It took the developer and operator of Santa Barbara Public Market four years to source the tenants for this SoCal food hall. Vendors create the community within the food hall, so the time spent searching ensured a good cultural fit. The Public Market still has some of its original vendors that were there on opening day five years ago like Enjoy Cupcake.
Politan Row opened in the spring of 2019 in the West Loop of Chicago. Featuring a curated mix of local food and beverage concepts, it is an example of a multivendor project. There are nine restaurants, a coffee shop, bar and beer garden. Politan Group is responsible for the project and curated a mix of local vendors that have had success in other areas of the city and have chosen to expand with Politan. The group's next project, Politan Row Houston, is scheduled to open in the fall.
Eataly, with its global platform, is probably the most well-known single-brand operator food hall. Built like an Italian marketplace, Eataly operates grocery-like sections with various retail goods as well as gelato and pizza counters and full-service restaurants. Many Eataly locations also connect with the community by offering cooking classes, wine tasting and other various events throughout their spaces. Eataly Las Vegas at Park MGM is the most recent project to open in the U.S., making Vegas its 6th location in the country.
A self-described culinary incubator, The Bourse in Philadelphia has revived a century-old building that was originally a commodities exchange, including a stock exchange and grain-trading exchange. The food hall has shops with local vendors selling homemade crafts, teas and flowers, along with cuisine from local Philly chefs. Canadev is a developer and operator that has worked to bring The Bourse, which reopened in 2018, back to the community.
Rock Row in Portland, ME, is being designed and curated to celebrate a local industry of distilleries and breweries (Portland has one of the highest numbers of craft breweries per capita in the US). The developer, along with the design team, is dedicating a significant amount of space to tasting rooms and bars to showcase this local industry and to give local vendors an opportunity to scale their business. There will be a 2,000-square-foot brewery in addition to six tasting rooms that will account for about 3,000 square feet. There will also be rooftop seating to accommodate socializing and hanging out. This project is being developed by Waterstone Properties with curation by Colicchio Consulting and design guidance from Eimer Design.
Advertisement
Now with several concepts under its belt, New York City-based Urbanspace has a unifying design that comes through even while balancing the design needs of its tenants. Every Urbanspace project feels like an Urbanspace project, but each vendor remains elevated and individual. Urbanspace has developed such a strong brand that each subsequent food hall is consistently branded while still encouraging the individuality of the market it occupies.
A 45,000-square-foot food hall in the soon-to-be-open American Dream -- a 3 million-square-foot retail and entertainment project in East Rutherford, NJ -- has been designed by GH+A design studios. GH+A is working with owner and developer Triple Five Group to design the overall project which includes the Munchies Food Hall, as well as several other food courts and restaurant areas, to develop a cohesive brand throughout the massive new project. MUNCHIES is a James Beard award-winning website and digital video channel from VICE Media.
Market Food Hall at Halcyon, a new 550,000-square-foot mixed-use project in the suburbs of Atlanta, has signed an ice cream and confections shop, Kilwins, as an anchor tenant in the food hall. The Kilwins space is twice the square footage of the interior food stalls. It is located on the edge of the Market Hall allowing Kilwins to open earlier than the other stalls and giving them direct access to the Village Green, the hub of the property's activities and events.
It took the developer and operator of Santa Barbara Public Market four years to source the tenants for this SoCal food hall. Vendors create the community within the food hall, so the time spent searching ensured a good cultural fit. The Public Market still has some of its original vendors that were there on opening day five years ago like Enjoy Cupcake.
Politan Row opened in the spring of 2019 in the West Loop of Chicago. Featuring a curated mix of local food and beverage concepts, it is an example of a multivendor project. There are nine restaurants, a coffee shop, bar and beer garden. Politan Group is responsible for the project and curated a mix of local vendors that have had success in other areas of the city and have chosen to expand with Politan. The group's next project, Politan Row Houston, is scheduled to open in the fall.
Eataly, with its global platform, is probably the most well-known single-brand operator food hall. Built like an Italian marketplace, Eataly operates grocery-like sections with various retail goods as well as gelato and pizza counters and full-service restaurants. Many Eataly locations also connect with the community by offering cooking classes, wine tasting and other various events throughout their spaces. Eataly Las Vegas at Park MGM is the most recent project to open in the U.S., making Vegas its 6th location in the country.
A self-described culinary incubator, The Bourse in Philadelphia has revived a century-old building that was originally a commodities exchange, including a stock exchange and grain-trading exchange. The food hall has shops with local vendors selling homemade crafts, teas and flowers, along with cuisine from local Philly chefs. Canadev is a developer and operator that has worked to bring The Bourse, which reopened in 2018, back to the community.
Rock Row in Portland, ME, is being designed and curated to celebrate a local industry of distilleries and breweries (Portland has one of the highest numbers of craft breweries per capita in the US). The developer, along with the design team, is dedicating a significant amount of space to tasting rooms and bars to showcase this local industry and to give local vendors an opportunity to scale their business. There will be a 2,000-square-foot brewery in addition to six tasting rooms that will account for about 3,000 square feet. There will also be rooftop seating to accommodate socializing and hanging out. This project is being developed by Waterstone Properties with curation by Colicchio Consulting and design guidance from Eimer Design.
Advertisement
Now with several concepts under its belt, New York City-based Urbanspace has a unifying design that comes through even while balancing the design needs of its tenants. Every Urbanspace project feels like an Urbanspace project, but each vendor remains elevated and individual. Urbanspace has developed such a strong brand that each subsequent food hall is consistently branded while still encouraging the individuality of the market it occupies.
A 45,000-square-foot food hall in the soon-to-be-open American Dream -- a 3 million-square-foot retail and entertainment project in East Rutherford, NJ -- has been designed by GH+A design studios. GH+A is working with owner and developer Triple Five Group to design the overall project which includes the Munchies Food Hall, as well as several other food courts and restaurant areas, to develop a cohesive brand throughout the massive new project. MUNCHIES is a James Beard award-winning website and digital video channel from VICE Media.
Market Food Hall at Halcyon, a new 550,000-square-foot mixed-use project in the suburbs of Atlanta, has signed an ice cream and confections shop, Kilwins, as an anchor tenant in the food hall. The Kilwins space is twice the square footage of the interior food stalls. It is located on the edge of the Market Hall allowing Kilwins to open earlier than the other stalls and giving them direct access to the Village Green, the hub of the property's activities and events.
It took the developer and operator of Santa Barbara Public Market four years to source the tenants for this SoCal food hall. Vendors create the community within the food hall, so the time spent searching ensured a good cultural fit. The Public Market still has some of its original vendors that were there on opening day five years ago like Enjoy Cupcake.
Food halls are more complicated that the average observer might expect. As JLL says in a new report, they're difficult to design, build, curate and operate. Perhaps more worrisome, it adds this somber observation: With so many of them sprouting up, odds are that some will fail. JLL's new report "So You Want to Build a Food Hall" is a soup-to-nuts guide to making sure that a food hall investment is a success. It covers everything from choosing an operator, to developing a food hall brand, to appealing to a target customer base. It also provides a number of case studies of successful food halls around the US. Read more about those in our slideshow.
NOT FOR REPRINT
© 2025 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
Erika Morphy
Erika Morphy has been writing about commercial real estate at GlobeSt.com for more than ten years, covering the capital markets, the Mid-Atlantic region and national topics. She's a nerd so favorite examples of the former include accounting standards, Basel III and what Congress is brewing.
