Mack-Cali Enhances Harborside Dining Experience with New Food Hall, Local Restaurants
All of the food vendors being added at the District Kitchen food hall at Harborside in Jersey City are local companies with roots in the community, says Mack-Cali's Michael DeMarco.
JERSEY CITY, NJ—Mack-Cali Realty Corporation is making significant investments in new food and drink amenities to ensure that its Harborside office development in Jersey City helps foster the feel of a destination neighborhood, cultivating a unique arts, dining, and lifestyle scene while harnessing the distinct character of Jersey City and its world-class river views.
An integral aspect of the transformation of Harborside is the creation of a retail and dining corridor between the Exchange Place and Newport PATH stations, says Michael DeMarco, Mack-Cali’s chief executive officer, in an exclusive interview with GlobeSt.com.
“It’s a major commuting route,” he says. “The ferry, the light rail, and the PATH are all attached to the building. So if you’re commuting in and out of New York, shooting back and forth through the neighborhood, you’ll likely get off at this site. So you could pop in, grab something and take it home with you, have something to eat real quick. And we also only used local entrepreneurs. No one’s a franchisee, nothing’s a company store. It’s all local people in the food business, who live locally, who work here.”
Mack-Cali is curating a variety of locally inspired dining and shopping options for Harborside, high-end grocer, gourmet coffee shop and other experiential retail to the neighborhood.
“When we first took over, there was an old cafeteria, vintage 1980, a bar where people drank behind a wall at lunch, and another kind of rummy bar at the end of a hallway that was really for back office workers,” says DeMarco. “We got rid of the two bars, put in a kind of hip restaurant run by a pair of New York entrepreneurs, added a bunch of different pop ups, and let them circulate for a while, to figure out which ones work. And we built a food hall around them that has 15 positions in it, about to go to 17 when we expand it. We’ll do about $5 million in sales, and it has every option you can think of, organic cuisine, everything from Indian to sushi to vegetarian burgers barbecue, kimchi.”
Restaurants currently in place in the 30,000 square-foot glass atrium food hall include: Salt + Seed, Angry Archies, Canteen to Go, Belgian Plate By Waffle It & Co., Pizza Vita, Kimchi Grill, Enfes, Tidal Poke, Modcup, Little Sushi Shop, Left Bank Burger, and Ani Ramen.
Harborside also includes a recently opened restaurant from celebrity chef Leah Cohen.
The recently opened Lutze Biergarten serves as the city’s premier outdoor venue for drinks and live entertainment, attracting residents from Jersey City and beyond. Two or three more restaurants will be added along the water, says DeMarco. A boat dock is being built for dining patrons who are sailing the Hudson River and want to stop for dinner or drinks, he says.
Harborside’s six class A office buildings, which span 4.3 million square feet along the waterfront, also are undergoing an extensive capital improvement program.
Hallways and office entrances are being uniquely revamped, with materials reminiscent of Harborside’s industrial past, collaborative workspaces.
Integrated workspaces are being incorporated throughout the buildings; walls are also desks, tables are also informal meeting spaces, and everything is connected by Wi-Fi.
“We’re spending almost 50 million bucks on redoing the space,” DeMarco says. “People love the building, when you walk in you’ll see a certain vibe that you don’t see anywhere else in New Jersey.”
Harborside’s anchor building, Harborside 1, will be completely reskinned to create floor-to-ceiling glass walls on the east-facing side.
“There’s more density, and connectivity,” DeMarco says. “People want to be able to do things at lunch, so we have wi-fi that’s exponentially hyped up, so if you want to run your workplace off a bench downstairs, we have the bandwidth to do it. So you’ll find that people bring their laptops, iPads, phones, conduct business, and go back upstairs.”
Harborside is also home to Jersey City Urby, an unmistakable 69-story apartment tower designed for the contemporary urban renter, and a full-service Hyatt Regency – both of which add to the base of daily users for the cultural district that Mack-Cali is creating.
An estimated 75,000 people come to work in offices in downtown Jersey City each day.
Harborside is part of the newly-established Exchange Place Special Improvement District created by the City to promote more cultural programming, make capital improvements, and energize the waterfront.
Correction, 4/30/2019, 9:05 p.m.: Because of incorrect information supplied to GlobeSt.com, an earlier version of this article included an inaccurate list of the restaurants currently open at Harborside’s District Kitchen food hall. The list has been updated with correct information. The article also incorrectly stated that celebrity chef David Malbequi operates a restaurant there. He does not.