"We're going to be dessert-focused. It will utilize French techniques, but it's not going to be a French bakery." Weiser Kaysen told the Star Tribune.
That's chef Jasmine Weiser Kaysen describing Clementine, the patisserie she is building out this fall in a storefront that spent years selling seasonings and spice blends. The address is 614 West 54th Street, half a block off Lyndale Avenue, in the small commercial stretch that gives Tangletown its name. Walk that block right now and you'll pass a dark space where El Sazón Cocina y Tragos served tacos and cocktails for nearly three years before closing in August. Head a couple of blocks the other way and you'll hit a torn-up bridge over Minnehaha Creek that has been closed to every car since March 2. Neither has slowed down what's opening right around the corner.
That's the part worth sitting with. A restaurant closed. A bridge that carries roughly 14,000 cars a day has been shut since March 2, roughly six months now, with more than a year still left before it reopens. A pastry chef with a well-known name in local dining just signed a lease a couple of blocks from the construction fencing. If this corner's businesses depended on drive-through traffic, this is exactly the season you'd expect a storefront to sit empty rather than get a new tenant. Instead, the strip is behaving like the bridge traffic was never the customer base it was counting on.
The Storefront That Used to Sell Spices
El Sazón Cocina y Tragos opened in Tangletown in the fall of 2023, an offshoot of a Mexican restaurant that started inside an Eagan gas station before expanding. Owners Christian and Karen De León built a following with creative Mexican cooking, and the Tangletown location ran for nearly three years before closing on August 15. The reasons had nothing to do with the bridge. The couple had already spoken publicly about the rising cost of labor in Minneapolis, and the disruption tied to Operation Metro Surge made an already tight margin tighter. Their locations in Eagan and at Eat Street Crossing are still open, along with a sister restaurant, Xelas, in Stillwater. This was one storefront closing for reasons specific to that storefront, not a neighborhood pulling back.
A Pastry Chef Bets on the Same Corner
In the same small commercial cluster, in the space that used to be Spice Your Life, Weiser Kaysen is building a 20-seat bakery she named Clementine, after her daughter. She spent seven years as executive chef at Edwards Dessert Kitchen in the North Loop before it closed in the summer of 2025, and Clementine is the first shop with her own name on the lease. The menu leans on French pastry technique: viennoiserie, ice cream, cakes, coffee, with wine, cocktails, and a ticketed dessert tasting menu under consideration once the doors open. Her husband, Sean Kaysen, is the older brother of chef Gavin Kaysen, whose restaurants include Spoon and Stable and Bellecour. Sean worked in this exact storefront as a teenager, back when it was a Mr. Movies. Weiser Kaysen has said she's hoping for an October opening, though she's careful to note the build-out timeline is still tentative. The planned opening would put a new bakery on the block during the detour.
The Detour Nobody on 54th Has to Take
The bridge in question is the Nicollet Avenue span over Minnehaha Creek, built in 1923 and last rebuilt in the 1970s. It's old enough to be eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, and decades of wear are exactly why the city is spending $55.2 million to rebuild it, with $34.3 million of that coming from a federal grant secured in 2024. The span also carries Metro Transit's Route 18 bus line, not just car traffic. It closed to every vehicle on March 2, 2026, and won't reopen until late 2027. That sends the roughly 14,000 vehicles that normally cross it out on a longer loop:
- Westbound traffic detours along 50th Street and Diamond Lake Road to Lyndale Avenue
- Eastbound traffic uses the parkway frontage road across Nicollet
- Pedestrians and cyclists on the creek trail are routed up the hill south of the bridge to cross at street level
None of that touches the businesses on 54th Street itself. The city's own project page states plainly that Nicollet Avenue south of the bridge stays open to all businesses at all times. The bike and pedestrian trails along Minnehaha Parkway, closed for construction staging in late April, reopened on July 3. The bridge deck itself is still the one piece that won't be back until late 2027. Axios reported on the scale of the regional headache when the closure began, and it is one. But a regional headache for through-drivers is a different thing from a threat to the shops a couple of blocks south of the construction fence.
The Garden Corner Kept Its Calendar Anyway
At 54th and Nicollet, Tangletown Gardens and its restaurant, Wise Acre Eatery, never paused their fall programming while any of this was unfolding. The garden center ran a Fall Container Design Workshop this past weekend, and it's bringing back its Harvest Dinner at Wise Acre, a farm-to-table meal built around the height of the season's produce. The bigger draw is the Harvest Festival on Saturday, October 10, a full day of family activities on the same corner:
- A scavenger hunt through the seasonal plant displays
- A pumpkin decorating contest for kids
- A visit from a baby Highland cow, brought in from the Tangletown Gardens farm in Plato
These activities are on the same corner, with Clementine a couple of blocks away.
What the Turnover Actually Tells You
Put the three threads together and a pattern shows up that a quick drive-by wouldn't catch. A restaurant closed for reasons tied to labor costs and a federal enforcement operation, not construction. A pastry chef with real name recognition in local dining is planning to open her first solo shop a couple of blocks from an active job site, with an October opening in view. A garden center and its restaurant kept a full autumn calendar running during the construction.
The distinction between pass-through traffic and neighborhood customers matters if you live near this stretch and have been watching storefronts change hands, wondering whether the neighborhood's small commercial spine can hold through another year-plus of construction. The early evidence says it can, because it was never built to run on pass-through traffic in the first place. The regulars who already walk to George & The Dragon for dinner or Heather's for brunch are the same regulars who will walk to Clementine for a croissant, bridge or no bridge. That's a different kind of staying power than simply waiting for a road to reopen. It's a corner whose businesses were built around the people already living here, which is also why the trail along the creek came back in July even though the bridge above it is still more than a year from done.
If you're watching Tangletown from a distance and want a longer view of what's changing in this part of Southwest Minneapolis, Josh Zuehlke & Co tracks these shifts block by block. Reach out through our contact page if you'd like to talk through what's happening in this corner of the city, or take a look at our Southwest Minneapolis real estate guide for more on the surrounding area.
