The two-story brick building at 4636 Colorado Street SE went up fast this past year. Yellow brick, black metal accents, floral art panels along the storefront glass, the kind of ground-up commercial construction that tends to get talked about in a city where a new sit-down restaurant is still news. Manny Perez opened Chula's Mexican-Latin Food & Spirits inside it on May 22, and the building filled up with families, first dates, and regulars almost immediately.
What's easy to miss, unless you were paying attention to city council business last year, is that nobody at the development company picked the building's name. The city did, by asking residents to submit one. Three hundred sixteen people sent in nearly 900 different suggestions. A judging panel that included builder Dan Stanley, Chula's owner Manny Perez, and Mayor Kirt Briggs picked the winner: Railhead Building, submitted by Prior Lake resident Lauren Fries.
A railhead is the end point of a rail line, the spot where cargo used to move off the tracks. The name is a direct nod to the Milwaukee Road railroad, which once ran through Prior Lake and hasn't in a long time. So the newest, most modern piece of construction in downtown Prior Lake, the one with the mezzanine bar and the projector screen and the custom cocktail menu, ended up named for infrastructure that disappeared before most of the people who voted on it were born.
That's not a coincidence worth shrugging off. Prior Lake has grown from 15,917 residents in 2000 to 29,780 in 2025, according to the city's own economic development page, nearly doubling in a generation. A city adding that many new households doesn't automatically hold onto its own backstory. The fact that almost 900 name ideas came in for one commercial building suggests plenty of residents, new and longtime, wanted this particular corner of downtown to say something about where the town came from, not just what's for sale inside.
A Contest Over One Word
The building sits where T-Shirts & More used to be. Perez and his business partner Dan Stanley, who runs Stanley & Wencl Construction, bought the property and demolished the old structure to make room for something built for restaurant use from the ground up. Groundbreaking happened in late May 2025, with construction running through the winter into a spring 2026 opening. Somewhere in that stretch, the city opened up the naming contest and asked for submissions that reflected Prior Lake's history and its momentum as a growing community, a phrase that does a lot of work when you consider how much of downtown Colorado Street looks nothing like it did five years ago.
Fries's winning entry beat out the other 899 submissions because it did both things the contest asked for. It pointed backward at a railroad most current residents never saw running, and it gave a brand-new building, designed by architecture firm Tanek with a two-story layout and multiple tenant spaces, a name with some weight behind it instead of a developer's placeholder.
What Opened Inside
Chula's is the anchor tenant, and the restaurant carries its own family story layered on top of the building's. Manny Perez has been in the restaurant business for 35 years, including a run owning 16 Subway franchises at one point. He still owns four Subway locations in the area and was named the Small Business Administration's Minnesota Minority-Owned Small Business of the Year in 2024. Chula's is his first full sit-down concept, built with his partner Suzie Dahl and his daughter Mercedes Dahl. The name itself is a family nickname, chosen in honor of Perez's granddaughter, Sawyer.
The menu leans into that Mexican and Latin American identity without over-explaining it: walleye tacos with pickled cabbage and lime crema, a Topopo Salad loaded with pulled chicken, refried beans, and fried leeks, tequila and mezcal flights, and a light lager brewed specifically for the restaurant by Boathouse Brothers Brewing, finished with a hint of chili pepper. Upstairs, a mezzanine level was built with a large projector screen and velvet curtains, nicknamed the Jalisco room, meant as a private gathering space overlooking the main dining floor.
Mayor Briggs had a simple read on why this mattered to the city beyond one new business. Community surveys, he said at the groundbreaking, kept coming back with residents saying they wanted to see more restaurants downtown. Chula's answered that directly, and it did it inside a building the community had a literal vote in naming.
The Corridor Around It
None of this happened in isolation. The stretch of Highway 13 and Colorado Street that Railhead Building sits on has seen steady commercial activity over the past few years, part of a broader physical shift in downtown Prior Lake that's easy to track if you drive through often enough. A County Road 21 and Highway 13 roundabout near downtown wrapped up construction after roughly two years of work, changing how traffic moves through the area Chula's now anchors. New construction, new traffic patterns, and a building named for infrastructure that no longer exists are all happening on the same few blocks at the same time.
That combination is worth sitting with for a second. A town growing this quickly could easily let its older references fade out in favor of whatever's newest and shiniest. Instead, when the city had a chance to name a brand-new, architecturally striking building anything at all, hundreds of residents pushed toward something that pointed backward. The railroad the name honors isn't coming back. The building that carries its name is doing a version of the job the tracks used to do, giving people a reason to end up in the same place.
Chula's already has more community events on the books this fall, each one filling a room named for train tracks that disappeared long before most of the city's current households arrived.
If you've noticed other new construction going up around Prior Lake and found yourself wondering about the story behind it, that's exactly the kind of question West + Main Homes MN likes fielding over coffee. Let's Connect.
