How many names can one address hold before the turnover itself becomes the story? At 5445 Eden Prairie Road, the answer is at least three. The building opened as Kazoku, a Japanese restaurant whose name the city once explained in a newsletter as translating to "family," and the second location of its kind in the metro. Kazoku didn't last. Copper Cow took the space next, and didn't last either. By the fall of 2024, chef Heather Asbury had opened her second restaurant there, Heather's Minnetonka, and this time the concept held.
That's three restaurants in one building in a few years, and it's only the warm-up. This year, the turnover reached Ridgedale Center itself. Redstone American Grill, the steakhouse chain that anchored a dining spot inside the mall's footprint for years, is gone, its online listing reduced to a farewell note pointing former regulars toward Maple Grove and Eden Prairie. A few minutes away on Ridgedale Drive, Dave's Hot Chicken opened its first Minnesota location in August. Two exits, two arrivals, one short stretch of road. The pattern isn't that this corner of Minnetonka is getting more restaurants. It's that a specific kind of restaurant keeps leaving, and a different kind keeps taking its place.
The Address That Keeps Changing Its Name
Heather's Minnetonka didn't arrive as a blank slate. Chef Heather Asbury already ran a small, well-loved cafe on Chicago Avenue in south Minneapolis, a spot she built after years working the line at the farm-to-table restaurant Lucia's. When she and her business partner and brother went looking for extra catering space, they found the former Kazoku and Copper Cow address instead, and decided the building was ready for a full second location rather than a satellite kitchen.
What she opened there runs on a wider schedule than either of its predecessors. Heather's serves breakfast through dinner and pours cocktails seven days a week, with a menu that moves from an acai bowl with housemade granola and lemon blueberry French toast in the morning to a French dip, a curried turkey burger, and a salad built around golden beets later in the day. Entrees run twelve to twenty two dollars. The bar program, developed with the Libation Project, includes a blended rye and bourbon old fashioned, a Trinidadian rum and cola, a strawberry gin martini, and a lavender sage version of a Negroni built without alcohol.
Kazoku ran on a single cuisine and a dinner-forward schedule. Heather's runs on three meals and a cocktail list that covers noon through night, seven days straight. That's the difference that seems to have stuck. The building has now held one restaurant for two years running, longer than either of the two concepts that came before it, and the one that lasted is the one with the broadest hours and the widest menu.
Redstone's Quiet Exit
Ridgedale Center's own restaurant directory still lists the address for Redstone American Grill alongside its neighbors, but the chain's own booking page tells a different story. In place of a menu or a reservation calendar, visitors now find a short message:
Thank you, Minnetonka, for the memories!
The note redirects diners to Redstone locations in Maple Grove and Eden Prairie. No new tenant has been announced for the space as of this writing, which means one of the center's longer-running sit-down anchors is currently sitting empty while two entirely different restaurants opened nearby within the same year.
Redstone wasn't a quick stop. It was a full steakhouse format, the kind of restaurant built around a dinner reservation and a longer visit. Its departure leaves a gap in that particular category at Ridgedale Center, not because the mall has less dining overall, but because the format that filled that gap for years hasn't been replaced by anything similar yet.
Why Dave's Hot Chicken Picked This Corridor
Dave's Hot Chicken soft opened on Ridgedale Drive on Thursday, August 6, 2026, according to a same-day review posted to the location's Yelp page. It's the chain's first Minnesota restaurant, run by a family franchise group: Alex Humphries, his parents Debra and William, and his brother, former NBA player Kris Humphries.
Alex Humphries has described the site choice in terms of the roads that meet near it, calling the location "a synaptic connection point for Minnesotans near and far" thanks to its closeness to I-494, I-394, and Highway 169. That's a different calculation than Kazoku or Redstone made. Neither of those concepts needed highway visibility to work. A hot chicken counter that depends on walk-in and drive-through traffic does.
What's Still There
Not every concept on this stretch has turned over. A few have simply kept running underneath all the churn:
- Fork'd, a comfort food restaurant in Minnetonka still taking online orders, unaffected by any of the moves above
- The Tavern Grill, the build-your-own pizza, burger, and salad concept still listed at Ridgedale Center's directory address
- Ichiddo Ramen and Sushi, still operating in the same footprint through all of the recent changes nearby
These three didn't need to reinvent their hours or their format to stay put. They already ran on the kind of flexible, counter-adjacent model that seems to be winning out along this corridor.
Reading the Rotation
Line up what left against what arrived and a shape starts to show. Kazoku was a single-cuisine dinner restaurant. Copper Cow didn't last long enough to leave much of a record. Redstone was a full steakhouse chain built around reservations and a longer meal. What replaced or joined them, Heather's all-day, seven-cocktail-a-week format and a fried chicken counter with no dining room to speak of, both run on longer hours and faster throughput than what came before.
That's not a story about Minnetonka getting more restaurants this year. It's a story about which restaurants are surviving a specific stretch of road near a shopping center bounded by three major highways, and which ones aren't. A single-format sit-down concept, however good, seems to need something extra to hold that ground. The concepts that don't ask you to plan an evening around them, that let you show up at 7 a.m. or 9 p.m. and order without a reservation, are the ones sticking.
If you already treat Ridgedale as a regular stop, the useful takeaway isn't that there's more to choose from. It's that the specific restaurant you used to count on there may not be the one still standing, and the one that replaced it might run on a completely different clock than you're used to.
The Weinstock Group keeps an eye on these small shifts because we're in this same stretch of Minnetonka every week, not because we're trying to sell anyone on it. If you want to compare notes on what's opening next along Ridgedale, or anywhere else around Lake Minnetonka, The Weinstock Group is always up for that conversation.
