When Starling opened earlier this year in Edina, the Minneapolis restaurant group Jester Concepts was dipping a toe into suburban dining. Now, it’s going all in.
The group behind Borough, Parlour, Butcher & the Boar, Char Bar and P.S. Steak, all in Minneapolis, has announced three new restaurants coming this year in Excelsior.
First to open is Parlour Bar. The craft cocktail bar with a simple menu changed the way Minneapolis would crave burgers, smashed thin with a crispy crust, when it opened in 2012 beneath Borough. A second Parlour Bar opened in 2018 in St. Paul, and now the popular burgers can also be found at two food trucks, pop-ups and concession stands in Minneapolis stadiums, but the Excelsior outpost will be the brand’s third brick-and-mortar location.
Parlour will open this fall in the basement level at 200 Water St., just a block from Lake Minnetonka’s Excelsior Bay. The address was previously home to Bull & Wren and Jake O’Connors.
Later this year, Jester Concepts will open two more concepts on the street level. The company shared no further information about what they will be, other than “new.”
“We like to create concepts,” said Brent Frederick, Jester Concepts’ owner. “It’s fun for us to flex that creative muscle to new brands, new design, new menus.”
Moving into suburbs became the company’s strategy when the pandemic took a bite out of business in downtown Minneapolis. “We really noticed that we had our eggs all in the downtown basket, and that was scary for us,” Frederick said.
Starling, which opened in May, was the group’s first suburban restaurant, and it’s been reaching Edina residents who work from home, Frederick said. Inspired by the caliber of restaurants in nearby Wayzata, he chose Excelsior to continue the company’s westward expansion.
