50th and France Restaurants in Fall 2026: What Changed

Walk down 50th Street past France Avenue this week and you will pass at least three storefronts with paper still taped to the windows. That is not unusual for a commercial strip in any given year. What is unusual is the math behind it. Edina Grill served its last banana waffle after 26 years. Salut Bar Americain poured its last glass of Bordeaux after 20. D'Amico & Sons closed its pasta case after roughly three decades. All three shut down within about six months of each other, between September 2025 and March 2026, and not one of them closed because customers stopped showing up.

That distinction matters if you live within walking distance of this corner. A neighborhood losing 76 combined years of restaurant history in half a year sounds like decline. It is actually something closer to a scheduled handoff, and the businesses filling in behind it are almost entirely names with existing roots in the Twin Cities, not national chains discovering Edina for the first time.

Three Closures, Zero Business Failures

Here is what actually happened at each address, based on statements from the owners themselves and Twin Cities restaurant coverage:

• Edina Grill (5028 France Ave S), open since 1999, closed Sept. 18, 2025. Owner Stephanie Shimp said the closure came down to timing: the neighboring jeweler, R.F. Moeller, wanted to expand, and the Grill's lease happened to be ending at the same moment. The Star Tribune reported that Blue Plate Restaurant Co., which also owns Highland Grill and Longfellow Grill, is still evaluating other Edina locations.
• Salut Bar Americain (5034 France Ave S), open since 2005, closed Dec. 31, 2025. Parasole Restaurant Holdings, which operates the restaurant, had told the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal months earlier that it was undecided on renewing the lease. By November, Salut announced the closing date directly, and the landlord was already marketing the space as available that January.
• D'Amico & Sons (3948 W. 50th St.), open roughly 30 years, closed March 28, 2026. This one wasn't really about the Edina location at all. The company shuttered its final two Minnesota storefronts (Edina and Golden Valley) as part of a broader shift toward its Naples, Florida restaurants and its Twin Cities catering arm.

None of these were quiet failures. Two of the three owners went out of their way to say so publicly. The lease cycle at 50th & France just happened to line up three multi-decade tenants in the same short stretch.

Where the Space Actually Went

The more interesting detail is what moves into a vacated lease at 50th & France, and it isn't uniform. One of the three spaces isn't becoming a restaurant at all.

The jeweler absorbing Edina Grill's footprint is the detail most stories about "restaurant turnover" leave out. One of three long-running restaurant spaces at this corner isn't returning as a restaurant at all.

The other two are staying in the neighborhood's own family, more or less. General Sports Bar comes from Marty Collins and Brett Johnson, both Edina natives who also run NOLO's Kitchen, The Rooftop Bar and The Basement Bar in the North Loop. The city's Housing and Redevelopment Authority approved a $24,000 SPARC grant for the buildout in August, one of the last such grants before the program ends this year, according to reporting from the Sun Current.

Smith Coffee & Cafe, meanwhile, is a second location for a small Eden Prairie shop, and its owner Ann Schuster has said the D'Amico & Sons building sits on the same block where she remembers stepping into Clancy's Drug and Toyland as a kid. That's not a corporate real estate play. It's someone buying back into a corner she already had a childhood attached to. The buildout has run about $400,000 so far, with an October opening target and roughly 90 seats planned inside, plus patio. Across the street, Takumi Sushi is set to take over the recently closed Raku space, another straightforward swap rather than a vacancy.

The Restaurant Group Building Its Own Block

While three legacy tenants were winding down, one operator was quietly assembling a cluster of new spots just a block or two over. Chef Daniel del Prado's DDP Restaurant Group now has four concepts either open or announced in the immediate 50th & France area:

• Thérèse, an upscale French brasserie in the former Lynhall space inside the Nolan Mains development, opened in late November 2025.
• Dexter's, an upscale sports bar, opened in August 2025.
• The Side Door at Dexter's, a small food hall in the former SotaRol space, where Lucia's sourdough pizza opened Aug. 6, 2026, with Daq Daq (Korean fried chicken) and Rose Sushi still to come later this year.
• Americana, a joint project with restaurateur Ryan Burnet replacing the former Cocina del Barrio space, with a glass-enclosed rooftop patio designed by Christian Dean Architecture, targeted for late 2026.

That's not incremental growth. That's one group deciding this corner is worth building a small campus around, while three of the neighborhood's original anchors were finishing out their leases a few storefronts away.

A jeweler absorbing a 26-year-old diner's lease is a stranger sentence than three restaurants closing in six months. It says more about who's actually running out of space at 50th & France than it does about who's failing there.

The Park Doesn't Know Any of This Happened

Two blocks from all of this lease activity, Centennial Lakes Park is running on a completely separate calendar. The 22nd Annual Edina Fall Into the Arts Festival returns Sept. 12 and 13, 2026, with roughly 250 artists set up around the park's ponds and promenades. It's a free, two-day event that benefits the Edina First Responders Fund, and it's been happening at this same location every fall regardless of what's opening or closing along France Avenue.

The park itself doesn't slow down between festivals either. There's an 18-hole Scottish Links putting course threading past sand traps and boulders, a lawn bowling green, four-person paddleboats on the connected ponds, and a summer concert series at the Maetzold Amphitheater that runs well into late August. None of it depends on which restaurant currently holds the lease at 5034 France Ave.

What's Actually Open This Week

If you're deciding where to eat or what to do around 50th & France right now, here's where things stand as of the end of August 2026. Thérèse, Dexter's, and Lucia's at The Side Door are all open today. Daq Daq, Rose Sushi, Smith Coffee & Cafe, and General Sports Bar are all aiming for openings this fall, with October the most commonly cited target. Americana is still several months out. And the Fall Into the Arts Festival lands right in the middle of that window, Sept. 12 and 13, giving the corner a genuine reason to be busy on both fronts at once this September.

None of this is a story about a neighborhood losing its identity. It's a story about a lease cycle that happened to bunch three long tenures together, and a corner that's refilling itself faster than it emptied.

If you're the kind of person who notices these things because you live here, you already know the texture of this neighborhood changes in small increments most years. This was just a year where several increments landed at once. Sara Moran spends enough time in Edina's neighborhoods to notice the pattern behind the paper on the windows, and if a move in or around 50th & France is ever part of your own next chapter, let's talk about your next move.