For a district that has spent two decades known mainly for women's boutiques and long brunches, the tenant list at 50th & France is doing something it rarely does. It is turning over in public, in the same season, with the arrivals and departures visible from the same sidewalk.
If you live in Edina and you have not walked the block since Memorial Day, the mix you remember is not the mix you are walking back into.
The one-sentence version
The district is trading a slice of its casual sit-down restaurants for experience-driven retail and bar concepts, and the timing lines up with a bus rapid transit corridor that will bring a different visitor to the same intersection.
That is the thesis. Everything below is evidence.
Who is leaving, who is arriving
Here is the ledger as of mid-July, drawn from confirmed announcements rather than sidewalk chatter.
| Departing or in question | Arriving |
|---|---|
| Edina Grill, closing after a five-year lease | MeatEater, third US retail store |
| Salut Bar Americain, future in the district uncertain | General Sports Bar, from the Nolo's team, at 5034 France Ave |
| Cooks | |
| Mad Hatter Bakery & Cafe, opened April 2026 at 7300 Metro Blvd |
Two of those arrivals matter more than the rest, because they change what the district signals to a first-time visitor. A hunting-and-fishing lifestyle store and a sports bar are not what 50th & France has ever sold. That is the point.
Why a Bozeman-based hunting brand picked this corner
MeatEater's third US location will sit inside a shopping district that the Star Tribune described in June as camouflage-trending, which is a phrase no one has ever attached to 50th & France before. The first store opened at the company's Bozeman headquarters in 2024. The second opened last year at an outdoor lifestyle mall in the Milwaukee suburbs. Edina is number three.
The reason is not what you would guess. It is not proximity to the Boundary Waters, and it is not lakes. According to MeatEater's senior manager of direct-to-consumer retail Michale Brunker, the decision was driven by data on where the brand's content is actually consumed. A lot of it is watched and listened to in the Midwest, and founder Steven Rinella's audience skews accordingly. Roughly fifteen to twenty percent of the apparel line is aimed at women, which reframes the store as less of an outlier at 50th & France than the first press release suggested. The store will not sell firearms.
You would have expected this concept at Mall of America, or on the road to Cabela's near Maple Grove. Instead it took a spot in a shopping district best known for Anthropologie, jewelers, and the art-house movie theater near the corner. That is a bet on foot traffic and dwell time, not on category adjacency.
The bar side of the shift
The other new arrival with a real footprint is General Sports Bar, coming to 5034 France Ave from the group behind Nolo's in the North Loop. A sports bar three doors from a women's boutique is a different kind of tenant than a wine bar or a bistro, and it will bring a different weekend crowd than the one Edina Grill has been feeding.
If you are keeping score: Edina Grill's owner Anne Knipe told local press the team decided not to renew at the end of a five-year lease, and Salut has left its own status open. Meanwhile Cooks | Bellecour has confirmed a third Twin Cities location in the district, targeted for fall 2026, which softens the loss on the casual-dining side.
The net effect for a resident: fewer sit-down neighborhood restaurants, more destination concepts. Whether that is a gain or a loss depends on whether you were walking here for a table or an afternoon.
The plot twist is the bus
Two blocks of tenant news would be a normal summer at 50th & France. The reason this summer is not normal is the Metro E Line.
Construction started in spring 2024 on the 13-mile bus rapid transit route from Southdale Transit Center in Edina to the Green Line Westgate station in St. Paul, running mostly along France, Hennepin, and University. A station is planned at 50th & France as part of that alignment. The line largely replaces the old Route 6, which carried around 9,000 weekday trips before the project started, so the baseline demand for this corridor is already there. The upgrade is what the ride feels like: signal priority, bus lanes, all-door boarding, wider stop spacing, and a station experience that reads more like light rail than a bus stop.
The local business association reportedly asked to move the station one block south to 51st and France. That request was not granted. Which is to say the station is going where the redevelopment gravity is, not where the storefronts wanted it.
For a resident, three things follow from that:
- Southbound France Avenue has been the corridor's construction pressure point, with phased detours pushing southbound through-traffic to Xerxes during earlier work windows. If your normal route home cuts through 50th, plan for it to stay unpredictable through the build-out.
- The E Line changes who arrives at 50th & France on a Saturday. A rider from Uptown, Dinkytown, or the University of Minnesota now has a one-seat ride to the same block that used to require a car and a parking ramp.
- The three public parking structures the City of Edina maintains in the district, which sit inside 19 acres of commercial land and roughly 500,000 square feet of Edina-side commercial space, are still the plan for drivers. Free parking is not going away. It is just no longer the only story.
Tenants like MeatEater and a sports bar make more sense if you assume the average visitor five years from now is younger, arrived without a car, and is looking for something to do rather than something to browse. That is exactly the visitor a BRT station tends to produce.
What to actually do here between now and Labor Day
If you live in the neighborhood and you want to use this summer well, here is the honest short list.
- Eat at Edina Grill before it goes. A five-year lease ending is not a soft close. Once the doors lock, that room becomes something else.
- Walk the corner at dusk on a weeknight. This is the last summer the intersection looks the way it has looked for a decade. The station work will visibly change the streetscape.
- Try Mad Hatter Bakery & Cafe at 7300 Metro Blvd. It is technically Southdale-adjacent rather than the 50th block, but it is the freshest Edina food opening of the spring and worth the ten-minute drive for a proper English breakfast.
- Watch the MeatEater buildout. The store's positioning as a gathering spot for anglers and conservation-minded outdoor folks, in Rinella's own framing, is either going to work at this address or it is going to be the most interesting retail case study in the metro next year. Either way you want to have been in the room.
- Ride the 46 or the E Line replacement service to the district once, from wherever you normally drive from. It is the fastest way to understand what the corner will feel like when the station opens.
The takeaway
The story at 50th & France is not decline and it is not revival. It is a repricing. The district is trading a subset of its casual-dining tenants for retail and bar concepts that need destination traffic to work, and a transit line is being built that will supply exactly that. If you have owned in the Country Club, Morningside, or Fulton area for a while, the block you bought near is not going to look like the block you get in 2028. That is not a warning. It is a reason to pay attention to it now.
If you are thinking about how any of this affects the value of a home within walking distance of the corner, that is a conversation worth having with data in front of you. David Brandner at SellingMinneapolis tracks these micro-market shifts for a living. Get your instant home valuation and let's talk about what the next two summers at 50th & France mean for your address.
