Dragon Star was IMHO a fairly typical local Asian supermarket until about a year ago when they pretty much doubled the size of the store. My guess is that it's now the largest Asian market in The Cities, though United Noodles is not very far behind and the St. Paul Shuang Hur (at least; never been to the Minneapolis one) is pretty good sized, too. (I'm interested in seeing what Ha Tien does with the old St. Paul Byerly's.)

Dragon Star offers a wide variety of Asian produce, meat and fish, lots of frozen prepared items, and tons of groceries. They must have 15 brands of fish sauce on the shelf (not counting bottles actually labeled patis, etc.). They also carry a wide variety of Latin, Indian, and African ingredients, a curious assortment of American products (apparently provisioned by SuperValu), cookware, some gifts, and a relative smidgen of to-go food.

In my experience, the produce has always been good, they're good about keeping expired stuff off the shelves (a challenge, it seems, in much smaller stores), the store is reasonably clean, and the prices are good. I've had a couple of misses in the meat/fish department (stuff that should have been pulled despite the expiration date on the package). But Dragon Star has become my go-to Asian market unless I need something *very* cuisine-specific (for instance, Kim's carries a wider variety of kimchi).

Without doubt a recommended trip for anyone interested in cooking Asian food. Maybe not worth the drive from Lakeville by itself, but well worth an hour or so of your time next time you've got some time to kill in St. Paul.

Used to be on Chowhound this would be one of the more animated threads of the year. Sad.

We went last Saturday. We rounded up the reviews from both big local papers and another foodie site to winnow out the skippable items. I had:

- the Sheep Dog (from the lamb booth in the Food Building); very tasty. The quinoa serves more as garnish than anything, but the other key ingredients are all present in good proportion;
- a bacon-wrapped jalapeño corn dog from a booth on the former Machinery Hill (while trying not to think about how they could add bacon and jalapeño to a corn dog and charge only 50 cents more than for the unadorned version); and
- finally, the kimchi and curry poutine from Rabbit Hole -- a middling amount of kimchi and some Japanese-style (sweet-ish) curry sauce atop some (consumer-grade) french fries and melted cheese. I would have done better with the Carpe Diem, which generated long lines and got unanimously-positive reviews but we'd just gotten out of the Dairy Building and I wasn't in the mood. n.b., this is one of the vendors that switches out at mid-Fair.

Mrs. Sisp had walleye on a stick and an ice-cream (soft-serve, I think) cone at the Dairy Building. Familiar and fine considering the surroundings. She was looking for cheese curds but we ended up leaving the Fair before we trekked over to one of the stands.

On a side note, I was surprised to see booths selling roasted turkey legs at $12 (well, I guess they were selling). We passed Bridgeman's trailer but did not see anyone indulging in the $25 Lalapalooza. I suppose even Fairgoers have their limits.

Not to create too big a tangent within this thread, but -- for me, at least -- one of the chief attractions of Hy-Vee is their customer service. Some of that comes with size: room for multiple brands/types of items in which almost every other store offers one or maybe two choices; a very extensive prepared-foods section; lots of stores-within-the-stores (coffee, bank, dry cleaners, florist, etc.; not always my go-to stores, but convenient none the less). I will ding Hy-Vee (*hard*) for carrying only pork that is "injected" (odd in a store with an organic/natural section bigger than a few local coöps). I can't speak to the quality of the beef, not having purchased any there. So maybe the meat is not their highlight.

But, beyond that, every time I've been in a Hy-Vee, every employee has been friendly and genuinely helpful. No "I think it's in aisle 4" and a head-nod in that direction. And it seems genuine (not part of the "corporate friendliness script", as one recent ad puts it).

They're the kinds of thing at which Byerly's, in particular, once excelled. And they manage to do it without L&B's sky-high prices -- prices not much above Cub's, which also have increased beyond the value they offer.

I still shop there, but not often and only when it's very convenient.

I think L&B once led this market by quite a distance -- but they're getting tired and the other runners are catching up or even passing them. Back in "the day" (80s/90s) there were free-standing specialty shops for fish and beef and ethnic groceries; there were co-ops for organic/sustainable/whole food; and there were farmer's markets in summer. But no one had it all in one place except Byerly's. Lund's came close -- but they usually were in older, smaller stores that lacked the room for the selection and amenities Byerly's offered. No other grocery chain in town had home economists and monthly magazines and coffee shops and olive bars and extensive takeout and half an aisle of mustard (!). The SLP store WAS a showplace with its chocolate shop and cooking classes and artwork.

But then things started moving ... out. The restaurants -- which could have been a showcase for products shoppers could take from the shelves and prepare on their own -- are pretty much (if not totally) gone. The home economists are gone. Some of the stores (at least St. Paul and Golden Valley) went too long between freshenings and started looking dated and dowdy (broadloom carpet in the detergent aisle was a bad expensive idea). The fancy-packed food (olives, etc., in ornate glass containers) disappeared.

Byerly's had one or two early but abortive attempts at home delivery and never sold it very well to customers who now are quite happy to pull up to Hy-Vee or shop Coborn's Delivers. Byerly's was late to house-branding and the bigger profit margins it can bring. New products and services rarely seem class-leading now as other chains already offer them. IMHO the whole Lund's/Byerly's branding merger burned a lot of energy and money and they took their eyes off the ball.

