Forepaugh's

The Restaurant

Forepaugh's occupies the 1870 Joseph Forepaugh House on Exchange Street, at the heart of St. Paul's Irvine Park Historic District, four blocks of Civil-War-era mansions a short walk from the river. The restaurant, after a multi-year closure, reopened in 2024 following a million-dollar restoration that preserved the Victorian interior: parquet floors, twelve-foot ceilings, the original carved-walnut staircase, three intimate dining rooms across the main floor seating between four and twenty guests apiece. The new operator is a local hospitality group with a track record on Summit Avenue and in Lowertown.

The cooking has been re-conceived for the reopening as New American with classical bones. The menu is short and seasonal, roughly eight starters, six mains, four desserts, anchored on a dry-aged bison ribeye for two, a slow-braised lamb shoulder, a wild walleye prepared in the historic style with brown butter and capers, and a vegetable tasting that rotates monthly. The wine list is mid-sized at one hundred and eighty references with deliberate attention to Burgundy and Oregon Pinot. Service is among the most formal in the Twin Cities: jackets are welcomed, multiple captains work the room, and the pre-dinner cocktail in the front parlour is encouraged.

The mansion's ghost stories, documented for over a century and the subject of a small library of local books, are not the reason the room has become St. Paul's default proposal address, but they are part of its mystique. The real draw is the unrepeatable architecture: a private booking of the upstairs Tower Room for a party of six, the ability to take dessert and cordials in the parlour after dinner, a winter table by the original fireplace in the front dining room. For a once-in-a-lifetime evening that needs a setting the restaurant itself cannot manufacture, Forepaugh's is the one room in the city that has it built in.