Cecil's Deli has been making the same matzo ball soup since 1949, the kind longtime customers describe as little changed since the early days, including the recipe for bubbe-approved matzo ball soup. Half a mile up Cleveland Avenue, past the Lunds grocery and the Lifetime Fitness that anchor Highland Village, a very different kind of restaurant just spent its first six months in the neighborhood: white tablecloths, a zinc bar, and a menu built around Angus steaks. The two establishments sit on the same commercial strip, serving two different versions of what Highland Park eats on a Tuesday night. Only one of them needed the city to write a check to make it happen.
That detail is the part worth sitting with. Highland Park isn't becoming a different neighborhood. It's running two dining economies at once, and the fact that one of them required public money to show up tells you something about the other one that a restaurant roundup alone won't.
Fourteen Months, Two New Kitchens
The shift started in December 2024, when Altera brought classy, sit-down dining to Highland Park at 721 Cleveland Ave S, in a space that marked quite a shift from the Agra Culture that used to sit on Cleveland Avenue near Ford Parkway. Minnesota Monthly's first-look review noted the wallpaper and the size of the bar, then added the line that mattered more: this is a neighborhood that tends to lean hyper-casual in restaurants. That wasn't a knock. It was a description of a real pattern, one that made Altera's bet on white-tablecloth dining a genuine test rather than a safe follow-on to an existing trend.
Fourteen months later, the test got a second entry. The Barn Steakhouse at 1900 First St. showed off the vibe for the first time on Monday, Feb. 16, during its grand opening, arriving with a Manhattan feel, highlighted by curved red banquettes, low-profile lighting, a zinc bar, and exposed-brick walls. The name behind it carries weight in steakhouse circles: Amy Morton is a restaurateur following in the footsteps of her father, Arnie Morton, of Morton's Steakhouse. The Barn has been highly anticipated in Highland Park since word got out in early 2025 that Morton was opening the second location, with the other in Evanston.
Two upscale, reservation-driven restaurants landing on the same short stretch of Cleveland Avenue in just over a year is not a coincidence of timing. It's a signal that someone with capital decided Highland Park was ready for a different kind of dinner. The question is why it took until now, and why one of those someones needed help getting there.
The Check the City Had to Write
Here's the detail most coverage of The Barn's opening buried: Amy Morton admitted that opening the Highland Park location cost her a lot of money, but those costs were partially offset via a $750,000 city incentive to draw celebrated chefs and restaurants. Morton hopes the restaurant will bring the community together by creating a welcoming, hospitable atmosphere, which was also the goal of the city incentive that helped attract her.
Cities don't usually need to subsidize a Morton's-family steakhouse into a dense, high-income neighborhood. That kind of concept typically chases foot traffic and follows the money on its own. The fact that Saint Paul had to put $750,000 on the table says the retail math on Cleveland Avenue wasn't obviously pointing toward fine dining before this. Look at what actually anchors the corridor: the Highland Shopping Center at 2024 Ford Parkway, described by its own leasing brokerage as the best corner in the Highland Village area, sits shadow anchored by Lifetime Fitness, Target Express, the new Lunds grocery store, and M Health Fairview, with recent deals signed for a fitness user and a swim school. That's a corridor built for errands, workouts, and groceries, not a corridor a national steakhouse concept walks into unprompted.
Compare that to Myriel, the restaurant that made Highland Park a dining destination without any reported incentive at all. Myriel opened during the pandemic and chef Karyn Tomlinson has established the cozy space as a wonderful date night destination, work that eventually earned her the 2025 James Beard Award for Best Chef in the Midwest. The restaurant's name has its own story too: Myriel is named for the monk in Les Misérables who provided hospitality to those who needed it most. Myriel is small, chef-driven, and built its reputation one tasting menu at a time. The Barn is a bigger bet on a national concept and a bigger building. Small, homegrown fine dining could work here on its own. Big-format fine dining needed a push.
What the Rest of the Corridor Says
Not every business on Cleveland Avenue needed convincing. When Centro opened its Highland Park location, owner Jami Olson put it simply:
"I'm excited to be opening a restaurant in my own neighborhood."
Olson is a Highland Park resident and the owner and CEO of Centro Restaurant Group, which operates two other Centro locations in Minneapolis. That's the other half of Cleveland Avenue's story: local operators betting on the neighborhood with their own reputations, not outside capital that needed a subsidy to show up.
The everyday anchors around them haven't moved either:
- Cecil's Deli, split into grocery, deli, and restaurant space, has held its recipes since 1949.
- Highland Grill still runs early morning breakfast starting at 7 a.m., with daily happy hour from 2 to 6 p.m., the kind of reliable schedule a reservation-only steakhouse doesn't try to match.
- Carbone's Pizza keeps making the case that Midwestern pizza is best served on thin crust, with generous sauce, a snow-drift worthy heft of cheese, and a pie cut into squares.
None of these places are going anywhere. They're not competing with Altera or The Barn for the same Friday night reservation. They're serving the same neighborhood a different meal on a different night, which is exactly why the corridor can support both without one side pushing the other out.
Why the Timing Actually Lines Up
The new restaurants aren't opening into a quiet calendar. St. Luke's Farmers' Market has run every Saturday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. since June 13, continuing through Oct. 3, sponsored by St. Luke's in its parking lot in the Highland Park neighborhood since 2015. Circus Juventas just wrapped its early-August run of performances in Highland Park last weekend. And on September 10, the Highland District Council hosts Music at the Bridge at Highland Bridge Civic Plaza, an outdoor evening event featuring live entertainment, food trucks, games, and beer and wine for purchase, expected to draw approximately 400 attendees.
Every one of those events pushes people onto the same half-mile of Cleveland Avenue and Ford Parkway in the early evening, which is precisely the window a steakhouse needs to fill tables and a farmers market vendor needs to sell out the last of the peaches. A subsidized fine-dining concept and a 77-year-old deli can both benefit from the same Saturday crowd without ever competing for the same customer.
That's the real shape of what's happening here. Highland Park isn't trading its everyday character for something more polished. It's layering a second, higher-ticket dining option on top of a corridor that was never built for it on its own, and the neighborhood's own community calendar is doing part of the work the incentive money was meant to do.
If you're watching this stretch of Cleveland Avenue and wondering what it means for a specific address, not just a dinner reservation, Christian Klempp has spent years reading exactly these kinds of shifts across Saint Paul's neighborhoods. Schedule a consultation when you're ready to talk about what a corner like this one is actually worth.
