At the end of May last year, a small crowd gathered on Colorado Street to watch a building come down. The former T-Shirts & More storefront, empty for months, was about to make way for something the city had been hearing about for years. Mayor Kirt Briggs stood with restaurant owner Manny Perez and his business partner Dan Stanley for the groundbreaking, and when Briggs spoke, he said what everyone already knew.
"One of the things we hear in our community surveys quite often is, 'We'd like to see more restaurants.'"
That restaurant is Chula's, a Mexican-Latin kitchen that opened this spring at 4636 Colorado St SE. It is, by any obvious measure, exactly what the survey answers asked for. But the part of the project that actually solves a problem Prior Lake has had for years isn't downstairs.
The floor nobody was talking about
Perez has been in the restaurant business for 35 years, most of it running Subway franchises. At one point he had 16 of them. He still owns the Prior Lake location along with three others, and in 2024 the Small Business Administration named him Minnesota's Minority-Owned Small Business of the Year. Chula's is named for his granddaughter Sawyer, a project his daughter Mercedes and his partner Suzie Dahl helped design and brand.
When Perez talked about the building itself, though, he didn't only talk about the dining room. About 40 percent of the space is leased out as professional office or retail, and the rest is split between the restaurant on the ground floor and something the city has needed for a long time: a second-floor event center, built for graduation parties, retirement parties, wedding showers, and business gatherings, wired for the kind of technical equipment a company holiday party or a client meeting actually requires.
"We heard from so many people that there is little meeting space available for use by the public," Perez said. "We're super excited we have the ability to provide this for the public."
That's the sentence that matters more than the taco menu. A town of Prior Lake's size has a library, a VFW hall, and church basements for public gatherings, but not much in the way of bookable event space with a kitchen attached. Chula's second floor quietly answers a request nobody put on a survey because nobody thought to ask for it directly. The restaurant everyone said they wanted turned out to also be the meeting hall nobody realized was missing.
Two new restaurants, two very different owners
Chula's wasn't the only dining news in Prior Lake this year, and the contrast is worth sitting with. Across town, at The Wilds Golf Club, the on-site restaurant quietly got a new name and a new menu: Slate North. That change traces back to a sale that closed last year, when The Wilds went to Thompson Golf Group, an Arizona-based golf management company, for $7.7 million. Thompson also owns Geneva Golf Club in Alexandria and runs six other courses across Arizona, Texas, and Minnesota.
The Wilds itself is not a small asset. Designed by Tom Weiskopf and Jay Morrish, the course runs 7,012 yards with more than 150 feet of elevation change, and its Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired clubhouse holds event space for up to 350 guests, a scale Chula's second floor isn't trying to compete with. What's notable is the direction of ownership. Chula's is a family-built, locally financed answer to a local request. Slate North is a multi-state golf company's rebrand of an asset it bought sight unseen from out of state. Both opened new dining rooms to Prior Lake residents within the same year, and they represent opposite instincts about what the town's food scene needs: one more homegrown gathering space, one more polished regional brand.
Residents don't need to pick a side. But it's worth knowing which kind of "new restaurant" you're walking into, because they're not solving the same problem.
The rotation that was already working
None of this displaces what's already anchoring downtown and the lakefront. Charlie's on Prior keeps its waterfront bar, The Landing, running live music on the patio every Wednesday from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., plus seasonal events like Rock the Docks, and its lower patio stays dog-friendly with water bowls out for anyone who boats or walks in. The Pointe Grill & Bar on Highway 13 South remains the most consistent live-music room in town on weekends. Perron's Sul Lago keeps drawing steady praise for its steak and pasta menu on Main Avenue. None of these places needed Chula's or Slate North to succeed. What changes is the number of reasons to end up downtown on a random Tuesday instead of driving toward Savage or Shakopee for dinner.
What the calendar already proved this summer
If the restaurant additions are the quiet story, the summer calendar was the loud one. Prior Lake Days filled the south end of Main Street the first weekend of August with live music, food vendors, and the kind of foot traffic that turns a normal commercial strip into an actual event. A few weeks earlier, Lakefront Music Fest brought Keith Urban and Billy Idol to Lakefront Park, drawing the kind of headline names that don't usually play a town this size. The city's free Friday concert series at Lakefront Park ran all summer on a set schedule, Zero Below in May, The C Notes in June, the Prior Lake Windjammers in late July, and Skitzo Fonik closing it out on August 28, three days before this was written.
That's the pattern worth noticing. Prior Lake didn't get a single big event this year. It got a repeatable one, spaced out May through August, that trained residents to expect something happening at the lakefront on a predictable schedule. Chula's is already extending that pattern into fall: an agave spirits tasting filled the patio on August 24, and SKOL Shuttle nights are already on the books to run fans to Vikings games on September 13 and October 4. Downtown's calendar doesn't go quiet once the lake cools down. When DecemBRRR Dazzle lights up downtown for the winter, as it has in years past, it'll be landing on a commercial strip that spent the back half of 2026 adding reasons to stick around rather than losing them.
What actually changed this year
Prior Lake didn't get "more restaurants" in some vague sense. It got a specific answer to a specific request, plus a public meeting space the city didn't know how badly it needed until someone built one. It also got a lesson in how differently new ownership can show up: one restaurant built by a longtime local operator to fill a gap his neighbors named out loud, another rebranded by an out-of-state golf company that bought an established asset and gave it a new label. Both are worth a visit. Only one of them was built because the city asked for it by name.
If you're watching how a town like this evolves, block by block and quarter by quarter, that's the kind of detail that tells you more than a list of new openings ever could. Set Apart Realty keeps a close eye on what's changing across Prior Lake and the surrounding Twin Cities communities we serve, whether you're weighing a move, sizing up a neighborhood, or just curious what's new around you. Contact us any time you want a local read on what's actually happening on the ground.
