When Victor Salamone and Joe Newhouse wanted to bring a second location of their Eagan restaurant, Kitchen and Rail, into the long-empty Mort's Deli building on Winnetka Avenue, they did not lead with a pitch deck. They made a sandwich. A half-pound of pastrami piled on caraway rye, stone-ground mustard, house pickles, kettle chips on the side. They called it The MORT, and they served it at their Eagan location months before Golden Valley ever got its own kitchen.
The sandwich wasn't for diners. It was for a landlord.
Paster Properties, the Minneapolis firm that had just bought the Golden Valley Shopping Center, was the audience Salamone and Newhouse actually needed to win over. "We were literally just courting them," Salamone told a reporter. "We smoke meats very well." It worked. Mike Sturdivant, Paster's chief development officer, still talks about the moment he tried it: "I was just like, 'Oh my gosh, this is amazing, that attention to detail.'"
That detail matters more than it sounds. If you've driven past the strip mall at Highway 55 and Winnetka in the last three years, you've watched a freestanding building sit dark in that parking lot since Mort's closed in the summer of 2022. A prime corner, empty, for three years, in a shopping center that's been a fixture of the city's town center for seven decades. The obvious assumption is that nobody wanted to open a restaurant there. The actual story is closer to the opposite.
The Space Wasn't Empty Because Nobody Wanted It
Salamone has been blunt about why he chose Golden Valley for Kitchen and Rail's second location. "I would say Golden Valley is slightly underserved with the restaurants in that area, and yet it's almost double the residents of Eagan," he said, describing the decision. In his read of the market, the demand had been sitting there the whole time. What hadn't been sitting there was a landlord willing to fix up the building around it.
That's a different story than the one most vacant storefronts tell. Usually an empty restaurant space means the neighborhood can't support another kitchen. Here, the operator who eventually filled it says the opposite was true, and he backed that belief with a second location rather than a press release.
What Actually Changed Was Who Owns The Building
The Golden Valley Shopping Center had been under the same ownership for a long stretch, and it showed. Scott Farrell, general manager of Down in the Valley, the record store that's occupied a spot in the center since 1986, put it plainly when the sale went through: the mall needed "a little TLC." Farrell wasn't talking about his own store's fortunes. Down in the Valley has been voted Minnesota's Best Record Store by Star Tribune readers six years running, 2021 through 2026, and it just changed hands to new owners in October 2025. Its business was fine. The building around it was not.
That changed on June 6, 2025, when Paster Properties bought the Golden Valley Shopping Center for $17.5 million. Emily Goellner, the city's community and economic development director, called it a turning point for downtown Golden Valley: "This property is crucial to the success of Golden Valley's town center." The company committed to exterior upgrades, new landscaping, and parking lot improvements, with renovation work starting later that summer and continuing into fall.
Here's the sequence, laid out plainly:
Date | What happened |
|---|---|
June 6, 2025 | Paster Properties buys Golden Valley Shopping Center for $17.5 million |
Summer through fall 2025 | Exterior renovation work begins on the aging strip mall |
October 2025 | Down in the Valley changes ownership, stays put at 8020 Olson Memorial Hwy |
February 23, 2026 | Kitchen and Rail opens in the former Mort's Deli building at 525 Winnetka Ave N |
Spring 2026 | Landscaping upgrades roll out across the center |
Kitchen and Rail wasn't an isolated tenant win. It was the first visible sign that new ownership meant new investment, and Sturdivant has said as much. He calls the restaurant "a good catalyst" for the rest of the leasing effort, adding that having an active, occupied space under construction gave him something concrete to point to while courting other tenants.
What's Actually Different If You Stop In Now
If you haven't been by since the sign went up, a few things are worth knowing before you go.
- Kitchen and Rail's Golden Valley location added something the Eagan original never had: weekday lunch service, plus a private event space available for reservations. Newhouse has described the menu as approachable comfort food with a bit more craft to it, the kind of place meant to become part of someone's regular lunch rotation rather than a once-a-year splurge.
- The MORT sandwich, the one built to court the landlord, is on the permanent menu at $28, alongside Kitchen and Rail's usual Famous Filet Mignon Sandwich and Nana's Meatballs.
- Down in the Valley is still at 8020 Olson Memorial Hwy under its new owners, still carrying the new and used vinyl, CDs, and turntables that earned it the Star Tribune title six years straight.
- Hiring at the new restaurant wasn't a quiet affair. For roughly 60 positions, Kitchen and Rail says it fielded 1,500 applications, which tells you something about how much interest a new sit-down option generated in a part of the west metro that hadn't seen one in years.
None of this reads like a market testing the waters. It reads like a market that had been waiting.
Why This Probably Isn't The Last Change
Goellner has framed the shopping center renovation as one piece of a bigger shift already underway in Golden Valley's town center. A new apartment complex is under construction next to the strip mall, and a new public safety building is planned for the same area. "Our town center is going to be so much different in a number of years in all the great ways," she said.
Sturdivant, for his part, has said he's in talks with other potential tenants for the center, and that Kitchen and Rail's presence gives him leverage in those conversations rather than a finished product to point to. If the pattern holds, the storefronts still sitting quiet in that strip mall are more likely candidates for the next wave of leasing than long-term vacancies.
That's the actual thesis buried under the sandwich story: the emptiness on Winnetka Avenue was never a verdict on the neighborhood. It was a symptom of an aging property under an owner who wasn't investing. Once that changed, the tenant interest showed up fast, and it's still showing up.
What To Do With This Fall
If you live nearby, the practical version of all this is simple. Kitchen and Rail is open for lunch on weekdays now, which is new for the brand and worth using if you've only ever thought of it as a dinner spot. Down in the Valley is worth a stop under its new ownership if it's been a while since you dug through the bins. And if you notice more construction fencing or a new sign going up somewhere else in that shopping center before the year is out, you'll know why. Sturdivant said he's talking to other tenants. The MORT sandwich worked once already.
If you're watching Golden Valley change and wondering what it means for your own plans in this part of the west metro, Anne Rybarczyk Gray has been tracking this market and this neighborhood for a long time. Let's Connect.
