
After a decade on Hennepin, the gourmet-burger room will close when its lease runs out.
After 10 years in Uptown, the Hennepin Avenue location of Red Cow will flip its last burger on June 1, when the restaurant's lease comes to an end. The closure of the 2626 Hennepin Ave. spot removes one of the corridor's better-known gathering places, a burgers-and-craft-beer room that helped define casual dining on the avenue over the past decade.
Owner Luke Shimp said the decision was largely lease-driven, but framed it against a brutal stretch of business. Sales had largely rebounded after the early pandemic years, he said, then dropped 60 to 70 percent once construction on Hennepin began in 2024 and dragged on.
For a restaurant built on walk-in traffic and a steady bar crowd, a two-year disruption out front is close to an existential threat. When the sidewalks are fenced and the avenue is a single lane of detours, the spontaneous stop-in that fills tables on a weeknight largely disappears — and the volume a place like Red Cow needs to clear rent and payroll goes with it.
Shimp told local outlets that employees from the Uptown location would be moved to the chain's other restaurants, sparing staff the worst of the shutdown. Red Cow operates several locations across the Twin Cities, and the company has emphasized that the Uptown closing is a single-store decision rather than a retreat from the market.
Sales had come back, and then the street work cut them by two-thirds. A lease renewal on top of that just didn't make sense.— summarizing owner Luke Shimp's account of the closure
The closing arrived as part of a steady drumbeat of Uptown departures. The president of the Uptown Business Association said more than 60 businesses have closed along the south Minneapolis corridor in recent years, and pointed to the new Hennepin Avenue layout and the long construction period as central causes. Red Cow's exit, announced within weeks of other longtime Uptown closures, became shorthand in a citywide conversation about the district's health.
Boosters counter that the losses, while real, mask a slower turnover: new operators and redevelopment projects are moving into the corridor even as familiar names leave. That is cold comfort to regulars who marked birthdays and Friday nights at the Uptown Red Cow, but it frames the closure as a chapter ending rather than a verdict on the neighborhood.
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Red Cow was more than a burger stop. It was a default — the place a group landed when no one could decide, a bar where a Twins game played to a half-full room on a Tuesday, a patio that did brisk business the instant the weather turned. Casual neighborhood restaurants like it are the connective tissue of a commercial district: they generate the routine, unhurried foot traffic that keeps a sidewalk feeling alive between the morning and evening rushes.
Lose enough of those, neighbors and merchants warn, and the street starts to feel like a place you drive through rather than one you walk. That fear is precisely what is animating Uptown's business community right now, as it tries to convince operators and landlords that the corridor's troubles were a construction-era dip rather than a permanent decline.
No replacement tenant has been announced for the Hennepin Avenue space, which becomes another freshly accessible storefront on a street finally emerging from its rebuild. The same finished sidewalks and calmer traffic that arrived too late for Red Cow are the conditions a new operator would want — and Uptown's boosters are betting that a rebuilt avenue, paired with the housing and redevelopment moving through the pipeline nearby, will eventually refill rooms like this one.
For now, the most visible marker of Red Cow's decade in Uptown is the countdown to a final service, and the question that hangs over the whole corridor with it: who bets next on a street that its champions insist is on its way back up?