Walk through the skyway at noon and you will see chairs filling in at a Tuscan sandwich counter that did not exist a year ago. Walk along the river at eight that same evening and you will find a dining room that did not exist six months ago, its patio catching the last light off the Mississippi. Both are true. Both are downtown. And neither comeback has much to do with the other.
That split is worth understanding if you live here, because it changes how you plan a Tuesday lunch versus a Saturday night, and it explains why downtown can feel simultaneously quiet and full depending on when you show up.
The Nine-to-Five Comeback Nobody Priced For
For years, the story of downtown's skyway was subtraction. Caribou Coffee closed eight locations across the system. Starbucks pulled out of two more. Saks Off 5th and Nordstrom Rack, the kind of anchor tenants that used to justify a skyway detour, both left. The empty storefronts piled up in a network built for 80 city blocks of foot traffic that had thinned considerably.
What is happening now is not a return of those old tenants. It is something closer to a fire sale that turned into a matchmaking service. Real estate consultant Lee Krueger has personally brokered close to a dozen new skyway leases, working as a go-between for landlords and small operators in deals too small for commission-based brokers to bother with. Before the pandemic, a 1,000-square-foot storefront on Nicollet Mall might have leased for around $3,000 a month. Krueger says the same space now often goes for a few hundred dollars, sometimes less, with landlords keeping quick termination rights in case a bigger tenant eventually wants to sign long term.
That structure explains why the skyway's newest tenants are almost all independent. Paper Boy Deli, from restaurateur Kamal Mohamed and pastry chef Yon Hailu, opened in the Baker Center serving Italian sandwiches on schiacciata, the same airy flatbread that made their mortadella sandwich a lunch-line regular. Food on the Fly moved into the Forum 900 building with bulgogi rice bowls and a solid vegan menu. Two Mixed Up landed at Deluxe Plaza with a burger built for a stressful weekday afternoon. Eggflip now runs two separate skyway counters serving Korean-style egg sandwiches on milk bread.
None of these are the kind of tenant that used to anchor a skyway lease. That is the point. The system spent years losing its national chains and is now filling back in with the kind of small, single-location businesses that could never have justified pre-pandemic rent. If you work downtown or live within a skyway-connected building, this is the version of downtown you are actually experiencing most days, one sandwich counter at a time, in spaces that would have sat dark two years ago.
Meanwhile, the River Is Having a Different Year
A few blocks south, on a different clock entirely, downtown's evening and weekend identity is being rebuilt around one building.
The Guthrie Theater turns 20 in its current home on the Mississippi riverfront this year, and it is marking the occasion with a free open house on Sunday, August 30, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Backstage tours, interactive workshops, Guthrie trivia, a musical theater singalong, pop-up story times and food trucks are all planned, and the theater is asking people to RSVP by August 29 for a chance at a season flex pass. It is the kind of event that rewards actually living nearby, since there is no ticket to buy and no show to plan around, just a Sunday afternoon spent inside a building most residents pass but rarely tour.
The bigger change at the Guthrie is downstairs. The restaurant space on its main floor, most recently known as Sea Change, sat empty for a stretch before reopening this year as Indígena by Owamni, the next chapter of chef Sean Sherman's James Beard Award-winning restaurant. The original Owamni operated out of the Water Works pavilion in the Mill District starting in 2021 and won Best New Restaurant honors the following year. The move into the Guthrie roughly doubles its footprint, from a modest original dining room to 200 indoor seats plus another 100 on the patio overlooking the river.
That size difference matters beyond the numbers. The original Owamni was often booked solid, even in the coldest months, which meant plenty of downtown residents knew about it without ever managing to get a table. A restaurant with 300 total seats and a dedicated pre-theater menu for Guthrie patrons is a fundamentally different proposition for a neighborhood, one built for walk-ins as much as reservations.
One Kitchen, Two Very Different Audiences
Indígena by Owamni is open Tuesday through Sunday for lunch and dinner, with a curated theater menu timed for people catching a Guthrie show and a full dinner menu for everyone else. The kitchen still works from an entirely Indigenous North American pantry: wild rice, corn, squash, tepary beans, sumac, cedar, maple, and native proteins, with no dairy, wheat, cane sugar, or pork anywhere on the menu. That constraint has always been the creative engine behind Sherman's cooking rather than a limitation, and the larger kitchen at the Guthrie gives that approach more room to work with heartier dishes built around elk, venison, and bison from Indigenous producers.
For a downtown resident, the practical effect is that a night that used to require choosing between dinner and a show now has a restaurant built to handle both, without forcing a choice between a rushed pre-theater meal and missing curtain.
What This Actually Means for a Downtown Weekend
Put the two stories next to each other and the shape of downtown right now becomes clearer. The skyway is rebuilding itself during business hours out of the wreckage of national retail, one small independent lease at a time, filling space that would otherwise sit dark. The riverfront is rebuilding itself around a single institution's anniversary and a restaurant that just doubled in size, aimed squarely at evenings and weekends. These are not competing narratives. They are two separate downtown economies running on two separate schedules, and most residents already experience them that way without naming it.
A few things worth knowing if you are timing a weekend around either:
- The Guthrie's 20th anniversary open house is August 30, free, and requires an RSVP by August 29 if you want a shot at the season pass drawing.
- Indígena by Owamni takes reservations through OpenTable, and the pre-theater menu is worth asking about even if you are not seeing a show.
- If you have been avoiding Nicollet Mall because of the Blue Line construction, that bus-for-train swap between Mall of America and Target Field wraps up August 19, just two days from now, so trains should be back to normal for the Guthrie's anniversary weekend.
- The new skyway lunch spots, Paper Boy Deli, Food on the Fly, Two Mixed Up, and Eggflip, are all weekday operations. Skyway restaurants close on weekends more often than not, so plan lunch accordingly if you are downtown on a Saturday.
Downtown Minneapolis has spent the last few years being described mostly in terms of what left. The more accurate read this month is that two different parts of the neighborhood are filling back in, on two different clocks, for two different reasons. Understanding which one you are walking through changes what you notice.
If you are watching downtown closely enough to care about details like these, you already understand what makes this stretch of the city work. When the conversation turns from what is happening in the neighborhood to what a specific building or unit is worth, Shane Spencer and The City Dwellings Group are a confidential call away. Let's Connect, Request a Confidential Consultation.