Today, the Kowalski mini-empire has grown and Hy-Vee has started moving in. Whole Foods and Fresh Thyme (?) and Trader Joe's are here. There are a dozen food co-ops in town. Shoppers have choices, many of which offer prices lower than L&B (even at BOGO). I don't see Lund's & Byerly's trying to maintain a lead anymore. They're simply reacting to the market and hoping they stay up front: I was in the Eagan L&B a couple of months ago. They were remodeling. It's not one of their older stores. But there's a Hy-Vee going up just down the road. Guess what the remodel looks like? Yup.

I live near the Brewery. This neighborhood is changing. It's no Mac-Groveland or Crocus Hill, but it's much less working-class than it was 5-10 years ago. There *are* people right in the neighborhood with spare money for fancy food and many more within walking or short driving distances. We're also about a mile (walk or a short bus ride) from big downtown St. Paul attractions like the Ordway, Xcel, and CHS Stadium and many people attending events at those venues have spare money.

Besides, there's no rule that says all the food has to be fancy: there already are a couple of long-time coffee houses here and the proposed farmer's market can offer "normal food for normal people".

I'm very much looking forward to this development. I think it will be successful for reasons that go well beyond the neighborhood.

If you're not married to eating at three- and four-star sit-down restaurants, there are some cuisines not easily found elsewhere which are well worth the visit.

One is Hmong food, which relates closely to Thai food. A trip to one of the Hmong Marketplaces in St. Paul will be like a couple-hour vacation somewhere far far away from the Midwest. Since menus at the food court will include more-standard fare like grilled pork ribs and fried chicken pieces, your partner should not go away hungry. If you'd prefer a sit-down restaurant, Cheng Heng in St. Paul offers a Cambodian menu, friendly service, and good prices. Eat with as much daring as you like.

The other cuisine is eastern African. Meals are largely stew-like with "normal" ingredients like beef, string beans, tomatoes, and so on, often served on a spongy flat bread called injera. Tear off a piece of injera and scoop up what you want to eat. The restaurant Fasika, in St. Paul, is a very good provider of the food and a lot of the ambience that the culture has.

No reservations taken and none likely needed. Eat when you wish. :-)

Paul J refers to a section found in many stores in the metro, typically in the ethnic-foods aisle, of Mexican ingredients in cello bags with (IIRC) yellow and red paper labels. Without doubt, anchos and arbols would be found there.

I've seen these sections in Cub stores, larger Asian supermarkets, and random others. You might try your nearest Cub store first. They're plentiful and easier to navigate.

Failing that or a stop at an Asian supermarket (I don't live on that side of town anymore so I can't recommend), Penzey's for sure has them, though if you don't live near Lakeville you'll have to venture to Uptown Minneapolis.

I suspect restaurants like La Belle Vie are suffering on multiple fronts.

As sandylc points out, people are embracing a less formal lifestyle. Dressing up and "inside voices" are not as common as they used to be. That doesn't bode well for restaurants like LBV.

I also believe many people are still wary of the economy. It's not hard for a couple to drop $50 on dinner at a fairly ordinary restaurant. The kind of money it costs to provide the food and service of a LBV is one or two orders of magnitude beyond that. And that may just be too much money for special occasion celebrants to spend on an few hours of an experience. The number of restaurants which can survive at that level in this area is finite and I think we're beginning to see that.

We've been there a couple of times as someone else's guests.

By the standards by which we judge Asian buffets (quite different from our standards for sit-down restaurants), it's quite good. Maybe we were lucky both times. But Miyavi offers a far wider array of foods than your typical "Great Golden Moon Bowl" buffet: stirfries, soups, sushi (mostly rolls and nigiri with thinnnnn slices of fish), pho, dim sum, salad, and a few "American" dishes for the truly challenged. :-)

Normally that is not a recipe for success, but (admittedly without having tried everything) Miyavi seems to avoid the breading that is twice as thick as the food it encapsulates and the uniform soy-garlic-cornstarch sauce on which so many buffets seem to rely. It's also cleaner than many Asian buffets we've visited (from the perspective of picking up dropped food and spills on the serving tables). About the only thing we can ding them for is that the label on the sneeze guard (when it's present) often does not match what's in the tray.

To paraphrase another product's ad, we don't always eat at Asian buffets, but when we do, we'd visit Miyavi.

I've been on the beta site for a while.

I think there's a lot of wasted space on this site, but I'm not a mobile-browser reader like, apparently, most of the rest of the world. I wish the feed on the right of this page covered stuff I actually cared about -- right now it's offering four threads from the Los Angeles forum, which I have never tagged or probably even looked at. Seems to me that with limited screen real estate you'd want to make sure that what *was* visible was useful to the reader.

But in periodically reviewing the post on the the beta-feedback thread, I think Chow got this design concept into their head and almost nothing short of total failure was going to deter them. So I can take it or I can leave it. For now I choose to take it. But it would not surprise me to miss threads or responses because the format makes it more difficult to see activity on threads.

I don't think that's an accurate statement, either. Certainly many of the new items which have been written up are moving past $8-9. But there still are plenty of very popular items (cheese curds, beers, corn dogs, lots of "-on-a-stick") which cost nowhere near that much.

I am of the belief that we're going to see a few changes in Fair food before any vendor cracks the $10 mark for a food item. Either the portions will get smaller or expensive ingredients/labor will diminish/disappear or they'll move to a base-with-extras pricing model. Right now I think $10 for a single item is a psychological barrier vendors don't want to cross.