George Dayton came to Minnesota in 1881 to sort out some troubled real estate investments and ended up staying for the rest of his life. By 1902 he owned a building at Seventh and Nicollet in downtown Minneapolis and a department store inside it called Goodfellow’s. In 1903 he put his name on the door. Dayton’s Dry Goods Company had begun.
Sales grew every year from the start. The downtown building expanded eight times over the following decades. By 1946 the original six-story corner store had grown to twelve floors and three-quarters of an entire city block. The Dayton brothers helped open the nation’s first enclosed shopping mall at Southdale in Edina in 1956, then spread to Saint Paul, Rochester, the suburbs, and eventually had stores in forty-one states. The Dayton name disappeared from retailing in 2001, nearly a century after George put it there.
For generations of Twin Cities families, though, Dayton’s wasn’t a corporate entity. It was where you went for good clothes, where your grandmother took you to lunch, where the eighth floor turned into something magical every holiday season. You didn’t just shop at Dayton’s. You went to Dayton’s.
Part of what made it a destination rather than just a store was the food. By the mid-twentieth century, Dayton’s had built a genuine dining culture across its locations, with restaurants that drew people in for reasons that had nothing to do with what was on the sales floor. The 12th floor of the Minneapolis flagship was where it all started.
The Sky Room
In 1947 Dayton’s in-house architect Robert Hansen designed two dining rooms on the 12th floor of the downtown Minneapolis store. One was for women. The Sky Room arrived with slate grey walls, floor-to-ceiling windows, a curvaceous white ceiling, lush draperies, state-of-the-art indirect lighting, and eight Waterford chandeliers. A Minneapolis Tribune critic called it unequaled by any restaurant of its type in the country. It became, as its own menus put it, the public’s penthouse.
By the 1970s the lunch crowd had shifted. Working women on tight schedules replaced the leisurely shoppers, and the Sky Room adapted with express lunches and a 40-foot salad bar. The chandeliers came down and went into storage. Some ended up on the sales floor. The glamour faded but the elegance held on until the very last day of service, January 27, 2017.
The Oak Grill
The Oak Grill opened alongside the Sky Room in 1947 as the Men’s Oak Grill. Women weren’t welcome in the room without a male companion until the late 1960s. Dark oak paneling, dim lights, and a centuries-old fireplace brought over from England gave it the feel of a private club. One regular ate lunch there nearly every day for fifty years and lived to be 100 years old.
Families with children knew to order from the children’s menu with favorites like chicken and mashed potatoes named “Little Miss Muffet,” a burger and fries called “Little Boy Blue.” And then there were the popovers that originated at the River Room in Saint Paul, served hot from a napkin-padded basket and meant to be eaten immediately. The Oak Grill closed after nearly seventy years, when Macy’s shuttered what had been the Dayton’s flagship.
The River Room
The River Room actually predates Dayton’s involvement in Saint Paul. It opened in 1947 at Schuneman’s, one of the city’s oldest department stores. When Dayton’s bought Schuneman’s in 1959 and eventually moved across Wabasha Street into a new five-story building, the River Room came with it.
In 1971 a manager named Robert Johnston, known to everyone as Mr. J., arrived and introduced the popovers that would make the River Room famous. The eggy, airy rolls spread from Saint Paul to the Sky Room and Oak Grill and eventually every Dayton’s location in the Twin Cities. Those popovers became one of the most requested recipes in Twin Cities dining history… ever. The River Room served its last popovers on February 1, 2013.
The Mall Restaurants
When Dayton’s expanded into the suburbs, the restaurants came along. At Southdale in Edina, the restaurant opened with the store in 1956 as the Valley View Room, became the Boundary Waters in 1985, and eventually the Lakeshore Grill in 2004. Ridgedale in Minnetonka opened in 1974 with the Oak Ridge Room, which went through the same naming journey. The Rosedale location had the Bubbling Kettle, Brookdale had the Brookdale Inn, and the Saint Paul store eventually added the Iron Horse alongside the River Room.
The menus were reliably, comfortably the same across all of them, Caesar salad, meatloaf with mashed potatoes, wild rice soup, chicken potpie, chocolate-mint ice cream pie. And popovers, always popovers. The Lakeshore Grill at Southdale and Ridgedale were the last to go, closing quietly during the pandemic. A sign at Ridgedale thanked customers for their patronage and apologized for the inconvenience. It was a very Dayton’s way to say goodbye.
Recipes from Dayton’s
Looking for a recipe?