On the opposite side of the first floor, diners can find beloved Dinkytown pho staple Pho Mai’s second location, along with its sweet sibling, B ober Tea & Mochi Dough. The menu stars Chinese cuisine, and succulent, glistening ducks ready for your plate are on display. On the first floor, flanking the grocery store, is Hometaste, brought to us by the owners of Minneapolis's Hong Kong Noodle. The sprawling space has allowed many local favorite Asian business owners to open new locations. Not only a place for grabbing ingredients for your meal or your favorite Asian snacks, Asia Mall is also a destination for stuffing yourself to the gills with delicious food. A few unopened vendors haunted the top floor, namely the Korean hot dog joint CrunCheese, shaved ice dessert stand Snowbing, a hair salon, and a place to buy used cars, with a handful of open spots for leasing to other restaurants and services. The new mall’s ownership group proudly proclaims their goal of having all AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) identities represented under one large roof-and they’re well on their way. Natalia MendezĪlthough our visit was shortly after opening, some of the displays were already picked over, no doubt due to the overwhelmingly positive response from visitors. The meat section had tendon, tripe, and other tasty bits of offal, like tongue and beef aorta, perfect for soups and stews. On display, too, were harder-to-find seafood like conch, razor clams, and jellyfish. Here, behind a separate door, a tub full of live and wriggling blue crabs greeted us, along with tanks full of tilapia, live lobster, and a sign advertising eel though the tank was empty on our visit. Fresh bamboo, giant king oysters and tiny delicate enoki mushrooms, and thick pre-sliced pieces of purple-flecked taro root sat smartly adjacent to an entire display dedicated to hot pot seasoning and pre-sliced flash-frozen lamb and beef near the meat and seafood area. Many of my favorite staples-Thai curry pastes, fish sauces, dried mushrooms, and the requisite 25-pound bags of rice-were abundant, as the layout led to another fresh produce area and a corridor full of frozen whole fish and fillets. Pillars of dried noodles, tasty pickles, walls of ramen, and three rows of snacks were backlit by a long corridor of freezers full of entrees, durian and taro fruit pops, dumplings, and all of the steamed buns one’s heart desires. Behind the displays: aisles upon aisles aisles of grocery goods. The brightly lit center of the mall was open and reserved for registers with a few produce displays of fresh, spiny, toddler-sized jackfruit, pyramids of vibrant orange satsumas, melons, nuts, squash, and more. (Although I’d reserved Eventbrite tickets right at the noon opening hour, no one was checking them at the door.) Upon entering the two-story, 116,000-square-foot store, the first thing I noticed was the plaza-style layout. The Monday after Thanksgiving seemed as good a time as any to check out the much buzzed about new mall, and the smell of charred meat danced in my nostrils as I walked between stone pillars beneath the glowing red “Asia Mall” sign. RIP to the Gander Mountain, but I’d willingly trade more of them (and all of their fucking guns) for diasporic community malls like the new Asia Mall, currently in its soft open phase in the old GM space at 12160 Technology Dr. ![]() What Eden Prairie lost in hunting and fishing stores, it more than gained in delicious food experiences.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |