Trellis Hospitality announced its new restaurant at Eagan's Viking Lakes this spring. Ben Berry, the company's operations and business development director, told Bring Me The News that the goal was a place that felt comfortable, but done well, somewhere you could sit down for a meal or a drink whether you were coming from work, from a game, or from the neighborhood.
The space in question sits at 730 Vikings Parkway, a 6,000-square-foot restaurant with a large bar and an expansive outdoor patio, built into the corner of the Viking Lakes campus where foot traffic from TCO Stadium, the Vikings Museum and Locker Room Store, and the Omni Viking Lakes Hotel all cross paths. It has held two restaurant concepts in under a year.
Lago Tacos at Viking Lakes
Lago Tacos, a modern Mexican concept with existing locations in St. Louis Park, Excelsior and Plymouth, opened its Eagan location in that space on July 7, 2025, according to city meeting records. By the spring of 2026 it had closed. Trellis Hospitality announced that same April that Copper & Rye, described as an elevated comfort food concept with a craft cocktail program, would take over the identical footprint and open in May.
Less than ten months separated a grand opening from a closing in a building that hasn't sat empty since. The contrast between the freestanding restaurant and the hotel dining room offers a basis for considering how Viking Lakes' different dining settings serve visitors.
Kyndred Hearth at the Omni
A few hundred feet away, inside the Omni Viking Lakes Hotel, Kyndred Hearth has operated without interruption since it opened during the pandemic's early running years alongside the hotel itself. Same 200-acre campus. Same mix of Vikings employees, hotel guests and Twin Cities Orthopedics patients moving through the development every day. Different physical position, and a different dining setting.
That difference becomes clearer when considering how diners arrive.
A restaurant inside a hotel captures a share of guests who are already there, deciding where to eat rather than whether to visit at all. Someone staying at the Omni for a Twin Cities Orthopedics appointment, a corporate training session at the CLA Connection Center, or a night before a Vikings home game doesn't need a reason to walk downstairs. A freestanding restaurant across a parking lot from the stadium needs something more. It needs a visitor who decided, on a Tuesday with no game and no museum tour scheduled, that this specific building was worth the drive.
Viking Lakes as a whole is built to generate exactly that kind of embedded traffic. The 200-acre campus totals more than 3 million square feet of corporate office, medical, retail, entertainment and multi-family space, including over 2 million square feet of professional and medical office alone, 160,000 square feet of retail, up to 1,000 multi-family apartment units and 320 hotel rooms. Most of the people moving through it on any given day already have a reason to be there that has nothing to do with dinner. A restaurant positioned to intercept that traffic may reach visitors already on campus, while a freestanding restaurant may need to attract people making a separate trip.
The Eagan City Council has approved the final phase of Viking Lakes' residential build-out, a plan that adds 814 dwelling units across new apartment buildings sited next to the campus's basketball, pickleball and tennis courts. The units would add households within walking distance of both restaurant spaces.
What's Changing at Viking Lakes
The Omni Viking Lakes Hotel is adding a new outdoor pool, spa and amenities area, slated to open in 2027. Copper & Rye is the second restaurant concept at the freestanding corner, described as an elevated comfort food concept with a craft cocktail program.
None of this predicts how Copper & Rye will fare. Trellis Hospitality already runs several suburban full-service spots in the Twin Cities, including Southern Social, Tamarack Tap Room in Woodbury, Barley + Vine in Lakeville and Woolley's Kitchen & Bar in Bloomington, and that experience with full-service suburban restaurants is relevant to an address that draws visitors for many different reasons.
For now, Copper & Rye occupies the same patio and the same 6,000 square feet where Lago Tacos opened in July 2025.
If Viking Lakes' next chapter has you thinking about what else is changing near your own corner of Eagan, Shelly Rae Linnell and the team at Your Home By Design track these shifts because they shape more than dinner plans. Reach out anytime to talk through what's next for your address.