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.