Bloomington's Two Best Restaurant Bets This Year Have Nothing to Do With the Mall

Mall of America keeps adding names you already know. Sweetgreen opened on Level 3 in early September. Giordano's, the Chicago deep-dish chain, landed there in July. A build-your-own mac and cheese concept called Roni's Mac Bar arrived in the spring. Each is a proven brand extending its footprint into a shopping center that guarantees foot traffic before the doors even open.

Meanwhile, a few miles away on two different roads that have nothing to do with the mall, two Twin Cities restaurant groups made a different kind of bet this year. Neither needed the mall's crowds. Both needed Bloomington to already be a place worth driving to.

A Steakhouse Bet on Minnesota Drive

Smack Shack has run its Bloomington location at 3801 Minnesota Drive since December 2021, a seafood-forward outpost of the Twin Cities chain known for lobster rolls and crab boils. On September 15, that restaurant became Smack Shack Steak, with a new executive chef, Ben Pichler, who previously worked at Grand Cafe and Burch Steak and Pizza Bar. The centerpiece of the relaunch is a 10-foot wood-fired grill, the kind of equipment investment that signals a restaurant is not tweaking a menu but rebuilding around a different cooking philosophy. The new menu adds USDA Prime steaks from the Certified Angus Beef brand and a locally sourced Duroc pork porterhouse, while keeping the lobster and crab dishes the location built its name on.

Co-owner Josh Thoma described the move plainly: the concept has room to grow, and the Bloomington space had the square footage to support it. Pichler, for his part, was looking forward to putting his own stamp on the relaunch.

That last detail matters more than it sounds. A wood-fired grill is not cheap to install and not easy to walk back from. When a restaurant group commits capital like that to a location on Minnesota Drive, just outside the Edina border, it is betting on a customer base that already lives nearby, not one that happens to wander over from Nickelodeon Universe.

A Different Road, the Same Kind of Bet

Eight months earlier, a separate restaurant group made a nearly identical calculation on the other side of the city. Travail Collective, the Robbinsdale-based operation behind Travail Kitchen & Amusements and James Beard semifinalist chefs Mike Brown, Bob Gerken, and James Winberg, opened its second Pig Ate My Pizza location on January 5 at 10700 Bloomington Ferry Road. That address sits nowhere near the mall's retail core. It is a more than 4,000-square-foot building with seating for 90 indoors and another 90 on a patio built to stay roughly 80 percent covered for year-round use, a design choice that only makes sense if the owners expect people to keep coming back through a Minnesota winter.

The restaurant brought its Robbinsdale menu south largely intact: craft pizzas, smash burgers, and a full bar pouring exclusively from Nouvelle Brewing, the group's in-house brewery, alongside Dream Creamery ice cream. Travail's director of operations, Zach Clement, said after the opening that the support and enthusiasm from the city had been overwhelming.

Two ambitious, chef-driven Twin Cities restaurant groups, on two different roads, in the same calendar year, both decided Bloomington could support a destination restaurant that draws people in on its own terms. That is not a coincidence worth skimming past. It is a pattern.

Why This Reads Differently Than a Restaurant Roundup

A single new restaurant is a data point. Two independent groups making the same locational bet within eight months of each other, in a city best known nationally for a shopping mall, is closer to a signal. Neither Smack Shack Steak nor Pig Ate My Pizza depends on mall parking or mall tourism to fill seats. Both are counting on residents, on repeat visits, on a food scene that exists whether or not anyone flies in for Nickelodeon Universe.

The city itself has been putting money behind that same bet. Through the 2026 Hatch Bloomington Loves Local program, the city awarded a total of $124,000 to five small businesses specifically to help strengthen operations and support growth. That is a modest sum by restaurant-industry standards, but it is a deliberate signal from City Hall that independent, locally rooted businesses are worth investing in beyond whatever spillover the mall generates on its own.

The Festival That Outgrew a Sidewalk

The same pattern shows up outside the restaurant world. The Bloomington Street Arts Festival started in 2024 as a small event outside The Arts Creative, a local gallery space. In 2025, it moved to Nine Mile Brewing. This year, on Saturday, September 19, it returns to Nine Mile Brewing for its third year with more than 40 local artists and makers, live music, an interactive fashion activation, a youth art booth with eight young vendors, and a sidewalk chalk art contest that runs from 9 a.m. to noon before judges announce winners later in the day.

Nine Mile Brewing is holding its own Oktoberfest that same day, layering specialty beers and Oktoberfest programming onto the arts festival rather than competing with it. The event is free and family-friendly, and it is partly supported by the city's Office of Creative Placemaking, which is a different kind of civic bet than a mall tenant lease. A festival that starts on a sidewalk and reaches its third year inside a working brewery, drawing 40-plus vendors, did not get there through marketing budgets. It got there because enough people in Bloomington kept showing up.

As The Sun Current reported, Pichler said: "What a difference cooking over Minnesota hardwood can make."

That line was about a grill, but it doubles as a decent description of what is happening across Bloomington's food and arts scene this month. Something built with intention, on a foundation that already existed, is starting to show what it can do.

What This Actually Looks Like on a Calendar

If you live in Bloomington and have mostly experienced these months through what shows up at the mall, here are a few dates from this month away from it:

• September 12 — Nature Fest, a free bilingual celebration presented by the city, Indigenous Roots, and Huellas Latinas, ran from 1 to 5 p.m. at the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge, with music, art, and food.
• September 15 — Smack Shack Steak launched its new menu and wood-fired grill on Minnesota Drive.
• September 17 — Smack Shack's Bloomington patio hosts a dog-friendly happy hour from 4 to 6 p.m., with proceeds supporting The Bond Between, a local dog rescue organization.
• September 19 — The Bloomington Street Arts Festival runs 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at Nine Mile Brewing, overlapping with the brewery's own Oktoberfest.

None of this requires a trip to the mall. All of it requires knowing where to look, which is the actual point.

The Takeaway Worth Keeping

Bloomington's reputation outside Minnesota is still mostly one building. But the restaurant groups willing to sink real capital into wood-fired grills and 90-seat patios, and the festival that tripled its footprint in three years without any help from Nickelodeon Universe, are telling a more specific story: this is a city where independent local businesses are willing to bet on the neighborhood itself, not just the tourists passing through it. That is the kind of place worth paying attention to, whether you are grabbing a steak on Minnesota Drive this weekend or just noticing which corridors keep attracting ambition.

If you are watching how a neighborhood like this evolves and wondering what it means for where you might want to live next, that is exactly the kind of on-the-ground read Kami Gerald brings to every conversation about Bloomington and the rest of the Twin Cities. Let's Connect.