The building at 6130 Sycamore Lane North looks like a grocery store from the parking lot. Walk in and it behaves like five restaurants that happen to share a produce department. That distinction matters if you live nearby, because the way most Plymouth households are still describing the place four months in — "the new Coborn's" — undersells what actually opened on March 12, 2026.

The anchor of The Boulevard redevelopment at I-494 and Bass Lake Road is Coborn's first metro-area store, and the company has been calling the format a "grocerant" since before the doors opened. Inside are three fast-casual counters from Minneapolis chef David Fhima, a bakery-and-brunch counter from a former Food Network champion, and an ice cream parlor built around Kemp's and dirty soda. The right way to read the room is as a decision, not a destination: which counter, for which night of the week.

Here is how each one earns its keep.

Basta Pasta, when someone at home says "I don't feel like cooking"

Basta Pasta is the Italian-leaning concept inside The Global Table, Fhima's three-restaurant footprint at the store. It is the counter that most cleanly replaces a mid-week takeout habit. Pasta travels well the short drive from Sycamore Lane back to neighborhoods around Bass Lake, Parkers Lake, or the Wayzata school corridor. The kitchen is fast-casual, which means the wait is closer to a Chipotle line than a sit-down Italian room, and the components on the menu are also sold as raw ingredients elsewhere in the store. That last piece is the interesting one. If a family likes a dish, they can buy the same pasta and sauce two aisles over and reproduce a version at home the following night.

Abuela's Mexican Kitchen, the counter for a house full of kids

Abuela's is the second of Fhima's three concepts, described by the company as Mexican cuisine rooted in family traditions. For Plymouth households running two schedules and a soccer practice, this is the counter that handles the pickiest table. Tacos, rice, beans, and salsa are the compromise dinner that ends most arguments, and they hold heat in a paper bag better than almost anything else on the property. Orders can be placed in-store or online at theglobaltablemn.com for dine-in or carryout, which is the piece worth memorizing if you are trying to shave ten minutes off a Tuesday.

Brother's Burgers, the Friday-night default

The third Global Table concept is a gourmet burger counter. It is the one that will most often show up as an alternative to driving into Wayzata or down 494 for dinner out. A burger is also the item on the property that benefits most from the store's outdoor dining setup, which is open seasonally. Between roughly Memorial Day and the first cold Friday of fall, this counter plus the patio is a legitimate substitute for a casual sit-down meal, without the reservation friction.

The Buttered Tin, the reason to change your Saturday morning

This is the counter most likely to rewire an existing habit. The Buttered Tin is founded and run by Alicia Hinze, a former champion on Food Network's Cupcake Wars, and the Plymouth store is her third location after outposts in northeast Minneapolis and St. Paul. Both of those locations have spent years on Twin Cities brunch shortlists. Getting scratch-baked pastries and a scratch-made breakfast without driving to Central Avenue or downtown St. Paul is a genuine change to what a Saturday morning in Plymouth can look like. Hinze framed the expansion around wanting to "become part of the neighborhood," and the counter-service format with food delivered to the table is designed for exactly the kind of drop-in traffic that a Saturday generates.

The practical read: if a household currently drives past two closer coffee shops on weekends to reach a specific bakery, the calculus just changed.

Penny Horse Parlor, the after-Hilde stop

Penny Horse Parlor is the in-store ice cream shop, built around Kemp's ice cream and dirty soda. It is small, and on paper it is the least ambitious counter in the building. In practice it is the one most likely to become a summer routine, because it slots directly into the trip home from the Hilde Performance Center, from a Medicine Lake evening, or from a game at Bass Lake Playfield. The Hilde's summer concert schedule already pulls hundreds of families through Plymouth Boulevard on weeknights. Penny Horse turns the drive home into a stop.

The pattern to watch is not any single counter. It is that five distinct culinary reasons to leave the house now share one address, one parking lot, and one set of hours.

The rest of the building, in one pass

The food is the story, but a handful of adjacent services are why the store will end up on more weekly errand routes than any single restaurant would justify on its own. Worth knowing:

• Coborn's Wine & Spirits, a curated selection of wine, spirits, non-alcoholic beverages, and THC products, attached to the same trip.
• Mulberry's Garment Care pickup and drop-off, which absorbs a separate errand that most west-metro households currently run somewhere else.
• An on-site fuel kiosk, worth a rewire only if you are already stopping.
• A performance stage and small playground inside the concept, which is the piece that turns a grocery run into something a family might extend rather than shorten.

None of these on their own justifies the drive. Stacked, they explain why the parking lot has been full at times that grocery parking lots usually are not.

How to think about ordering

Two things about the operational model are worth internalizing before your third visit.

First, the counters are independent. You order at Basta Pasta, at Abuela's, at Brother's, at The Buttered Tin, and at Penny Horse separately. A family that wants a burger for one kid, tacos for another, and pasta for the adults ends up at three counters. That sounds like friction. In practice it is the reason the concept works, because it lets each counter cook to its own strength rather than compromising into a single menu.

Second, many components on The Global Table menu are for sale as groceries in the same trip. That is the mechanic that separates this from a food court. A Wednesday night takeout order can double as a research trip for Thursday's home dinner, and a Saturday morning at The Buttered Tin can end with a bag of the same pastries in the cart on the way out.

Where it fits in Plymouth's summer, right now

The store opened in mid-March. What that timing means, four months in, is that the summer 2026 stretch is the first real test of how the room performs on the nights Plymouth families are actually free. Outdoor dining is open. The Hilde is programmed through August. Beach and trail traffic at West Medicine Lake Park and along the Medicine Lake Regional Trail feeds directly into the corridor. The nearest Wednesday farmers market is a short drive across town.

The interesting question for residents is not whether the food is good. Early counts of cars on a weekday evening suggest that answer is settling on its own. The question is which existing routines get quietly replaced. A brunch that used to require a drive across the river. A weeknight takeout order that used to come from a chain. A dry-cleaning drop that used to sit as its own separate stop on the calendar. Each of those substitutions is small. Together they are the mechanism by which a new anchor becomes a default one.

Four months is early. But this is not the kind of opening where residents are still deciding whether it is worth trying. It is the kind where they are deciding which counter is theirs.

If you have questions about how The Boulevard is reshaping the everyday economics of living on this side of Plymouth, or about anything else happening in the west-metro market this summer, Aaron Lowe is glad to talk. Let's Connect.