style noodle and rice room on Central Avenue. Fourteen years of boat noodle and a kitchen that taught a generation of Twin Cities cooks what regional Thai actually meant.
Anna Prasomphol Fieser ran her Franklin Avenue restaurant for 36 years. One of the longest-running Thai restaurants in the metro, the Seward fixture that took the standards seriously.
Fifteen years on Hennepin in Uptown. The all-day kitchen, the long brunch line, the patio that caught the morning sun. Closed citing eighteen months of Hennepin Avenue construction.
J.D. Fratzke's small French-leaning bistro on Cleveland Avenue. Forty seats, the kind of room that flattered everybody in it.
The Central Avenue cocktail room that defined Northeast distillery culture for nine years. The company moved its operation to a new River Falls campus in Wisconsin.
The basement bar under the Hotel Ivy. Horseshoe bar, a private whiskey room, and one of the more atmospheric downtown rooms while it lasted. The Ivy's new owners replaced it with new concepts.
Closed at the start of the pandemic alongside The Bachelor Farmer upstairs and never reopened. Pip Hanson's downstairs bar made the modern Twin Cities cocktail scene possible. Half the bartenders working today learned the craft there.
A decade of one of the best dining rooms in St. Paul. The Lowertown corner is going to feel different at dinner.
The Schmidt Brewery campus had become an anchor. The food hall did not survive the post-pandemic shakeout.
Ann Kim's Northeast pizza-and-then-some flagship. The back-bar was one of the best rooms in the metro.
A small contemporary space that punched above its weight for thirteen years.
The longest continuously running professional theater in the United States. Eighty-four years.
Isaac Becker and Nancy St. Pierre's steakhouse-and-pizza place. The downstairs pizza counter alone was worth the trip.
A cocktail bar that helped define what the new Eat Street wave looked like. Luna & The Bear took over the space.
Twenty-six years of a vegetarian-leaning neighborhood cafe in Seward. The patio was a Saturday morning institution.
The alt-weekly that defined what writing about this metro could sound like. Forty-one years. The void it left is still being filled.