The last several months have not been easy for Lake Street restaurants, to put it mildly. Businesses up and down the immigrant corridor suffered, with those at Midtown Global Market seeing 40% sales declines during Operation Metro Surge, according to the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal. Restaurants tell the Biz Journal that things are looking up, but that sales are still down from where they would be in a typical year.
So if you haven’t been to the food and retail hub in a while, maybe this would be a good opportunity to reacquaint yourself with Minneapolis’s proto-food hall—especially since Midtown Global Market has welcomed four new restaurants over the last six months.
Pizza Luna
You can get a lot of amazing food at Midtown Global Market—hell, you can get a haircut, a meditation rug, and your driver’s license renewed—but there hasn’t been a pizza place there since Slice Brothers departed.
Enter Pizza Luna, which celebrated its grand opening on February 27. The new pizza shop comes from Ary Ramirez, and her menu is full of classics (cheese, sausage, pepperoni) as well as specialty pies (dill pickle ranch, Hawaiian, buffalo chicken). These are big, floppy, triangular slices ($4.99-$5.49) with a crust that’s on the thinner side, just waiting to be popped into the oven; do you know what I mean if I call them “mall slices” (complimentary)? Gluten-free crust is available, and so are dairy-free cheeses. In addition to slices and 10-inch or 16-ich pies, they’ve got wings, mozzarella sticks, and salads.
Oh, and desserts! There’s a case full of parfaits, and we loved our fluffy slice of tiramisu cake ($6). You can also order large cakes, like this beauty, for special occasions.
7 Spices
Of the new Midtown Global restaurants we tried, 7 Spices emerged as an obvious favorite: simple, delicious, affordable.
Owner Sadiaa Hassan relocated to Minnesota in 2016, according to a press release from MGM, after operating a successful Somali restaurant in Portland (the Maine one) for eight years. She and her children run the restaurant, which had a home just up Lake Street inside Karmel Mall before opening here in March.
At $23 before tax and tip, 7 Spices bill would have been the best deal of the day even if the food wasn’t our favorite (which it was). We ordered nine sambusas—three beef, three salmon, and three veggie, all two bucks a pop—and a heaping platter of cumin-y rice ($5) and loved every bite. The palm-sized, perfectly golden-brown shells gave way to crumbles of flavorful beef and onion or soft lentils and spinach, and the accompanying house-made hot sauce, a minty green color that belied its serious heat, kicked those flavors into another dimension. The assertive seasonings sold us; we’ll be back for 7 Spices’ lamb and goat platters.
Trio Plant-Based
You might remember Trio Plant-Based from its original Lyn-Lake location, which closed in September after six years. Louis Hunter’s vegan restaurant is back, with a familiar menu of soul food bowls, sandwiches, burgers, salads, onion rings—honestly, the menu is pretty huge.
Racket’s vegetarian staffer is a fan of Trio’s wraps. This meat-eating Racket staffer sticks to their apps, particularly the cauliflower wings ($15), available tossed in buffalo, Trio BBQ, BBQ Sriracha, or lemon pepper seasoning. I’d skip the $15 Burger Mac on a return visit (just too many competing flavors and textures, between the BBQ sauce, diced pickles and tomatoes, ground Beyond burger, and crushed potato-chip topping) and go for one of the For Your Soul Bowls instead, which got rave reviews at Trio’s original location.
One nice thing about Trio? Their Midtown Global seating area is reserved for folks who’ve ordered from the restaurant, so there won’t be anyone chowing down on, say, a pulled pork sandwich or a plate of brisket in your vicinity, if you don’t want that.
Now, for those who do want something meaty…
Rollin’ Nolen’s BBQ
Rollin’ Nolen’s landed at Midtown Global Market back in November, but I must confess to sleeping on the BBQ newbie until this month. My bad: Sometimes a person needs a platter of fully loaded pulled pork fries, in the middle of the day, a need Nolen’s satisfies.
The family-owned BBQ truck got its start in 2016, selling food “tail gating style” with the help of a huge smoker attached to the back of an open trailer. Today, Nolen’s operates two food trucks, but the location inside Midtown Global Market is its first stationary restaurant.
Nolen’s mixes proprietary seasoning blends and rubs for its wings, tenders, burgers, and brisket. And it’s not all meat: Baked mac ‘n’ cheese, jalapeño poppers, and even some vegan options like a burger and cauliflower bites are all on the menu. So far, I’ve had only the hush puppies ($6 for 15 of ‘em!), served piping-hot, drizzled in honey, and deep-fried to crispy perfection. The only thing missing was a side of whipped butter for added Southern decadence.
