Owamni left Water Works Pavilion this year and moved into a much bigger room on the main floor of the Guthrie Theater, taking a new name with it: Indígena by Owamni. The Mill City Farmers Market did not move an inch. The Stone Arch Bridge, closed for repairs since April 2024, has now stayed open through a full season for the first time since the work started. None of that changed the physical size of the two blocks between the Guthrie, the Mill City Museum and the river. What changed is how much of that space you can actually use on a random Tuesday, not just a planned-months-ahead Saturday.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Downtown East residents have spent the last two years treating this corner as a place you visit on purpose, when the bridge is open, when you scored a reservation, when the market happens to be running. This year, for the first time in a while, those conditions stopped being conditional.
From 65 Seats to More Than 300
Owamni opened at Water Works Pavilion in 2021 and won the James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant the following year, all inside a 6,000-square-foot space that seated 65 people. A restaurant that small, with that much acclaim, runs on scarcity. Whatever table culture built up around it during its five years at Water Works, it built up around a room that could only ever hold 65 people at a time.
That math changed on June 23 of this year, when the restaurant reopened as Indígena by Owamni on the Guthrie's main floor at 806 South 2nd Street. The new space seats 204 people indoors with roughly 100 more on the patio, more than four times the capacity of the old location. The team is growing from about 100 employees to as many as 150 to run it. Chef Sean Sherman's nonprofit, North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems, had already been investing about $750,000 a year in Indigenous food producers out of the smaller kitchen. With the bigger floor and expanded menu, they expect that number to double, maybe triple.
65 seats at Water Works. 204 indoors and about 100 more on the patio at the Guthrie.
The menu grew with the room. Duck tinga tacos, peppercorn-crusted bison ribeye, and scallops over papaya jam and sweet spoonbread now share the card with an oyster bar and a chef's table, alongside a pre-theater menu built for people eating before a Guthrie show and a bar menu for people staying after one. The restaurant is open Tuesday through Sunday for both lunch and dinner, which is its own kind of shift. A special-occasion destination that seated 65 people is now a lunch option on a Wednesday.
Owamni's old home inside Water Works Pavilion, the mill-ruins building the Park Board opened along the river in 2021, is between chapters. Nothing has been announced for what comes next in that space, so for now it sits as the corner's one open question.
The Market Kept Its Spot
While the restaurant scene reshuffled, the Mill City Farmers Market did the one thing markets are supposed to do: show up in the same place, on the same schedule, every week. It runs Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., May through September, shifting to a 9 a.m. start in October, set up on 2nd Street S and Chicago Avenue right next to the Guthrie. More than 100 vendors rotate through on a given Saturday, and the market's own visitor guidance is worth knowing before you go: street parking on 2nd Street runs $1.50 an hour if you'd rather not deal with the ramp, and market organizers note the Saturday crowd can run up to 10,000 people, so plan your walk in accordingly.
The market has run this same footprint since 2006, when chef Brenda Langton founded it in partnership with the Mill City Museum. In a neighborhood where a restaurant just moved buildings and a bridge just came back from a two-year closure, the market is the one fixed point everything else gets measured against.
If you're building a Saturday around this corner right now, the pieces stack up in an order that didn't exist a year ago:
- Walk the market between 8 and 10 a.m. before the crowds and the heat pick up
- Cross the fully reopened Stone Arch Bridge into St. Anthony Main for a loop back
- Grab a table at Indígena for lunch instead of hoping for a dinner cancellation
- End at Gold Medal Park's 32-foot mound for river views before heading home
None of those four steps required a reservation booked weeks out or a bridge detour. That's the part that's actually new.
The Bridge Stopped Being an Asterisk
The Stone Arch Bridge has connected downtown Minneapolis to the Northeast side since 1883, first as a railroad crossing, then as a pedestrian and bike bridge since the mid-1990s. It closed in April 2024 for a repair project originally estimated at $22 to $26 million and expected to run until spring 2026. For most of that closure, walkers could only get to the bridge's midpoint before turning back.
The project finished ahead of schedule and over its early estimate, landing at $38.5 million total, with about $33.3 million of that covered by federal funds. Minneapolis marked the full reopening with a ribbon-cutting and a community walk across the span, and MnDOT reported zero injuries and no lost schedule time across the entire repair. That reopening happened well ahead of the spring 2026 target, which means this year is the first time since the closure began that Downtown East residents have had the whole bridge, the whole season, without a construction caveat attached.
If you've been avoiding that river loop because you remember the detour signs, the detour signs are gone.
The Rest of the Loop Filled In Around It
The two anchor green spaces on this corner didn't change size either, but they're doing more work this year simply because there's more reason to be out walking between them. Gold Medal Park sits right next to the Guthrie at 7.4 acres, built around a 32-foot mound that gives you a sightline to the river, the bridge and the Mill District all at once. The Commons, the 4.2-acre green space by U.S. Bank Stadium, still runs its weekday food truck lunch scene on the east block until around 2 p.m. and still hosts free programming like this month's Music in the Parks session through the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board.
The restaurant row filling in the rest of the loop hasn't disappeared either. Boludo's second location, a few blocks from the stadium, is still serving Facundo De Fraia's empanadas and pizza. Day Block Brewing Company is still running its full bar and live music nights. Milly's Wine Bar, Chloe by Vincent and Farmer's Kitchen + Bar round out the options if Indígena's booked or you just want something else. None of that is new information on its own. What's new is that all of it now sits downstream of a bridge that's actually open and a restaurant that can actually seat you.
The thing about a neighborhood that gets more usable without getting any bigger is that it's easy to miss if you're not the one living in it. The tourists who show up for a single Guthrie matinee or a farmers market Saturday won't notice that the loop used to have three separate points of friction and now has none. The people who walk this corner every week will.
If you're already living around the Mill District and wondering what a summer like this one does to demand in your building or on your block, that's a conversation worth having before the next listing goes up, not after. Massad Real Estate tracks these two blocks closely because so many of our clients already call them home. Request a Free Home Valuation and we'll walk you through what's actually moving in Downtown East right now, not just what the portals say.
