Midtown Global Market

Midtown Global Market is a year-round indoor market on East Lake Street in the Midtown neighbourhood that brings together food vendors, small shops, and event spaces from over 50 immigrant-owned businesses. The mix reflects Minneapolis's extraordinary immigrant diversity: Somali, Hmong, Mexican, Ecuadoran, Ethiopian, Tibetan, Vietnamese, and other vendors sell prepared food and groceries from a common hall in a restored Art Deco building.

The market is both a functioning food hall and a genuine community gathering place, especially for the East African and Southeast Asian communities that are concentrated in the surrounding neighbourhoods. It is the best single place to eat across multiple cuisines in one sitting, and the vendors selling grocery items — Somali spices, Hmong vegetables, Mexican dried chiles — are worth examining even if you are not cooking. Open seven days a week.

things to do market
A story
The market opened in 2006 in the restored Sears-Roebuck building on Lake Street — a 1928 Art Deco retail building that had been abandoned since 1994. The Sears building had an attached postal sorting facility where mail-order packages were processed; when the catalogue business declined, both facilities closed together, leaving the largest single abandoned building in the Midwest at the time.

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