On Tuesday I posted a brief writeup of our recent lunch at Hmongtown Marketplace in St. Paul. Lunch was only part of our visit. We spent as much time after the meal walking around the market and buying vegetables etc. If you’ve never been to Hmongtown Marketplace, you should know that the market sections are by far the largest part of the space. The larger part of the market is indoors, in two large warehouses/sheds that sit on either side of a central outdoor space. This outdoor space has stalls selling clothes and cds/dvds and also a large green market. During the height of the growing season, this green market is filled with produce sellers (there’s also live poultry available); currently, it is filled with vendors selling vegetable and plant starters—and if you’re a home gardener, you should go check them out this weekend. There’s also a green market indoors all year around, and this part of the market is already on the go. In other words, you don’t need to wait another month to go vegetable/fruit shopping here. Go now. 

Given how much time it’s taken me to resize all these pictures, I’m not going to do much here beyond two slideshow walkthroughs of the market. First up, the outdoor area.

Outdoor and Green Market

This is coming up soon: June 23-24. Alas, we will be out of town then.

Lots of things being sold out of cardboard boxes.

It’s hard to beat this market for starters for South East Asian vegetables and herbs.

Not all vegetables and herbs though

Behind the outdoor plants section is an entrance to the indoor green market where you can buy lots of fruit and veg.

Indoor Markets

And now for the indoor market. The building with the larger food court (the one in which we ate) has a lot of shops in it, but there may be even more in the other building, which also has a few eateries as well as a butcher counter.

Lots of clothes on sale.

As always, I wondered about the market for non-white mannequins in the US.

Goat milk shower cream

Also medicine-related, I think…

This is the other building. We went in looking for this Nigerian restaurant but couldn’t find it.

Lots of other shops though.

That’s not actually it for this visit to Hmongtown Marketplace. I saw on this trip a store I’d never noticed before (perhaps it is new) and I’ll report on it separately in a few weeks. I don’t mean to be mysterious: it’s a Nepali store and one of the few places in St. Paul for South Asian groceries.

Coming up next week on the food front: a fine dining report from Minneapolis.