"There are not too many places in White Bear where you can go sit down, have a beer, have a hot dog and watch local games." That's what Connor Podewils told a reporter this spring, explaining why his family opened a restaurant instead of just talking about opening one. He and his brother Logan Neal, both graduates of White Bear Lake Area High School, had noticed the same gap in downtown's dining scene for years. Nobody filled it until they did.
That single sentence says more about how this town eats than any list of restaurant openings could. White Bear Lake doesn't wait for a chain to notice the opportunity and build a location here. When something is missing, a family that grew up here builds it themselves. And when a homegrown business outgrows the town, it doesn't get bought out by an outside group. It takes the White Bear Lake name somewhere else.
This September gives you two live examples of that pattern, plus a full calendar of events built by the same instinct.
The gap a family filled
Bear Dogs opened this spring at 1595 County Road E East, and the origin story reads like a family project rather than a business plan drafted in a boardroom. Logan Neal and Connor Podewils co-manage it, backed by their parents Ryan and Nicole Podewils. Ryan isn't new to running a business in this town. He opened Pods Tires and Wheels with his father back in 1995 and sold it just last year, which means the family already understood what it takes to build something that lasts here before they ever touched a menu.
The restaurant leans hard into that "sports hangout" identity Connor described. Black and orange walls, jerseys on display, a bear painted on the wall greeting you at the door. It's also shown up where you'd expect a business built by locals to show up: teaming with White Bear Lake boys and girls lacrosse to provide food at tailgates. That's not a marketing tactic borrowed from a franchise playbook. That's two brothers feeding the same teams they used to play for.
The institution that's expanding outward
While Bear Dogs was filling a gap inside White Bear Lake, a much older local name was making the opposite move. Donatelli's, the pizza and pasta spot at 2692 County Road E East that started in 1976 as what its own website calls a "hole-in-the-wall pizza joint," announced in early August that it's opening a second location in Bloomington. The exact address and opening date hadn't been shared as of the announcement, but the timeline points to September.
Fifty years is long enough for a restaurant to become part of a town's identity rather than just a place to eat. Donatelli's is choosing to carry that identity outward rather than staying put or selling to someone who'd change the name. The original County Road E location isn't going anywhere. This is White Bear Lake exporting a piece of itself, not diluting what's already here.
Put those two stories side by side and you get the actual thesis, not just a coincidence of timing. This town's food scene doesn't grow by importing what's already popular somewhere else. It grows by families noticing what's missing and building it, and by long-running local spots reaching a size where they can share what they built with people outside town limits. Either direction, the source is the same: people who already live here.
The calendar runs on the same logic
If you want proof this isn't just true of restaurants, look at how the entire September calendar downtown got built.
Marketfest, the Thursday night series that just wrapped its 36th season on July 30, ran on more than 130 vendors according to the city's own event page, nearly all of them local merchants, food trucks and craft sellers rather than national brands paying for booth space. It's the kind of event that only works because enough small operators show up every single week for seven weeks straight.
Now that Marketfest is done for the year, the next two events on the calendar aren't corporate-sponsored festivals bused in from outside. They're organized by the same community infrastructure that put Marketfest together in the first place.
Saturday, September 12, 2 to 5 p.m. is the Taste of White Bear Lake, hosted by the local Rotary Club. Proceeds fund local scholarships, youth leadership programs, community events and environmental initiatives, which means the money raised by sampling downtown food stays in downtown's own institutions rather than flowing to a national charity headquartered somewhere else.
The final weekend of September brings Fall Fest, organized by White Bear Lake Main Street Inc., a nonprofit run by board members who own businesses directly downtown. The event has run every year since 2018, and this year's lineup includes:
- The Scarecrow Stroll, running September 26 through 28 from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., where downtown storefronts build scarecrows and shoppers vote for their favorite
- Polka & Pumpkin Painting on September 28 from 1 to 4 p.m. at Railroad Park, at 4th Street and Highway 61, with free pumpkin painting for kids while supplies last
Past years have seen shop owners lean into the Scarecrow Stroll as a chance to show off their own personality. A downtown clothing store built one scarecrow around a Golden Girl and another around Beetlejuice, according to Main Street's treasurer, using vintage stock from their own racks as costume pieces. That's a business advertising itself through a community event rather than paying for a billboard.
What this actually means if you already live here
None of this is a reason to buy or sell anything. It's just a more accurate read on why downtown White Bear Lake feels different from a strip of chain storefronts you'd find in a dozen other suburbs.
The businesses filling gaps here tend to be run by people who graduated from the same high school as their customers. The businesses expanding outward tend to keep their original address intact rather than treating it as a location they've outgrown. And the events drawing people downtown in September are organized by the same merchants whose storefronts you're walking past, not a festival company hired for the weekend.
If you're planning a Thursday dinner out now that Marketfest tables are packed away, Bear Dogs is worth checking for a hot dog and a game on the TV. If you haven't been to Donatelli's in a while, this is the month to go before its attention splits across two cities. And if you want a reason to walk downtown twice in September, the Taste on the 12th and the Scarecrow Stroll at the end of the month both give you one.
That's the actual shape of a White Bear Lake September. Not a town waiting for outside investment to notice it. A town that keeps building its own food scene and then, occasionally, decides to share it.
If you or someone you know is thinking about a move in or around White Bear Lake, Reidell-Estey & Associates can walk you through the neighborhood in more detail, whether that means a free home valuation or a straightforward conversation about what's for sale right now.
