For more than a year, if you lived on the west side of Edina and wanted to get to 50th and France, you didn't take Vernon Avenue. You took Eden Avenue instead, because Vernon was torn up, and Eden was the official detour the city posted at every intersection from Interlachen Boulevard to Gus Young Lane. Enough residents rerouted their errands around that closure for long enough that it became muscle memory. Then, on June 26, the muscle memory stopped matching the map.
That's the piece of this story most people have only half absorbed. Vernon Avenue reopened this summer after a rebuild of its interchange with Highway 100 that ran to more than $28 million, and the timing happened to land in the same stretch of months when the restaurant scene two blocks away, at 50th and France, changed more than it has in years. Most people know one of those facts. Fewer have connected them, and the connection is the actual news: the road that made it annoying to visit the district reopened right as the district gave people a much better reason to come back.
The Detour Nobody Fully Clocked
The Vernon Avenue and Highway 100 Interchange project started in April 2025 as a joint effort between the City of Edina, Hennepin County, and MnDOT. The scope was two bridge replacements, one carrying Vernon over Highway 100 and a second carrying it over the Canadian Pacific Kansas City railroad, plus a redesign that swapped six redundant highway ramps for a standard tight diamond interchange.
The Highway 100 bridge came back online first, reopening to traffic on November 15, 2025. That restored the bigger piece of daily driving, the on and off ramps at Vernon and West 50th Street. The railroad bridge was supposed to follow within weeks. Instead it slipped into 2026 after crews doing utility work in the railroad right-of-way struck a buried Xcel Energy power line, which meant a pause while Xcel and Canadian Pacific Kansas City worked out the permits and legal agreements to relocate it. That process ran through the fall, with the line de-energized and moved in early October 2025 before construction on the bridge itself could resume.
The upshot for anyone who lives nearby: Vernon Avenue itself, the direct route through the Grandview District, stayed closed for the better part of a year after the highway ramps came back. Eden Avenue carried that traffic the whole time. The city held online project talks every other Thursday during construction, hosted by Public Works Director and City Engineer Chad Millner, specifically because the closure was long enough and disruptive enough that residents needed a standing way to ask what was happening and when it would end.
What Actually Changed, Not Just That It Reopened
The ribbon-cutting on June 25 wasn't a formality for a road that came back the way it left. The new tight diamond interchange eliminated the redundant ramps that used to connect Vernon to four different streets in a way the city itself had called complicated and redundant. In their place: 10-foot sidewalks, ADA-compliant pedestrian ramps, pedestrian refuge islands, and new traffic signals, plus a noise wall added for the Sunnyslope neighborhood along the highway edge.
That's worth sitting with if you walk or bike through Grandview. The old bridge had a sidewalk narrow enough, with too little separation from traffic, that it created a real barrier between one side of the district and the other. The new one is built to fix that specifically, not as an afterthought to the driving lanes.
The reopening event itself was scheduled for a Thursday afternoon, with remarks from Mayor Jim Hovland and Millner, followed by refreshments at Davanni's on Gus Young Lane, the kind of low-key civic gathering that tells you the city considered this a genuine milestone for the neighborhood rather than a routine construction wrap-up.
The Restaurants That Opened While You Were Detouring
Here's the part that happened almost entirely out of view of the construction story, on the same stretch of streets. While Vernon was closed, 50th and France quietly became one of the more interesting new dining pockets in the metro.
Chef Daniel del Prado, known locally for Porzana in the North Loop, Martina, Rosalia, and Minari in Northeast Minneapolis, all restaurants that draw on the Argentine and Italian flavors of his native Buenos Aires, opened something different at 50th and France: Thérèse, an upscale French brasserie named for his mother. It opened serving lunch, dinner, weekend brunch, and a daily happy hour, built around the kind of classic French menu, think French onion soup, steak tartare, mussels, that the neighborhood hadn't had in quite that form before.
Del Prado isn't finished with the district either. He's partnering with Ryan Burnett on a second concept, Americana, moving into the former Barrio space at 5036 France Ave S with new American food, currently slated to open late this year.
A few doors down, Gavin Kaysen brought Bellecour back to 50th and France, in a lighter, redesigned space at 3934 Market Street built around bamboo and tan tones. The menu carries over the French onion soup Kaysen made his name on at the original Bellecour in Wayzata, alongside items like a smoked salmon tartine, and it's open daily from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., meaning it functions as a morning stop as easily as a lunch one.
Put those three together, an established Wayzata chef relocating his café concept into the district and a Minneapolis chef opening two new restaurants back to back, and you have more culinary investment landing at 50th and France in roughly a year than in a longer stretch before it.
Why The Timing Is The Actual Story
Construction detours don't just slow drivers down. They quietly suppress the kind of casual foot traffic that a district like 50th and France depends on, the stop-in-because-you're-driving-by visit rather than the planned trip. The city seemed to understand this: during the closure it ran a "Worth the Detour Passport" loyalty program, collecting stamps for shopping or dining at participating businesses in the area, specifically to keep people coming back while the direct route was gone.
That's the piece worth naming plainly. For the better part of a year, the easiest way to get to 50th and France from the west side of Edina involved a detour, and detours train people out of habits. If you'd stopped treating 50th and France as your default stop for dinner because getting there meant threading Eden Avenue, you weren't imagining the friction. It was real, it was official, and it ran for over a year.
Now it's gone, and it happened to disappear at almost the exact moment the district's dining lineup got substantially better. That's not a coincidence anyone planned, but it is the actual reason this fall is a good moment to reset the habit rather than wait for it to happen on its own.
What To Do With That This Fall
If you've been meaning to try Thérèse or the reopened Bellecour but kept deferring it because the drive felt like a chore, that reason is gone. Vernon Avenue runs straight through again, sidewalks and all, and the detour signage on Eden Avenue has come down.
The calendar gives you a reason to go sooner rather than later, too. The Edina Fall Into the Arts Festival returns to Centennial Lakes Park on September 12 and 13, a benefit for the Edina Crime Prevention Fund that draws a full weekend of shopping and browsing not far from the 50th and France corridor. It's an easy excuse to route your Saturday through the district, grab a coffee or a pastry at Bellecour on the way, and treat the reopened road as the shortcut it was designed to be rather than the memory of a closure.
None of this changes what your commute or your grocery run has looked like for a year. It just means the reason for the workaround is finally over, and the district on the other side of it has more reasons to visit than it did before the bridge came down in the first place.
If you're weighing a move to Edina, or just want to talk through what a neighborhood like Grandview or 50th and France actually offers day to day, Anne Rybarczyk Gray knows these streets well enough to walk you through it block by block. Let's Connect.
