For most of the last decade, the parking lot ringing Northtown Mall told you everything you needed to know about the place. Rows of empty asphalt. A building that opened in 1972 as one of the busiest, biggest malls in the Twin Cities and had spent the years since fading into the kind of spot you drove past, not to. That changed this summer. On the soft-opening weekend at the end of May, cars filled those same lots before 9 a.m., and by the June 13 grand opening, Mayor Tim Sanders was cutting a ribbon in front of a crowd that had already been lining up for hours.
The reason is Asia Village, a food hall, grocery, and entertainment space that took over the two-story space inside Northtown Mall once occupied by Becker Furniture Outlet. Mall owner Felix Reznick called it a source of "exponential new life" for Northtown, and after two months of steady crowds, that's looking less like opening-day optimism and more like an accurate read.
But the interesting part of this story isn't that a new food hall opened. It's that Asia Village exists specifically to fix a problem that regulars at its sister location in Eden Prairie had been living with for years.
The Eden Prairie problem, solved with bigger hoods
Asia Village is the second project from Michael Bui, the Twin Cities restaurateur behind Pho Mai and Keefer Court Bakery, who partnered with the owners of Eden Prairie's Asia Mall to build a version of that concept twenty miles north. If you've eaten at Asia Mall, you already know its limitation: most vendors ran tight, five-or-six-item menus because the kitchens simply weren't built to support more.
Bui addressed that directly during a hard-hat tour of the Blaine space back in March, while construction was still underway. "There's more refrigeration, more storage, bigger hoods, so each tenant is going to offer a full-blown menu versus maybe five or six items," he said. At 120,000 square feet, Asia Village runs about 25 percent larger than its Eden Prairie predecessor, and that extra footprint went straight into kitchen infrastructure rather than more seating or more stalls.
This is the detail that gets lost in most coverage of the opening: Asia Village isn't a new idea, it's a corrected one. The vendor list reflects that. Some names are proven imports carrying real followings from Eden Prairie. Others are brands making their first appearance in Minnesota altogether, now with the equipment to serve full menus from day one instead of scaling up later.
What actually made the cut
Eleven restaurants and food vendors opened with Asia Village, split roughly three ways:
- Making their Minnesota debut: 85°C Bakery Cafe, a Taiwanese chain opening its first Upper Midwest location inside Asia Village, along with OneZo Boba, also from Taiwan and known for making its bubble tea from scratch daily, and Hokkaido Ramen House.
- Already proven at Asia Mall in Eden Prairie: Sot House, from the team behind St. Paul's Mirror of Korea, Oday Creamery, known for Asian-inspired ice cream flavors sold through preorders, and Mochi Dough, all bringing an existing fan base north to Blaine.
- New concepts and local expansions: Pho Mai Express, a counter-service version of Bui's sit-down restaurant built around build-your-own banh mi and pho, Chingu Fried Chicken expanding from its Burnsville Center location, and two concepts exclusive to Asia Village, Sidewalk Steakhouse and Poke Bowl.
Only one restaurant runs full table service. Spice and Smoke Korean BBQ and Hot Pot occupies the second floor on its own, while every other food vendor operates as fast-casual counter service, a layout choice Bui made deliberately so the space could turn tables quickly during the kind of crowds it's already seeing.
The draw has extended well past Blaine. Two customers quoted by CBS Minnesota on opening weekend, Esther Monson and Sadie Roberts, both drove in from Coon Rapids. Cheryl Oquist made the trip from North Branch, close to ninety minutes away, telling a reporter she'd been reading about the Taiwanese bakery for weeks. And two sisters who showed up for the grand opening found out just how early is too early.
"We feel so dumb," Rose Yang said, laughing, after she and her sister Duo had waited outside the doors for almost three hours starting at 8 a.m., only to watch the mall stay quiet until the ribbon-cutting officially began.
For Yang, the wait was worth it. As she put it, anyone on the north side of the metro looking for Asian groceries, food, and shopping in one place no longer has to make the drive south to Eden Prairie.
More than a food court
The name undersells what's actually inside. A 25,000-square-foot grocery store sits alongside the food hall, stocked with produce, seafood, specialty meats, and pantry goods imported from across Asia, the kind of selection that previously meant a drive to Eden Prairie or further into Minneapolis. Beauty Lab, a Japanese and Korean cosmetics shop that first opened inside Asia Mall, has set up its second Minnesota location here as well.
The building also holds an 11,000-square-foot indoor playground with climbing structures and slides, aimed at families who want somewhere for kids to burn energy between orders of ramen and boba. An arcade on the second floor rounds out the entertainment side, and the space includes an event venue for private bookings, a use case that fits neatly into a mall built with wide, open corridors and few natural constraints on square footage.
Good to know before you go
Asia Village runs daily from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. now that the grand opening has passed, a stretch longer than the limited 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. hours during the two-week soft opening in late May and early June. If your first visit was during that window and you found half the shops still setting up, it's worth a second trip now that everyone is running full hours.
Parking has not been an issue. Given how much of Northtown Mall's lot sat empty for years before this opening, there's plenty of room even on the space's busiest weekend afternoons, unlike the tighter Eden Prairie location where finding a spot near Asia Mall's entrance can take a few extra minutes.
One space in the original vendor lineup was still being finalized as construction wrapped up in the spring, so it's worth checking in person if you're chasing a specific cuisine that wasn't on the initial list. Everything else opened as planned.
The bigger picture for Blaine
What's happening at Northtown Mall right now is a genuine reversal, and it's driven by something more specific than a general appetite for new dining options. Asia Village succeeded at fixing a real, named complaint from an existing customer base, then built the physical capacity to prove it. That's a different story than most mall redevelopment news, and it's part of why families are driving from Coon Rapids, Shoreview, and towns as far as North Branch to eat there on a weekday afternoon.
If you live in Blaine, you already have a new answer to the question of where to go this weekend. If you're the kind of person who tracks what a neighborhood is actually like day to day, this is the sort of change worth watching. New draws like Asia Village tend to reshape how a community spends its evenings and weekends, long before they show up in anyone's spreadsheet.
That's the kind of local detail our team pays attention to at The Paul E Team, because knowing a place well means knowing what's opening at the mall as much as what's listed for sale. If you ever want to talk about what's happening in Blaine, Andover, Coon Rapids, Ham Lake, or anywhere else in Anoka County, we're happy to share what we know. Contact Us anytime.
