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…