This Woodbury Storefront Burned Through Two Restaurants. Here's Why the Third One Stuck.

At 10060 City Walk Drive, sushi kept failing. Sapporo Sushi Asian Bistro opened first, then closed. Shanghai Bistro took over the same space next, and it closed too. By the time Liliana opened in July 2025, this stretch of City Walk had become one of those addresses longtime residents point to when they talk about how hard it is to keep a restaurant running here, especially when the concept doesn't offer the neighborhood something it doesn't already have plenty of.

Then Jason Hansen and Peter Sebastian, the team behind Estelle and Mario's in St. Paul, gutted the space and opened Liliana. It has been open for about a year now, and it is the reason this particular Woodbury address is worth a second look, not because a new restaurant showed up, but because of what its arrival says about which bets are actually paying off in this city's strip malls right now.

The Corner That Couldn't Hold a Restaurant

Hansen has been direct about why the space struggled before Liliana. He has pointed to an oversaturation of sushi restaurants in Woodbury as a likely reason the previous tenants couldn't hold on. It wasn't a bad location. It was the wrong concept, repeated twice.

What Hansen and Sebastian bet on instead was specificity. Not another version of something Woodbury already had, but a pasta-forward Italian menu with a visible pasta room where guests can watch noodles get made from scratch throughout the day, run by a chef with a reputation the Twin Cities dining scene already recognized. As Hansen put it when Liliana opened, he wanted to bring something for people who were tired of the alternatives on offer nearby: "I feel that people are thirsty for a chef-driven neighborhood restaurant, not fast food, not Chili's."

What Liliana Did Differently

The details matter here. Liliana seats around 110 guests inside with room for another 20 on the patio, open 4 to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 4 to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday, with the bar staying open an hour later. The kitchen is run by Kenzie Edinger, who came over from Saint Dinette and spent time before that at Mucci's, building a reputation among Twin Cities food writers well before she ever set foot in Woodbury. The cocktail program was designed by Seth Bellow, who runs the bar at Estelle, and leans into Italian amaro and vermouth rather than the generic suburban cocktail list.

One detail from a Star Tribune review a year into Liliana's run stands out because it complicates the easy version of this story. Edinger describes the pasta room and the curved bar as her favorite part of the space, but she's found convincing suburban diners to actually sit at that bar has been an unexpected challenge. Many still prefer a traditional table. That's not a failure. It's a reminder that opening something more ambitious in Woodbury doesn't automatically rewrite how people in Woodbury want to eat. The restaurant had to earn the shift, one dinner at a time, not assume it.

Hansen also mentioned something practical that gets overlooked when people talk about suburban dining as a downgrade from the city: a parking lot. Not every place inside St. Paul city limits can offer one, and it's one of the reasons the Woodbury location made sense to a team that had built its reputation on foot-traffic neighborhoods.

Sebastian summed up the bigger motivation behind the move:

"There is a lot happening on the restaurant scene in the western suburbs, but we're east side guys and want to help build up this area and elevate the dining scene."

The Same Bet, Twice More

Liliana isn't an isolated case. Two miles away at 1690 Woodlane Drive, in the space that used to be Cowboy Jack's, Feast Buffet & Banquet opened in September 2025 as Woodbury's first upscale, Asian-inspired buffet restaurant. Co-founders Kevin Ni and ZeGui Qiu, known for Sushi Train in Minneapolis and Captain Crab in Brooklyn Center, built a concept that swaps the usual self-serve buffet trays for individually plated dishes, from beef and broccoli to sushi rolls to stone crab.

Ni's reasoning for choosing Woodbury echoes Hansen's almost exactly, even though the two restaurants have nothing else in common. Ni has described asking himself where Woodbury residents were supposed to eat if the city didn't have enough options of its own, wondering aloud why people should have to spend money in other cities that they could be spending in their own town. Since opening, Feast has served more than 1,000 customers a day, with lines stretching out the door on busy nights.

Two different restaurant groups, working independently, landed on the same read of this market within two months of each other: Woodbury has the appetite to support something more ambitious than a chain, and for years nobody built it.

Retail Followed the Same Logic

The pattern isn't limited to restaurants. Shake Shack is opening its fifth Twin Cities location in Woodbury, the chain's first anywhere in the eastern metro. A national burger chain doesn't usually pick a suburb for an expansion like that unless it expects the surrounding retail corridor to pull in more traffic than a typical strip mall sees on a Tuesday.

Here's a short rundown of what's changed at these two corners over the past year, for anyone keeping track:

• Liliana, 10060 City Walk Drive: Italian pasta bar, opened July 2025, replacing a run of failed sushi concepts.
• Feast Buffet & Banquet, 1690 Woodlane Drive: individually plated Asian-inspired buffet, opened September 2025, formerly Cowboy Jack's.
• Shake Shack, Woodbury: the chain's fifth Twin Cities location and its first in the eastern metro.

None of these are enormous developments on their own. Together they describe a city where the strip malls are being asked to do more than they used to.

This Weekend Proves the Point

Woodbury Days runs August 28 through 30 this year at Ojibway Park, drawing roughly 25,000 people and around 200 participating businesses for a weekend of carnival rides, live music, a parade, fireworks, and the Taste of Woodbury food tent, where more than 20 vendors set up for the crowd. It is the closest thing this city has to a single shared table, and it happens to fall the same year that Liliana, Feast, and a handful of smaller local spots proved a Woodbury strip mall can hold something more particular than what used to fill it.

That's the actual shift worth noticing. Woodbury didn't just get a few new restaurants this year. It got restaurants and a retailer that assumed people here would stick around long enough to make the bet worth it, and so far, the lines out the door suggest they were right.

If you're weighing what it's like to live in Woodbury day to day, or you're already here and thinking about what comes next for your own home, Kami Gerald has spent nearly two decades getting to know this corner of the Twin Cities block by block. Let's Connect whenever you're ready to talk through what you're seeing in your own neighborhood.