When Frankie Celenza is home, hungry and doesn’t feel like cooking, relief can be found an elevator and an escalator ride away.
A faster-than-Grubhub trip lands him inside DeKalb Market Hall, a mix of sandwich shops and noodle joints that’s essentially in the basement of City Tower, Mr. Celenza’s Downtown Brooklyn rental building.
Yes, it can feel weird to live life under a single roof with the food hall, he said, but one-stop shopping is compelling.
“I sometimes would prefer to take a walk down the block,” said Mr. Celenza, 32, a chef and a host of an online cooking show. “But there has to be 1,000 things there to try. And it has something for everyone, so why not?”
Where developers once wielded yoga studios, wine cellars and pet spas in amenity wars, the food hall is becoming the weapon of choice these days.
Recalling the food courts of malls but with a homespun vibe and dimmer lighting, food halls are popping up in and around developments, which hope to use them to win over buyers and renters.
“They are absolutely a factor in marketing,” said Rohan Mehra, a co-founder of the development firm Prusik Group, which is building the shopping portion of Essex Crossing, the mixed-use mega-project on the Lower East Side.
At Essex Market, which has about three dozen vendors, shoppers can buy prepared foods as well as basic ingredients like spices, on display here at Essex Olive and Spice.CreditHiroko Masuike/The New York Times
Among the stores offered across the nine-building project is Essex Market, a food hall that relocated this spring from its decades-old home across Essex Street to the lower floors of the Essex, a 26-story rental on Delancey Street that has 195 units, from studios to three-bedrooms. Market-rate units, which make up half of the building, are about 80 percent rented after five months, said a spokesman for the project, whose developers also include BFC Partners, L+M Development Partners, Taconic Investment Partners and Goldman Sachs.
Remaining one-bedrooms at the Essex start at about $4,500 a month. Other Essex Crossing rentals are nearby, and more are coming.
With wide aisles, smooth floors and uniform signs across 37,000 square feet, the market’s design, at first glance, evokes a modern supermarket like Whole Foods. The orderly design is also a striking break from its former location, a jumble of vendors who sometimes seemed to be on top of one another.
But the place is more eclectic than an everyday grocery. Shoppers at the new Essex Market can choose Moroccan, Italian and Dominican dishes and pick up spices like turmeric by the ounce. More prosaically, a handful of bodega-style stores sell paper towels, aspirin and potato chips. On the second floor, there are free cooking classes in a glass-walled kitchen. On a recent morning, a half-dozen students learned “How to Store Leafy Greens” from instructors who addressed the group in English and Spanish.
Because it offers not just exotic meals but also basic supplies, Essex Market is a cut above a typical food hall, Mr. Mehra said. And its menu is poised to get much more expansive.
This summer will see the opening of the first phase of the Market Line, a sort of mirror-image of the Essex Market, with small groceries and hot-food stands — plus a concert hall, art galleries and a beer hall — but located below-grade, down a flight of stairs. The Market Line, which is set to be completed in 2020, is owned and operated by Essex Crossing’s developers. The city, meanwhile, owns and operates Essex Market.
The developers see the two markets complementing one another. “I think developers are coming around and realizing that people want an immediate ability to satisfy a daily need,” Mr. Mehra said.
Food halls, of which there are about two dozen in New York City, can fill glaring holes in the city’s landscape, like the western edge of Manhattan, a once-industrial area that still has few places to eat even as it has become more residential.
Acknowledging the deficit, GID Development Group is installing a 28,000-square-foot food hall from the international restaurateur Cipriani at Waterline Square, a three-tower rental-and-condo complex rising at Riverside Boulevard. Located in an angular and glassy building on West 61st Street designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, the Cipriani space will feature dangling charcuterie, a domed pizza oven and a tile-lined bar area, according to renderings. There will also be outdoor seating.
The food hall, Cipriani’s first, will be open to the public, but Waterline residents will have a leg up, with access through a special locked door from the lobby. And residents of the other buildings can travel through an underground concourse to an elevator that will drop them right inside.
