Selby Avenue's Biggest Weekend This Fall Isn't a Grand Opening. It's a Homecoming.

"Hang out with us three times a week, instead of just every six months."

That's how Alberto Blanco describes what he wants San Román Bakery & Deli to become on Selby Avenue. Blanco isn't new to Twin Cities dining, and he isn't building a special-occasion destination. He's building a counter you walk past on a Tuesday and duck into because you're hungry, not because you booked a table three weeks ago. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should, because it tells you something about what's actually happening on this stretch of Cathedral Hill right now. The corridor isn't just filling storefronts. It's sorting itself into two different kinds of return visit, on two ends of the same half mile, in the same season a 25-year-old neighborhood festival is bringing back the person who arguably made it famous.

Two openings, two different reasons to walk over

San Román took over the former Handsome Hog space at 173 Western Avenue North, right at the corner of Selby and Western, and it's open daily from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. It's a counter-service bakery and deli, the kind of place built for a fast breakfast sandwich or a loaf of bread on the way home, not a reservation. Tasca Madrid, a full-service Spanish restaurant from the same team, is set to open in the same building in the coming weeks, adding tapas, grilled meats, and a wine list to the corner.

A few blocks down at 525 Selby, in the space that used to be Revival before that Twin Cities chain shut down, Restaurant Aubergine opened this spring with an entirely different rhythm in mind. Husband-and-wife team Megan and Bjorn Jacobse built a French-inspired bistro with small plates in the mid-teens and larger format dishes running past $100, an 18 percent hospitality charge built into the menu, and a wine list that leans European. Demand has been high enough that reservations for early evening tables have been booked out weeks in advance, though the bar stays walk-in. This is the kind of place you plan for, not the kind you wander into on a Tuesday.

Put those two openings side by side and you get a useful map of what Selby Avenue actually offers right now, depending on what you're looking for that night.

Neither of these businesses is new to the neighborhood in the sense of being unfamiliar with it. Bjorn Jacobse cooked at Bellecour before he and Megan moved to Portland, and Megan ran the front of house at Meritage, which is why several of Aubergine's servers are familiar faces to anyone who spent time at Meritage over the years. Before they signed the lease on Selby, the Jacobses spent time doing pop-ups around town at Bûcheron, Mucci's, and Hyacinth, testing the concept on a Twin Cities audience before committing to a permanent address. They left, built a résumé somewhere else, and came back to open on the same street where a lot of Cathedral Hill's dining reputation was built in the first place.

The festival did the same thing, on purpose

That pattern isn't limited to restaurants. It's the entire premise behind this year's Selby Ave JazzFest, and if you've lived in Cathedral Hill for a while, the backstory is worth knowing before you show up on September 12.

The festival started in 2002, founded by Mychael Wright, who at the time owned Golden Thyme Coffee Cafe. It began as a response to a heavy post-9/11 mood in the neighborhood, a deliberate attempt to put a block party back on Milton Avenue. The first year drew about 600 people. Over more than two decades under Wright's leadership, it grew into one of the city's signature summer events, pulling crowds up to 12,000. Wright and his wife Stephanie retired from running it in 2024, and handed the festival to Walker|West Music Academy, the longtime Twin Cities music school just off Marshall Avenue.

This year is the 25th anniversary, and the headliner is Stokley Williams, the founder, vocalist, and drummer of Mint Condition. Coverage of the anniversary lineup has been direct about why this booking matters beyond star power: Williams is a former Walker|West student. The academy that now runs the festival is bringing back one of its own alumni to headline the milestone year, which means the transition from Wright's leadership to Walker|West's isn't just an organizational handoff. It's already produced a full-circle moment that the founders themselves couldn't have staged.

The festival runs Saturday, September 12, from 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. at Selby and Milton, free and open to anyone who shows up. If you want to be part of the kickoff rather than just watch it, there's a flash mob band forming at 11:30 a.m. right at Selby and Milton for anyone who plays brass, strings, or percussion and wants to jump in. On Sunday, September 13, Williams leads a masterclass at Harmony Hall inside Walker|West from 3 to 4:30 p.m., framed as a homecoming session with technique breakdowns and a live Q&A rather than a straight performance. The weekend closes with an after-hours jam session back at Walker|West from 8 to 10 p.m., open to musicians who want to sit in and fans who just want to be close to it.

Why the timing isn't a coincidence worth ignoring

None of this is presented as a coordinated campaign. Nobody planned Aubergine's opening and Stokley Williams' JazzFest booking to land in the same year. But the pattern itself says something true about how this particular stretch of St. Paul works. Cathedral Hill isn't a neighborhood that primarily absorbs outside investment and calls it revival. The people filling its most visible vacancies, from a shuttered restaurant chain's old dining room to a music academy's own festival stage, mostly left first. They built credibility somewhere else, in Portland or Montreal or on a national R&B stage, and then brought it back to the same six blocks where they started.

If you've watched storefronts turn over on Selby for a few years, that's a different story than the one you usually hear about neighborhood change. It's not developers discovering an underpriced corridor. It's specific people with specific histories on this street choosing to reinvest in it once they had something to bring back.

What this means for your next few weekends

If you're deciding how to spend the next two weeks on Selby, here's a rough shape for it:

• Stop into San Román for a weekday breakfast or lunch, since it's the low-commitment version of the corridor's new energy and there's no reservation to manage
• If you want a table at Aubergine for a specific date, plan ahead. Reservations release on the first of each month, and early evening slots have been going fast
• Show up at Selby and Milton on September 12 for the free festival day, and if you play an instrument, get there by 11:30 a.m. for the flash mob band
• If you have any interest in music education or just want to see Stokley Williams in a smaller room, the Sunday masterclass at Harmony Hall is the more intimate option compared to the Saturday main stage
• Cap the weekend at the after-hours jam session at Walker|West if you want to see what the festival looks like once the official schedule ends and the musicians take over

Selby Avenue in September isn't asking you to discover it. It's just doing what it's done for 25 years, which is pull its own people back and let them show the rest of the neighborhood what they picked up while they were gone.

If you're the kind of person who likes knowing a neighborhood this well before you ever need a real estate conversation, that's exactly the relationship Minnesota Home Girls is built around. Elisia Drewelow and the team spend as much time paying attention to blocks like this one as they do to listings, so whenever you're ready to talk timing, savings, or simply what a street like Selby actually offers day to day, Contact Us.