A birthday in Minneapolis usually comes down to a restaurant reservation and a hope that the table is not next to the kitchen door. Here is the alternative: a night inside a Gilded Age mansion, built around one thing you actually do together — a candlelit mansion tour, a haunted trolley ride, a murder to solve — with a speakeasy-style bar to start in, a private club room to keep the group together, and a dining room that serves smashburgers and cheese curds under four-hundred-year-old oak. This is how to put a birthday night together at the Pillsbury Club, using only the pieces you can book today.

Step one: pick the experience the night is built around

The Pillsbury Club is a private club open to guests with a reservation, and admission on any given day is for guests holding a ticket to a tour, event or experience that day (the full rules are on our club policies page). That is not a hurdle for a birthday; it is the point. Choose the thing your birthday person would actually pick from our experiences and tours: the guided mansion tour through the imported English rooms for the history lover; the Candlelight Ghost Tour aboard a vintage trolley that is itself said to be haunted, for the one who wants a scare; the Murder Mystery trolley for a group that likes a game (we wrote up how that night unfolds); a psychic reading or a paranormal ghost hunt inside the mansion for the birthday person who wants a story to tell on Monday; or, for an adults-only crowd, the Thunder Down Under show. A birthday is the rare occasion when everyone will go along with whatever the guest of honor chooses, so let them choose.

Step two: arrive early and use the bar

If your experience is a trolley tour, the Club opens an hour before your scheduled departure (see our hours page), and that hour is the birthday party. The cocktail lounge pours Minnesota beer — Grain Belt Premium and Surly Furious — alongside wines by the glass, a list of gins, vodkas and rums from Bombay Sapphire to Belvedere, and, for the non-drinkers, Onward THC seltzers in five flavors. The dining menu is deliberately unfussy, the kind of food a table shares while it argues about who is going to sit next to the ghost: Great Northern cheese curds, State Fair pretzel bites with gouda dip, Lake Street nachos, funnel-cake fries, and two smashburgers. Our guide to what you can eat and drink at the Club has the full menu; the short version is that nobody boards the trolley hungry.

Step three: book the Emerald Suite for a group of up to ten

For a birthday group that wants a room of its own, the Emerald Suite is the answer: a private second-floor club room with lounge seating, reserved for guests before or after their mansion tour, and sized — the Club’s own page says it plainly — for up to ten guests “celebrating a special occasion.” It is where the cake can appear, the gift can be opened, and the one friend who always gives a speech can give it without the rest of the bar listening in. We covered the room in detail in our Emerald Suite post; book it at the same time as your experience. Larger groups have another option: the vintage trolley itself can be booked privately through Minneapolis Trolley Tours, which leaves from our front door.

The practical details that make a birthday easy

Parking is complimentary — free street parking where permitted, plus a designated guest lot directly across the street — and rideshare drop-off is at the front entrance, so the designated driver can be a Lyft (details on plan your visit). The whole property is smoke- and vape-free, indoors and out. Before or after, the Pillsbury Club Market on site is the place to find a last-minute Minnesota-made gift if you forgot one, which someone always has. And if the birthday falls in December, the Club is where the holiday lights trolley boards — a BYOB ride through the best-lit neighborhoods in the city is a birthday present that happens to come with its own transportation.

Make it a weekend

Out-of-town friends, or a milestone worth more than one night? Our sister property 300 Clifton, a Georgian mansion in Loring Park with a garden hot tub and a private movie lounge, has written its own guide to a birthday weekend at a historic mansion, and its direct-booking guests receive a $20 Pillsbury Club dining voucher to spend here. Between the two houses you can tour one mansion, sleep in another, and still ride a haunted trolley in between. The house itself has a story worth a toast — Charles S. Pillsbury built it in 1916 and filled it with rooms from Tudor England, all told in our History Journal — but on a birthday night the history is the backdrop, not the assignment.

Pick the experience, reserve the suite, tell us it is a birthday. Reserve your night at the Pillsbury Club — the mansion has been throwing parties since 1916, and it has not forgotten how.

Keep reading: Did the same architect design both mansions on the Minneapolis Gilded Age Mansion Tour? Edwin Hewitt, 300 Clifton and the Pillsbury Mansion