Cipriani can also deliver daily “breakfast baskets” to apartment doors in the complex, said James E. Linsley, GID’s president.
At Waterline, rental units are stacked below the condos in each of the towers. Condos and rentals also have different layouts and lobbies. All told, Waterline offers 868 rentals, ranging from studios to four-bedrooms, 599 of which are market rate. Leasing starts this summer.
Mr. Linsley declined to share market-rate rents but said they would be “at the upper end of what that market has seen.” Across Manhattan, the average rental price in April was $4,200 a month, according to Douglas Elliman Real Estate.
The food-hall aesthetic has also found its way into grocery stores, as at Hudson Market, which anchors Helena 57 West, a rental on West 57th Street owned by the Durst Organization.
While by most measures a standard supermarket, a stone wall and a distressed picket fence — both inside — channel the rough-edged décor favored by food halls. The distinct stations for sandwiches and rice bowls also seem copied and pasted.
A new twist on a grocery store also seems at play at One West End, a condo-and-rental building next to Waterline Square, where Morton Williams, the supermarket chain, is planning an outpost. Like at Cipriani, patrons will be able to sip glasses of wine and relax at outdoor tables.
“It’s just another option,” said Mr. Linsley. “This area hasn’t attracted the food and beverage options it deserves.”
Developers weren’t always so keen to have restaurants downstairs. Evening noise and unpleasant odors were longtime concerns. Plus, an artisanal dumpling shop has a much higher risk of failing than, say, a deep-pocket bank branch tenant.
But as retail stores struggle, developers may have no choice but to adapt. Besides, new buildings have much better venting these days, said Thomas Brodsky, a partner at the Brodsky Organization, which developed City Tower, Mr. Celenza’s address. “Food smells are less of an issue now,” Mr. Brodsky said.
The City Point complex has three residential towers above DeKalb Market. In late May, the 440-unit City Tower building had three vacancies, all studios, starting at $2,725 a month. Not all food halls attract the same clientele. Some, like Chelsea Market and Gansevoort Market, both in the Meatpacking District, seem to thrive on tourists. But Building 77 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which opened last fall and has Russ and Daughters but is still sparsely populated, appears to function mostly as a place where yard employees can grab lunch.
Still, it’s not inconceivable that the yard’s Wallabout neighborhood, a bit of a food desert, will now be much more appealing to developers, brokers say.
Berg’n, a food hall that opened in 2014 in Crown Heights, serves barbecue and hosts DJs on Friday nights, and has contributed to the neighborhood’s gentrification, residents say. Rentals a few blocks away cite it in their marketing materials.
Some food halls have struggled with high turnover, like Gotham Market at the Ashland, a 586-unit rental from the Gotham Organization in Fort Greene. The 16,000-square-foot space, which originally had just a smattering of tenants, saw several close in 2018, a year after the food hall opened. Among the larger departures was Boqueria, a sit-down tapas restaurant, last winter.
Some of the closings had to do with internal decisions and not the location, said Phil Lavoie, Gotham’s chief operating officer. He also noted that vacancies have been filled. A new presence at the Ashland is Bolivian Llama Party, a savory-pastry maker that made a name for itself at Turnstyle Underground Market, a worker-oriented food hall at the Columbus Circle subway station in Manhattan.
“Some concepts aren’t as successful as operators plan, and I think there is a built-in turnover in the food-hall space anyway,” said Mr. Lavoie, who was also speaking about Gotham West Market. The 15,000-square-foot space, which in many ways put the Gotham West rental complex on the map, is considered something of a food-hall pioneer.
But since it opened in 2014, about 75 percent of its vendors have left, Mr. Lavoie said.
Still, restaurateurs appear willing to give food halls a shot. A branch of Corner Bistro, the West Village burger joint, will open there this summer, he said, joining other new businesses. “I think it’s a good thing,” Mr. Lavoie said of the changes. “You don’t want to have the same thing over and over again.”
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