On November 14 we ran a Buzz news brief about the cheering fact that a Saint Paul neighborhood had made Travel and Leisure magazine's list of the dozen best neighborhoods in America for ethnic food. Our very own Frogtown was included in a grouping that highlighted legendary neighborhoods like Brooklyn's Russified Brighton Beach and the pan-Arab little Beirut in Dearborn, Michigan.

 The list, it should be noted, was not without controversy. One angrily incredulous commenter on T+L's website complained that not a single neighborhood in the San Francisco Bay Area had been included, while a brand-new Chinatown in Las Vegas had been. (He also marveled that a "Minneapolis" neighborhood was on the list. One can only sigh.)

A Little Correction

To locals who know Frogtown, T+L's welcome tribute was in need of a little correction. "Minneapolis and St. Paul are home to 30,000 Hmong, the largest community outside of Southeast Asia," says the article, "and their restaurants are clustered along University Avenue in the Frogtown neighborhood."

Their restaurants is the ambiguous phrase here, since it could suggest that University Avenue is chockablock with eateries that specialize in Hmong delicacies. But St. Paul foodies know that great places like Cheng Heng, Trieu Chau, and Bangkok Thai Deli serve the food of the majority cultures in Cambodia, Viet Nam, and Laos/Thailand, respectively, and Hmong specialties are rarely on the menus there.

Of course, our Hmong fellow citizens flock to these restaurants, and Hmong culture itself has been so heavily influenced by that of the places in Asia where the Hmong live—Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, southern China—that the line between Hmong and non-Hmong food and food tastes can't be drawn too strictly.

There are indeed a couple of places to find echt-Hmong food on University, but they are hidden away—the Destiny Café offers favorite items like Hmong sausage, pork belly, and Hmong-style pho noodle soup; it's in the Sunrise Mall, a cluster of Hmong businesses at University and Chatsworth, and can only be accessed from the rear of the building, through the Sunrise  Asian market. There are a few Hmong specialties, too, in the modest deli in the Sun Foods Asian market at University and Dale.

But the two powerhouse locations are Hmongtown Marketplace, on Como at the northeast corner of Frogtown, and Hmong Village, on Dayton's Bluff. These two vast markets have, along with a dizzying array of Southeast Asian goods of all descriptions, multi-kitchen food courts where you can get an authentic taste of the Hmong homelands.

Pho-zzerias

And then there are the pizzerias. Tipped off that two pizza joints on the Eastside also served Hmong specialties, I just had to go—that kind of cultural fusion is too twenty-first-century to resist. The results? Mixed.

I tried the door at Checkerboard Pizza on Arcade Street and when it wouldn't open, a stylish parka-clad young woman standing nearby informed me that the place didn't open till four PM. So I fastened my own parka and took a walk down the street to kill a little time, noting that Checkerboard was attached to a bar—Checkerbar. Clearly, this was a nightlife-type operation—pizza with your beer, pizza for those midnight munchies.

Coming back at 4:05, I discovered that Checkerboard was a tiny takeout-only spot whose big red pizza/sub/burger/gyros menu had some additions penciled in: Chicken Alfredo, pho, laab salad (cooked or raw), Hmong sausage, papaya salad. Opting for the one 100 percent Hmong item,  the sausage, I ordered it with rice, which turned out to be the sticky white (not purple) variety. The sausage was bland, the rice dry; I got the sense that the wise choice here was pizza.

But Palace's Pizza, way over east on Maryland Avenue at Phalen Parkway,  was a different story. It's the closest I've come to that archetypal foodie discovery, the great little unknown ethnic place in the drab strip mall. (The mall where Palace's is located is practically sub-drab.) Inside, the narrow, nine-table-plus-counter place isn't much cheerier to look at, but the lively conversation of the all-Hmong clientele lifts your spirits, and—well, the papaya salad I had was simply beautiful and delicious. I ordered purple sticky rice on the side, and that chewy specialty was better than the version I ordered at Hmongtown Marketplace a while ago.  Pho (rice-noodle soups) seasoned the Hmong way are on the menu too, along with Thai dishes and, of course, all of the usual pizza combos.

These adventures whetted my appetite to learn more about Hmong food in the Twin Cities from somebody who really knows. Watch this space for some expert advice on where to buy and what to try.