Downtown Rochester restaurant to pull the plug on its popular breakfast as hotel becomes a college dorm

Jeff Kiger, Post-Bulletin, Rochester, Minn.
·2 min read

Sep. 28—ROCHESTER — A popular downtown Rochester breakfast buffet option will soon be off the menu as a hotel transitions into a student dormitory.

Pescara

, which is based on the street level of the DoubleTree by Hilton hotel, announced this week that it will no longer offer breakfast and its award-winning weekend brunch as of Oct. 1, 2022. However, the 13-year-old restaurant will still serve lunch and dinner.

"With all the changes happening in the Rochester downtown landscape along with the DoubleTree Hotel, we would like to assure our loyal longtime guests and friends that we are continuing business as usual," wrote Pescara General Manager Luke Johnson on social media.

This move is part of

the overall "evolution" of the building

at 150 S. Broadway Ave., which will soon no longer be a hotel.

Andy Chafoulias' Titan Development & Investments, which owns the property, signed an agreement earlier this year to

lease nine floors to the University of Minnesota Rochester

to use about 200 rooms to provide 400 freshman student housing beds as well as gathering, dining and recreational space.

The lease starts in August 2023.

Under the agreement, Titan would provide "a full-service dining program for three meals a day, seven days a week during the academic year."

The end of the hotel means the end of the need to offer a daily breakfast. Providing breakfast was part of the corporate requirements as the

hotel transitioned from the Radisson brand to DoubleTree

in 2009.

The Nova Restaurant Group

, which also owns the nearby Chester's Kitchen & Bar and Terza, opened Pescara in 2009. Pescara replaced the

Radisson's Metro restaurant and bar

, which had operated on the hotel skyway-level.

Soon after Pescara opened,

Rochester Magazine named its weekend brunch

as the best in the city with its gouda hash browns as its most popular dish.