For years, the old freight house running along Front Street held two different stories under one roof. Two Fathoms Brewing already had a working taproom there, a high-ceilinged space with exposed brick and a raised stage, itself a rebrand of an earlier operation called Island City Brewing Company at the same address, according to BeerAdvocate's listing. The rest of the building had most recently been Jefferson's Pub & Grill, and once that business closed, it sat renovated but mostly unused. Two Fathoms itself puts the freight house's construction at 1883. The Winona Freight Collective's own materials, and Visit Winona's listing, put it a year earlier, in 1882. Nobody downtown seems bothered enough by the discrepancy to settle it, which tells you something about how long this building has just been part of the furniture.
That changed in May. The Winona Post reported that two new food concepts, The Old Tiger and Café Zorya, opened inside the empty half of the freight house, joined by an event space called The Raven Room done up as a Victorian parlor. That empty half is now filled, and the whole building has a new collective name to match: the Winona Freight Collective.
One Building, Four Doors
If you have not been inside recently, here is what's actually running under that one roof now:
- Two Fathoms Brewing: the original tenant, small-batch beer brewed on site, the taproom regulars already knew.
- The Old Tiger: a sit-down restaurant leaning into the building's original era with period-inspired recipes and decor.
- Café Zorya: the daytime counterpart, coffee and food service for the hours before the brewery crowd shows up.
- The Raven Room: a Victorian parlor event space for the kind of gathering that needs a room, not just a table.
That is the actual shift worth naming. This was not a new restaurant opening in an empty storefront, which happens in any town most years. This was one existing business splitting its home into four distinct concepts, each with its own hours, its own kitchen or bar, and its own reason to walk through that door. A night out that used to mean picking one thing the freight house did now means picking which of four things you're in the mood for, without leaving the building.
Who's Actually Behind It
The people running the two newest pieces are not new to the region's restaurant scene, even if the concepts are new to Winona. The Old Tiger and Café Zorya are owned by Zoa Ryan and Peter Beard, who between them bring 45 years of restaurant, bar, brewery, and fine dining experience. Ryan told the Winona Post her mother owned a restaurant, and she was raised on scratch cooking. In December 2019, she and Beard opened a restaurant in La Crosse that did not survive the pandemic. They landed at La Crosse Distilling Co., where they met Graham Kaczmarek, who owns Two Fathoms Brewing with his partner Brook Merkwan. Kaczmarek is the one who eventually called Ryan about building something at the freight house.
Ryan's read on why she said yes was direct:
"I like so much of how good they already are, and like building the vibrancy of the building."
That is a former operator betting her own restaurant on someone else's beer program, which is a different kind of endorsement than a menu blurb.
The Building's Longer Backstory
The freight house did not get renovated on a whim. Back in 2023, developers floated plans for a hotel and apartment building on a long-vacant lot behind the Winona 7 Cinema, paired with a plan to renovate the freight house across Center Street, which at the time still held Jefferson's Pub & Grill, into a restaurant and event space. The city of Winona had wanted that parking lot developed for years, and other proposals for the site had come and gone without breaking ground. This year, at least the freight house half of that plan is finished and open. If you've watched that corner sit half-used for a while, the four doors now operating there are the payoff of a three-year civic wish, not a sudden discovery.
Meanwhile, Down at the Lake, the Band Is Down to One Wednesday
The Freight Collective's timing lines up with the opposite kind of story a few blocks away. The Winona Municipal Band, which claims the title of oldest continually performing city band west of the Mississippi River, has been playing free Wednesday concerts at the historic Lake Park Bandshell since 1924. This year's season runs June 10 through August 12, under director Levi Lundak, in a bandshell that seats more than 500 people on the edge of East Lake Winona.
The season did not start cleanly. Weather cancellations wiped out concerts through much of June, and the band ended up rescheduling its Independence Day program, celebrating the country's 250th birthday, to July 8 instead of July 1. However rocky the opening stretch was, the calendar still ends where it always ends: one Wednesday left after this week, with August 12 as the season's last concert before the bandshell goes quiet until next June.
So the same summer that gave the freight house three new doors is the summer that's closing out 111 years of Wednesday nights at the lake, on schedule, rain or no rain.
The Rest of the Month Is Counting Down Too
The freight house and the bandshell are the two biggest threads, but they are not the only things on a clock this month. No Name Bar's Silent Book Club, run in partnership with the Winona Public Library, meets the first Thursday of June, July, and August. That puts its third and final summer session on August 6, two days from now, at the bar's spot on East 3rd Street.
A few blocks over, Peter's Biergarten keeps its own rhythm going with Book Bingo nights run in partnership with the library, while the Blue Heron Coffeehouse hosts the first-Tuesday Laureate Writers Series. Back at the freight house itself, Two Fathoms Brewing's patio already runs a monthly Jazz Jam that rotates its nonprofit beneficiary, with June's edition benefiting the Elder Network. None of that is new this year, and that's the point: it's the baseline the freight house is now adding to, not replacing.
The Minnesota Marine Art Museum's Saturday gallery tours, thirty-minute guided walks through work inspired by rivers and water, are still running each week this summer as well, a quieter counterpart to the louder new energy on Front Street.
What the Pattern Actually Says
Put those threads side by side and the real story isn't any single opening or closing. It's that downtown Winona's oldest infrastructure, a 140-plus-year-old freight house and a bandshell that predates most of the buildings around it, is where both the newest business energy and the longest-running civic tradition are showing up this August, at the same time, a few blocks apart. The freight house didn't get busy because Winona suddenly needed another bar. It got busy because four different concepts decided the old building could hold all of them at once, on the same bet that a century-old band still draws a crowd on a Wednesday night even after a rained-out June.
If you already live here, you've probably felt this without naming it: the sense that downtown has more reasons to walk over on a random weeknight than it did two summers ago, even though nothing about the number of blocks changed. That's the actual shift. Not a new destination. A denser one.
If you're the kind of Winona resident who tracks what's happening in your own downtown, keep an eye on both of these countdowns this month. And if a summer like this one ever gets you thinking about what it would mean to put down roots closer to Front Street or the lake, Julie Delap knows this stretch of the Driftless Region well enough to talk through what's actually for sale near it, whenever you're ready for that conversation.
