Lake country dining, suburban edition: Where to eat and drink near Lake Waconia

With a résumé that took him from managing restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area, Lake Minnetonka and now Lake Waconia, it would seem that Ryan Sathre had a unique requirement in his job-hunting criteria.

“People joke with me going, ‘Do you only work at restaurants that are on lakes? What’s your deal?’ I feel like I need to be around a body of water of some sort,” said Sathre, who manages Lola’s Lakehouse, the only restaurant where you can dine directly on the second-largest lake in the Twin Cities metro.

Who could blame him?

Lake Waconia is a sparkling recreational hub that sometimes gets overshadowed by the other big lake to its north, sprawling Minnetonka. But its charms are well known to the people who make this far-flung corner of the west metro area, where Carver and Hennepin counties meet, their home — and to those looking to make it their home. More day-trippers and real estate hunters are drawn to the area, from Victoria to Minnetrista to Waconia, as development booms.

“When my wife grew up in Waconia, it was all farm fields,” said Dan Madsen, who, with his wife, Amy, owns Garage Bar & Bowl, a six-lane bowling alley in Waconia’s downtown core with an inventive menu of scratch-made pizzas. “Now when you drive through, those fields are massive housing developments. It’s incredible.”

The roads that lead to the lake, Hwys. 5 and 7, are sprinkled with small towns with big appetites.

In nearby Victoria, Marc Huebner began noticing more customers from suburbs like Edina and Eden Prairie making their way to his upscale Belgian and German restaurant, the Noble Lion, during the thick of the pandemic and unrest. “What happened was, nobody wanted to go into the cities to eat,” Huebner said. “People started looking to the periphery, and found me.”

Victoria is currently developing a 13.5-acre extension of its downtown to the west along Steiger Lake, with a 145-unit residential building in the works. Meanwhile in Waconia, a town of 13,000 with a largely preserved main street, the population is expected to reach 24,000 by 2040.

But even as the population creeps westward, the food scene is still somewhat of a secret that hasn’t yet leaked to too many city dwellers. You know the joke that Minneapolitans won’t cross the Mississippi to go to St. Paul for dinner? Try convincing them of a 25- or 30-minute drive.

“People think we’re on the border of South Dakota,” Huebner joked.

Molly Krinhop is more than willing to make the commute from south Minneapolis to St. Bonifacius and wishes more Twin Citians would do the same. She bought the long-running St. Boni Bistro last fall, and plans to rebrand it as Molly’s later this year. A wine seller and onetime La Belle Vie and Lucia’s chef, she has been slowly making the place her own, and that includes bringing in food purveyors and guest chefs based in the cities.

Northeast Minneapolis resident Nathan Mickelsen is also under the spell of the west metro and its burgeoning culinary scene. The former Parasole chef and a founder of the Travail-run ice cream project Dream Creamery had never been to Waconia before interviewing for a job at Lola’s Lakehouse. He recently became its executive chef, and he’s rewritten the menu to amplify the lakeside location.

He’s already house shopping.

“It’s peaceful, it’s quiet, it’s just a really nice place to be,” Mickelsen said. “I love it so much that I’m going to move out here.”

Whether day-tripping to Lake Waconia, the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, Carver Park Preserve, Lake Minnewashta Regional Park, Big Stone Mini Golf, or simply allowing the food to be the destination, here are some of the best places to eat in the fast-growing west metro towns of Waconia, Victoria, Minnetrista and St. Bonifacius.

There’s a lot packed into just a couple of blocks in Victoria’s city center. The compact downtown abutting Steiger Lake and the Carver Park Preserve, just down the road from the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, with the Lake Minnetonka Regional Trail passing through, has charm for days. And there’s plenty of food and drink, too, whether you’re in the mood for something classic (live music in the backyard at Floyd’s Bar, 1758 Arboretum Blvd.) or modern (wood-fired pizzas in the plush and stylish Winchester & Rye, 7929 Victoria Drive, winchesterandrye.com).

The offerings will take you from day to night, too. Start your morning with a meticulously spiraled caramel roll from coffee shop and bakery Ruby’s Roost (7924 Victoria Drive, rubysroostbakeryandcoffee.com). While away an afternoon over beermosas and board games at Enki Brewing’s taproom (1495 Steiger Lake Lane, enkibrewing.com). Or make a night of it with a tipsy game of hammerschlagen at the Burrow (7999 Victoria Drive, theburrowmn.com).

