New shops and restaurants coming to MSP airport

The Twin Cities International Airport is heading for a retail makeover. Airport staff are poised to make recommendations for a refresh of dozens of shops and restaurants next week, most of them in Terminal 1.

Detailed recommendations aren't public yet, but airport staff say they want to offer more opportunity for local businesses, ethnic food and combinations of food and entertainment, among other things. They'll be talking about their recommendations at a Metropolitan Airports Commission committee meeting on Monday.

The airport authority rebids its commercial space about once a decade. There are about 130 different locations in the airport, and 50 of them were put out for proposals this year, most of them newstands, convenience shops and regular retailers. About 20 will be food and beverage establishments, and most of the locations are inside the secure passenger area.

"It's the biggest bulk of the retail that we have at MSP," said airport spokesman Patrick Hogan. "So for example, in Terminal 1 there's an airport mall, and right now that mall is almost exclusively retail except at the very ends, where you have some restaurants. And all of those retail establishments were part of this proposal."

The locations were broken out into 14 different packages, so that bidders couldn't only select the highest traffic and most lucrative locations in the airport.

"We identified the kinds of concepts we want," Hogan said. "We didn't identify brand names, but just kind of what we were looking for. Intimate apparel for women, for example, was one of the concepts we were looking for. Others could be a music venue combined with a restaurant. So then it would be up to the proposer to identify the exact concept they wanted to put in there."

Other concepts include a wine bar with limited food service, a 24-hour sandwich shop, a "food truck alley," a craft beer bar, and a nationally-branded sports bar.

The MAC is scheduled to consider the recommendations and potentially approve bidders in August. The shops and restaurants involved could start build-outs as soon as October, and venues could open late this year or early in 2016.

The airport's food and beverage offerings are scheduled to get a refresh in 2017.

"This doesn't happen very often," Hogan said. "It's going to be a major shift for the kinds of opportunities that are available to people when they come to MSP."