Stephanie Fox

I was searching for a certain Chinese grocery store near Rice Street in St. Paul when I spotted the sign: "Golden Karen Grocery." I thought I might have read it wrong, so I did a U-turn and pulled into the parking lot. I’d read it correctly. I hadn’t known that there was a Karen grocery in the Twin Cities. As it turns out, there are two of them. I’ll visit the second one in the future.

On a recent visit, Asian Direct Oriental Market, a little mostly Vietnamese and Cambodian store in Richfield, was filled with customers, even as the sky was filled with April snowflakes.

Sunday is the busy day at Good Deal Oriental Food, an Asian store with a little extra. Located in North Minneapolis’s tornado alley (they were slightly damaged in the big one two years ago) the grocery store, carries ingredients from all over Asia. But, unlike most Twin Cities Asian grocery stores, Hmong foods are the star here. Opened in 2000, Good Deal carries a number of items that are sometimes hard to find, and people come from all over to buy the special ingredients.

Friday’s sunny skies and relatively warm temperatures made the annual Planned Parenthood Good Friday Solidarity Day easier for the several hundred people who attended. This was the first time the event, to support abortion rights, birth control and women’s health, was held at the new Planned Parenthood flagship health center in St. Paul.