For years, the anchor space at the north end of Northtown Mall sat dim. A Becker Furniture Outlet had come and gone in the old department store shell, and the two-story box collected the kind of retail silence that makes a mall feel like it is closing rather than continuing. That silence broke this summer.
Asia Village, a food pavilion, grocery store, shops and entertainment venue at Northtown Mall, held a soft opening on Friday, May 29, 2026, followed by an official grand opening on June 13. If you live off Ulysses, or drive Highway 65 for groceries, or have kids who need somewhere to burn energy on a rainy Saturday, the address at 301 Northtown Dr. NE has quietly become one of the most useful buildings in the city.
What Actually Opened On June 13
The space measures roughly 130,000 square feet, split across two floors of the old department store. The first floor is counter-service and grocery. The second floor holds the sit-down restaurant, the playground, and space marked for future entertainment tenants.
Here is the vendor lineup as of the grand opening:
| Vendor | Floor | Concept | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|
| 85°C Bakery Cafe | 1 | Taiwanese bakery and coffee | Minnesota debut |
| Hokkaido Ramen House | 1 | Japanese ramen | Minnesota debut |
| Pho Mai Express | 1 | Vietnamese, build-your-own | Counter-service spin on the local Pho Mai |
| Sot House | 1 | Traditional Korean | From the team behind St. Paul's Mirror of Korea |
| Chingu Fried Chicken | 1 | Korean twice-fried chicken | Second Minnesota location after Burnsville |
| Oday Creamery | 1 | Asian-inspired ice cream | Local outfit's first storefront |
| Spice and Smoke | 2 | Korean BBQ and hot pot | The full-service anchor upstairs |
Sot House comes from the team behind Mirror of Korea and serves traditional Korean fare, while Chingu Fried Chicken, the Burnsville Center eatery specializing in Korean twice-fried chicken, is opening its second Minnesota outpost here. The counter-service mix reads less like a mall food court and more like the East Metro's answer to Eden Prairie's Asia Mall, which is not an accident. Co-owner Michael Bui, a local restaurateur behind Pho Mai and Keefer Court Bakery, has teamed up with the owners of Eden Prairie's Asia Mall for the project.
The Playground Is The Point
The food gets the headlines. The playground is what will actually change how families in Blaine spend their weekends.
A more than 11,000-square-foot indoor playground with climbing areas, slides and other amenities is part of the lineup at Asia Village. That is a serious footprint. For context, most of the pay-to-play indoor gyms scattered around the northern suburbs run a fraction of that size. A sizable game room with arcade games and claw machines is planned as an addition, alongside retailers including a grocery store with live seafood, a gift shop and a beauty supply store.
The practical read for a Blaine parent: you now have a place three miles from most east-side subdivisions where a five-year-old can climb for an hour, a teenager can eat ramen, and someone can pick up live seafood on the way out. Bringing all three under one roof, in January, is the kind of Minnesota-winter amenity that shifts weekend routines.
Northtown Was Fading. Now It Isn't.
This is where the story turns into something larger than a food hall.
Northtown Mall spent most of the last decade shedding anchors. Big-box exits are not unique to Blaine, and the mall's slow drift toward vacancy followed the same script that hollowed out Rosedale-era retail across the metro. The Asia Village project takes the largest empty box in that shell, a former department store most recently used as furniture outlet space, and converts it into a use case malls were never built for: a destination that pulls traffic because it is a mall, not in spite of one. Parking is free and abundant. The corridor already funnels 65 and 10 traffic past the door. The two floors of ceiling height that made the space useless for a modern retailer are exactly what a food hall and a two-story playground need.
For homeowners on the west side of Blaine, particularly the neighborhoods that grew up around Northtown in the 1970s and 1980s, this matters. The commercial spine you drive to for errands is no longer trending down. That is a quiet but real amenity story, and it is the kind of shift that shows up in appraisal comps over the following three to five years as buyers stop discounting proximity to Northtown and start valuing it.
The Other Gravity Well: 105th Avenue
While Northtown was reinventing itself on the west side, the east side has been building a second commercial center from scratch.
The two-story dual concept Pizza Pub and Prime opened as part of the new National Sports Village, the restaurants, shops and community sports hub next to the National Sports Center. Prime is not a run-of-the-mill suburban steakhouse. The restaurant received the Golden Bull Kobe Beef Association certification, which allows access to highly marbleized beef from elite farms in Japan; Prime is currently the only place in Minnesota with the certification, with only 32 across the country and the next closest location in Chicago.
That certification is a small detail with a large signal. Fine-dining operators do not chase certifications like that unless they believe the traffic will support the check average. The city's own planning documents confirm the direction of travel. The proposed 105th Avenue development includes a Scheels Sporting Goods store, a full-service hotel with restaurant, food hall, sports and entertainment uses including golf entertainment, a year-round pickleball facility with a restaurant, a multi-function stadium, parking, housing, professional office space and public gathering spaces. The National Sports Center is installing 10 new lighted turf fields on the east side of the campus adjacent to the new development.
Blaine now has two commercial magnets pulling from opposite ends of the city. Northtown is being reanchored as an everyday-use hub. National Sports Village is being built as a tourism-and-entertainment hub. The neighborhoods in between, which used to feel a little marooned between Highway 65 and the airport, are suddenly closer to more than they were a year ago.
The Rest Of The 2026 Opening Wave
If Asia Village and Pizza Pub and Prime were the only two 2026 stories, Blaine would already have had a busy year. They are not. A partial list of what has opened in Blaine since spring:
- Cava, the Mediterranean fast-casual chain, at 12351 NE. Ulysses St., its first Minnesota location alongside a second store near the University of Minnesota
- Stella's on 97 at 4365 Pheasant Ridge Dr. NE, a second location for the Forest Lake restaurant serving burgers, wings, steaks and pasta
- Cairo Café at 772 County Hwy 10, an Egyptian coffee shop serving kunafa cups and other Middle Eastern desserts
- Hibachi Grill & Sushi at 12341 Aberdeen St. NE, a family-owned fast-casual with hibachi and handcrafted sushi
- Minnesota's first ProteinHouse, in the retail complex surrounding the National Sports Center, serving high-protein bowls, wraps and stacks
Cluster that list on a map. Ulysses. Aberdeen. County 10. Northtown. 105th. The openings are not concentrated in one corridor. They are spreading across Blaine's arterials, which is what commercial density looks like when it starts to compound rather than sprinkle.
A Quiet Weekday Visit
If you want to see Asia Village before it gets discovered by the rest of the metro, weekdays after 2 p.m. and before 5 p.m. are the current window. Weekends since the grand opening have run heavy, and 85°C in particular tends to hold a line during peak hours because it is one of only two Minnesota locations for the Taiwanese chain. Parking is easiest at the north entrance of the mall, which puts you at the food hall side rather than the retail concourse.
Rooting Homes To A Changing Map
Commercial change reshapes where people want to live before it reshapes what they pay. When a mall stops fading, when a full-service hotel and a pickleball complex go up next to the National Sports Center, when a Kobe-certified steakhouse opens where you used to drive to Roseville for one, the map underneath your address quietly redraws. If you are curious what the last twelve months of openings mean for your specific block, or you are weighing a move within Blaine and want to understand which corridor is going to feel different in three years, Maisa Olson offers a free valuation consultation grounded in appraisal-level neighborhood research. Book a conversation when you are ready to see your home the way the next buyer will.