Marc Huebner has seen Victoria’s food scene get better and better over the past seven years. He might have something to do with that. Huebner’s family moved to Belgium when he was young, and with a German mother who loved cooking, he absorbed a predilection for things like schnitzel and frites. After living in Europe, New York, San Francisco and Chicago, he always loved “the little neighborhood restaurants where, you know, you’re not striving for Michelin stars,” he said. “It’s just the place where the neighborhood hangs out and they serve good food.” And that’s exactly what he built in the Noble Lion (7940 Victoria Drive, thenoblelion.com), which celebrates some of those western and central European flavors he grew up savoring. (He added a cocktail bar, the Lion’s Den, across the alleyway in 2020.)

Brandon and Ashley Wallis owned a restaurant in downtown Victoria for 16 years, called School of the Wise. During COVID’s first year, they had a fire which, combined with constant delays for the reopening of nonessential businesses, had them taking “a hard look at our future,” Brandon Wallis said. They pivoted to something essential, at least by those early pandemic standards, and created a butcher shop. The Butchers Deli (1550 Arboretum Blvd., thebutchersdeli.com) is a combination liquor store, grocery store and meat counter, plus a few tables to dine in for sandwiches and burgers. Do get the burger, with aggressively seared edges that form an overflowing skirt of crispy meat that encircles the outside of the bun. A side of seasoned fries is a very good idea.

Before we get to the food, let’s talk drinks. In the area surrounding Lake Waconia, there’s a generous number of wineries, breweries and distilleries — enough to make a designated driver essential. The gem of them all has to be the Winery at Sovereign Estate (9950 N. Shore Road, sovereignestatewine.com), a vast property of trim fields and vines sloping down toward the lake. Live music, a group of friends and a good bottle or two could easily consume an entire weekend day.

Schram Vineyards (8785 Airport Road, schramvineyards.com) should be next on any wine tour. On a rural road next to a small airport, there’s a lively patio scene for music, bocce ball, wine and beer tastings and light food for pairing. J. Carver Distillery (1320 Mill Lane, jcarverdistillery.com), which supplies bars and liquor stores with its hyperlocal grain-to-glass spirits, has an on-site cocktail bar at its headquarters (which is also open for tours). And Waconia Brewing Co. (255 W. Main St., waconiabrewing.com) serves its award-winning brews from the brick-building-lined Main Street.

Waconia has just about everything one could want in a well-preserved downtown district: a bakery, multiple ice cream shops, a brewpub, a bar for burgers and karaoke, a movie theater and a bowling alley that puts food first.

Dan Madsen and his family operate Garage Bar & Bowl (16 W. 1st St., garagebowl.com), after saving the century-old former auto shop with an extensive renovation in 2018. Madsen takes the menu seriously, smoking and grilling wings, cold-proofing pizza dough for unusual pies (spaghetti and meatballs, anyone?), and winning a world record for the biggest DIY bloody mary bar with 219 garnishes. Madsen is all about defying expectations for a bowling alley (he calls his operation “boutique”). “Some people come in and they expect a Heggie’s pizza and an air fryer,” he said. “People may not understand the lengths we go to to try to provide the best food that we can.”

Down the street, a former VFW may no longer host meat raffles, but it does have a meat raffle pizza. A group that includes seasoned restaurateurs and a former teacher opened Bode Gray’s and the Brass Hat (125 W. 1st St., bodegrays.com) a little more than a year ago after renovating the veterans’ club down to the studs. The main level is Bode Gray’s, a date-night-worthy Italian restaurant. Downstairs is the speakeasy-ish, nautical-themed cocktail bar the Brass Hat (there’s a separate entrance at the back of the building). You can get any of Bode Gray’s appetizers and wood-fired pizzas at the Brass Hat, including one that pays homage to the restaurant’s bones, a pie with three kinds of meat. The restaurant even donates $1 from every sale to the local VFW, so just like the real deal, your meat consumption is for a good cause.

Further afield, in a Waconia strip mall, the new restaurant Sizzle Street (813 Marketplace Drive, sizzlestreet.co) is serving up classic Punjabi dishes, and letting loose with a few fun fusions, too. Owned by the longtime restaurateurs and brothers behind India Palace, Sizzle Street put an Italian spin on Indian flavors with a chicken tikka pizza and a creamy masala Alfredo.

