From tacos to tortas to camel burgers to barbecue, you can find plenty of incredible food at Midtown Global Market. But one thing you can't find among their globetrotting offerings? A pizza place.
That'll soon change, with the recent announcement that Slice, which only opened its first location about six months ago, is readying to open a second at the Global Market.
Jessie Higgins of the Neighborhood Development Center (NDC), which owns Midtown Global Market, says they'd actually been looking for a pizza concept for quite a long time. Slice made sense, not just because they have great pizza, "but also, they're very community driven, community focused, which is everything that the Midtown Global Market is about," Higgins tells Racket.
(You may remember that during the Minneapolis teachers' strike, Slice was one of the handful of local restaurants that showed support for striking teachers, offering free slices to educators who flashed their badges.)
On the Slice side, "Things have been going really well, and we really needed it, business-wise," says Hosie Thurmond, who co-owns the pizza shop with friend and business partner Adam Kado. "We're working in a really small space in our Northeast location. Like, our whole kitchen is really only 300 square feet."
The catering side of Slice's business has really ramped up—when we spoke on Wednesday afternoon, they'd just wrapped up a 35-pizza order for Southwest High School staff. Preparing those big orders while handling walk-ups, takeout, and delivery at the same time... it's been a lot.
So the Midtown Global location won't just bring their pizza to a new group of hungry Minneapolis residents, but it will give them much more room to work with, kitchen-wise, almost like a "ghost kitchen" that also belongs to them. As a bonus, they're heading for an area that doesn't have a ton of pizza places, especially shops where you can just walk in and grab a slice. (Higgins says Slice is not moving into the recently vacated Hot Indian Foods location, but another spot in that central food court area that's been vacant since about the start of the pandemic.)
And because it's not quite enough to open a second location across town just six months after opening your first one, Thurmond and Kado also have some big stuff in the works at their place in Northeast.
Not long after opening Slice last year, their building suffered a fire. People rallied around them in support; many donated to a GoFundMe that was set up to help them start slingin' slices again quickly.
"People really, really supported us on that," Thurmond says—like, to the tune of $25,000. The had some money left over after repairs, "so we thought, what better to do with the money than reinvest it in our space and create an outdoor community space that looks a little bit better and a little more copacetic to the vibe?"
They're in the process of building out that space right now, adding tables, benches, and greenery, and if their permits are approved, they'd like to have a big block party for the new community gathering space/Slice patio come Memorial Day weekend. Not long after, they'll celebrate the soft opening of their Global Market location—look for it the week of Juneteenth.
