The stretch of Selby between Dale and Western is quiet at 9 a.m. on a Saturday in August. A few dog walkers, someone reading on the Nina's patio, the Cathedral dome catching the first flat light of the morning. By 6 p.m. the same three blocks will be full. Anyone who has lived here for a summer knows this shift is the whole point.
What outsiders read as a restaurant row is really a single working intersection with a schedule. Selby and Western is the hinge, and the buildings around it have been playing versions of this role since the 1880 cable car put its first stop on Selby Avenue. The names change. The rhythm does not.
The Intersection That Runs The Weekend
The corner has become dense enough to function as a small district on its own. Selby and Western now anchors trendy, popular restaurants like W.A. Frost, Handsome Hog, and Red Cow and the always popular Nina's Coffee shop. Handsome Hog is the newest of the four at this corner: the elevated Southern spot relocated from Lowertown to the corner of Western and Selby, which turned a strong three-corner block into a four-corner one.
The reason this matters for a resident is that you can plan an entire day around one traffic light. Coffee at Nina's, which sits inside the Blair Arcade with morning sun on the north-facing seats. A midafternoon read on the W.A. Frost patio, still one of the most heavily shaded outdoor rooms in the city. Dinner across the street. A nightcap without moving the car.
| Hour | Where the corner points you |
|---|---|
| 7 to 10 a.m. | Nina's Coffee Cafe in the Blair Arcade; Bon Vie two blocks east with A Piece of Cake pastries in the window |
| 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. | High Hat brunch on Selby with vinyl on the turntable; J. Selby's for a plant-based rice bowl |
| 1 to 4 p.m. | W.A. Frost patio; La Grolla's smaller patio if the Frost line is long |
| 4 to 7 p.m. | Handsome Hog for ribs; Red Cow for a burger; Moscow on the Hill for zakuski and a cold pour |
| 7 p.m. onward | Augustine's for craft beer and pastry after hours; The Gnome Craft Pub for the largest patio on the block |
Why The Corner Reads Older Than The Menus
Selby is the only street in Summit-University that carries this much dining, and the reason is architectural. Selby Avenue became the heartbeat of the neighborhood after the 1880 cable car, and at the cable car's first stop near the Selby and Western intersection, the beautiful Dacotah Building was constructed and soon housed the neighborhood's most popular pharmacy, named W.A. Frost after its owner and the founder of the University of Minnesota's College of Pharmacy. Shortly thereafter, the stunning Blair Flats Building was finished at the same intersection.
That is a useful thing to know when you are standing at Frost waiting for a table. The restaurant is not named after a chef. It is named after the pharmacist whose counter sat in the same room in the 1880s. The Blair building across the street was originally a residential hotel, which is why Nina's, tucked inside it now, has ceilings that behave like a lobby and not like a coffee shop.
The rest of Selby, running about three miles across the west end of the city, filled in around that hinge. La Grolla has been serving pasta a few doors down since 2003 as an upscale neighborhood restaurant. Moscow on the Hill has held its Russian corner long enough that it now reads as a fixture rather than a novelty. Yumi opened in March 2020 with sushi and an unusually deep Japanese whisky list, which is a small piece of local trivia worth having on hand when a friend asks where to go for a second drink.
The Comeback Block
If you moved into the neighborhood in the last three years, one story explains half of the current tenants. The Happy Gnome closed unexpectedly in 2019 and it felt like all of Saint Paul had been punched in the gut. The spot was revived by local restaurateurs Brian and Sarah Ingram, and the neighborhood breathed a second sigh of relief when the new menu turned out just as delicious as before. The Gnome is back and firing on all cylinders, complete with a huge selection of local craft beer and the largest outdoor patio in the neighborhood.
The same team then opened Augustine's a few doors east, which functions as a bar and a bakery. In the morning it serves croissants, pastries, and desserts. In the evening the craft beer comes out along with fresh, seasonal entrees. Two doors and one team, running opposite sides of the clock.
The version of Selby Avenue you eat on this weekend was mostly assembled between 2019 and 2024. Ten years ago the shortlist was Frost, Moscow, and Nina's. Now the shortlist is a paragraph.
That paragraph keeps getting longer. The former Revival space on Selby Avenue is now an elevated French-inspired bistro featuring a rotating menu of 15 savory concoctions, according to Visit Saint Paul's 2026 new-restaurants roundup. It fills the room where Ingram's fried chicken concept used to be, which means the same address has now hosted three distinct dining identities inside a decade.
The Park Above The Restaurants
The other reason Selby works as a weekend backbone is Cathedral Hill Park, sitting at 215 Summit Avenue directly in front of the Cathedral. It is small. It is also, per the Rotary Club, the highest point in Saint Paul, situated directly adjacent to the historic Cathedral of Saint Paul with views of the downtown cityscape. On a clear evening the sightlines from the lawn cover the Capitol dome, downtown, and the river bluffs across the valley.
The park is picking up a new tradition this summer. A Fourth of July fireworks show is coming to Cathedral Hill in 2026, funded by the St. Paul Rotary Club Foundation, which is working with businesses, community groups, and individuals to help cover a show expected to cost $125,000. Along with the fireworks, there will be a line of food trucks along Dayton Avenue and a free concert featuring Steven C and Friends. If you were in the park on July 4th, you already know the crowd was manageable and the sightline was better than most people expected. If you missed it, the format is worth watching. It is the first year of a repeating event that will shape the neighborhood's summer calendar going forward.
For the rest of August, the park is doing its ordinary job: a quick walk between dinner reservations, a place to sit with a coffee, a lawn that fills briefly when the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra performs inside the Cathedral, which the SPCO uses as one of its regular venues. The Cathedral itself keeps generous hours, open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily, which means the late-summer routine of walking up the steps for ten minutes of quiet before dinner is genuinely available on any weekend evening.
A Resident's Late-Summer Playbook
A few moves that separate the people who live here from the people who are visiting:
- Book Frost's patio for 5:30 p.m., not 7 p.m. The tree canopy over the courtyard means the light gets photogenic and the wait is shorter.
- If you have out-of-town guests, use the Friday Cathedral Hill Walking Food Tour, which begins at The Gnome Craft Pub at 498 Selby Ave and ends at Moscow on the Hill at 371 Selby Ave. It handles the introduction to the corridor without you having to narrate it.
- Save the Blue Door Pub for a night you have a car. It sits at the far west side of Selby Avenue, where the kitchen fills a Juicy Lucy with blue cheese to make the "Blucy", and the walk from the Cathedral end of the street is longer than it looks on a map.
- Treat Augustine's as two different businesses depending on the hour. Croissants at 9 a.m., a sazerac at 9 p.m., and you can ignore the middle of the day entirely.
- If someone in the group has a specific request, remember The Naughty Greek and J. Selby's exist. They sit outside the Frost/Handsome Hog gravitational pull and rarely have a wait on a Saturday night.
Why This Rhythm Matters For The Neighborhood
Selby has always been a barometer for what Cathedral Hill is willing to support. When the Ingrams reopened the Gnome, the room refilled inside a week. When Handsome Hog left Lowertown for the corner of Selby and Western, the intersection absorbed a fourth marquee restaurant without any of the existing three losing traffic. The former Revival space cycled to a new tenant without sitting empty for a full season. That kind of turnover, absorbed without a gap, is the signature of a corridor that is working.
For anyone who has been in the neighborhood long enough to remember the Happy Gnome under its original name, the current version of Selby is denser than any previous iteration. The corner still points you at the same buildings the cable car pointed at in 1880. What happens inside them has been rewritten twice in the last five years, and probably will be again.
If you have thought at any point this summer about what your Cathedral Hill home is worth in a market where the neighborhood's dining spine has quietly doubled in weight, that is a conversation worth having in person. Reach out to Christian Klempp to schedule a consultation.