But if you’ve come all this way, you probably won’t want to miss the lake — and Lola’s Lakehouse (318 E. Lake St., lolaslakehouse.com) has lots of lake to offer. With a dining deck directly on the water, the 16-year-old restaurant is undergoing changes, some subtle and some overt, to ensure its reputation as a fine-dining lakeside restaurant, something the Twin Cities area unfortunately lacks. “If you want to have something a bit more upscale where you’re not having raging frat boys all around you, this is the place for you,” said Nathan Mickelsen, a chef who has worked in high-end kitchens such as Manny’s Steakhouse and Chino Latino, and who came on board as executive chef at Lola’s earlier this year. Mickelsen has edited the menu to focus more heavily on seafood, and he’s presiding over wine dinners and special events that are new for the restaurant. “Literally every week after the new menu hit, we’ve been busier and busier and busier, and we are not slowing down,” Mickelsen said. “It’s just a beautiful, beautiful property, on a beautiful lake in a beautiful city.”

Minnetrista mostly straddles the western edges of Lake Minnetonka, but the part you should know about is at the southern border along Hwy. 7. There, for a short time, Minnetrista swallows up the landlocked blip of St. Bonifacius, and the two cities make an unlikely corridor for a foodie’s road trip.

“Minnesota barbecue.” That’s the style of meat-smoking, wood-firing ingenuity that Joseph Cox is putting on the map. He and his wife, Jennifer, longtime barbecue-cooking nomads who spent years catering for oil field workers in Texas and Oklahoma, came back to Minnesota to establish their catering business out of a midcentury gem of a building on the highway. With wildly popular pop-ups keeping them there around the clock tending to an expansive list of fall-off-the-bone meats, they made it official last year, taking over the gas station next door and building their dream of a restaurant, Buddy Boy Fine Barbeque. There’s live music under the gas station canopy; a huge patio with quick-serve meats from the smoker; and a full-service menu in the unexpectedly elegant dining room (with plenty of non-meat-heavy dishes); a Bridgeman’s ice cream scoop shop; and billowing smoke that pours out onto Hwy. 7, a natural signal to do yourself a favor and pull over. “It’s what we’ve always dreamed of for the last 20 years,” Cox said.

Buddy Boy has you covered for lunch and dinner four days a week. For breakfast, they’ve turned that 70-year-old stunner of a building next door into Hash House just this past May. Breakfast burritos, sandwiches and skillet hashes utilize Buddy Boy’s long list of meats, and the coffee cups are never empty.

These are just the first two iterations of a long-range plan to turn the rest of their 14-acre plot into a “culinary park” that Cox hopes will feature Spanish, Mexican, Italian and Asian cuisines all in one spot. The latter is especially close to Cox; his mother is Taiwanese, his dad from Oklahoma, and he is already offering “east meets west flavors hidden in our foods.” (Buddy Boy and Hash House are located at 8174 Hwy. 7, Minnetrista, buddyboybarbeque.com, hashhousemn.com.)

Tiny St. Boni is “like a hidden gem, because if you blink, you’ll miss it,” said Molly Krinhop, owner of St. Boni Bistro (8516 Kennedy Memorial Drive, St. Bonifacius, stbonibistro.com). But she’s up for the challenge of bringing more notice to the area with fresh scratch cooking, collaborations with chefs from the cities, and even good-old roadside signage. “There’s a lot of potential here.” Krinhop, who most recently traversed Minnesota to sell wine to restaurants, is a kitchen alum of major Minneapolis restaurants, and she’s quietly transforming this ultra-charming restaurant with a cocktail program, deep wine list, ice cream from Minnesota Dairy Lab, pickles from the Fermentation Station and more locally made products. Look for the rebrand to be complete this fall, when she renames it Molly’s, or head out now for a sneak peek of what’s to come: lunch and dinner with beautiful salmon-topped salads, juicy burgers, and soups Krinhop learned to make while working for Lucia Watson.

And neighboring the new Juniper Apartments, Mackenthun’s (4751 Kings Point Road, Minnetrista, mackenthuns.com) — a century-old name in groceries — just opened a glitzy new market to serve the growing population in this corner of the city.