I’ve seen a few in Toronto; I think they’ve all been Chinese food courts. Although maybe I’m thinking of something more low-fi than in the original post.
If I heard that term, I would envision a stand-alone building rather than a single unit in a strip mall that is sandwiched below a dentist and next to a pharmacy (say).
St. Louis has The City Foundry, which has a food court but then also some shopping and a few “experience” venues - mini-golf, escape rooms, etc. The two times I’ve been there it seems to do good business, particular before or after sporting events or other reasons folks might be downtown.
When I was last in Austin there seemed to be a lot of “open air food courts” that were more a big lot around maybe one permanent structure where lots of food trucks would show up. Some had a flea-market sort of event attached to them.
And yeah, Europe has plenty of food markets. Like the Budapest Great Market Hall.
Rochester also has one downtown in a repurposed closed department store that is called, horrendously, The Mercantile on Main. Half a dozen restaurants. It sometimes calls itself a food incubator, probably because downtown is so destroyed that the businesses don’t last and need to move elsewhere. They also do private parties, but I don’t know whether alcohol is served at those.
Ours here in Dallas tend to be a way for more fast/fast-casual places to be located in high dollar areas where they might not be able to afford a straight-up location of their own. such as the AT&T Discovery Plaza(downtown next to AT&T’s corporate HQ), Legacy Park in Plano (near the corporate headquarters of Toyota N. America, Cinemark, Pizza Hut, JC Penney, Frito Lay, etc…), or the Dallas Farmers’ Market, which is downtown.
One that’s interesting is Trinity Groves, which is basically an inside-out food hall that specifically has a new restaurant incubator .
I think the big difference is that in Europe, they’re market halls that happen to have food stands as well; here in the US they’re specifically a cluster of restaurants that share some common infrastructure like trash, parking, cleaning, and so forth.
Some, like Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston, are like the European market halls that have both retail and food stalls.
Looks like someone is inventing Strip Malls again.
A decrepit one near me has a Chinese restaurant, a liquor store, Noodles & Company AND a Dollar Store. Include the Taco Bell and McDonald’s across the parking lot and it’s a complete evening. Now I know what you’re saying, you can’t drink in a Liquor store. That is what the back alley near the dumpsters is for.
Here in Cleveland, we have a new Hispanic Food Hall called CentroVilla25. It has Puerto Rican, Cuban, Mexican, Dominican, and Salvadoran stalls, a coffee shop, a panaderia, and a commercial kitchen facility. It’s quite frankly amazing. There are a couple of others that are more market halls (West Side Market, Van Aken Market Hall). Another new concept is food truck parks, which are permanent locations populated by several food trucks, featuring both open and enclosed dining areas with bathrooms.
There are plenty of enclosed malls (and were many more during the heyday of those venues) that have liquor stores or full table-service restaurants that serve alcohol in them. The mall management doesn’t have a problem with selling alcohol per se. But those establishments are not in the food court because 1) food court restaurants tend towards standardized national fast-food chains that rarely find it worthwile to deal with the regulations around serving alcohol and 2) the dining area of the food court is not directly under any one business’s control besides the mall itself, so enforcing state regulations on where you can take open containers becomes difficult/impossible.
Strip malls are retail with exterior entry that opens onto shared parking. Food halls are interior-oriented retail booths in a shared building. Here’s a tour of The Garage in Indianapolis’ Bottleworks District.
Food options are usually eclectic mixes of various ethnicities.
In Wisconsin (motto: Drink Wisconsinably) most malls had places that served alcohol going back to the 1960’s or earlier.
Not even remotely.
Look at this and see if it matches your idea of a “strip mall”:
I was at a meeting in Syracuse and there was one of these next to my hotel, in a former industrial space. It was awesome. Great ethnic food, inexpensive, and had a very good hipster bar attached (complete with bartenders with handlebar mustaches) that took their old fashioned’s very seriously.
There was one planned in La Crosse – they had restaurants lined up, but had some funding issues and then a big conflict with the building owners (upgraded water lines and such) – lots of back and forth. From what I read the hall guy(s) at best had ideas but not the skills or experience to pull it off. (some think outright fraud, I don’t know enough to confirm or deny that)
Too bad the place was within walking distance of where I worked and would have tried a restaurant or 2.
Brian
I’ve never seen a liquor store in a New York state mall. (Not that I’m a mall enthusiast, but you wind up in them over the years.) Makes me wonder whether New York has laws against that or I just missed them.
Nitpick but the food halls we’re talking about are different from the typical mall food courts. And the food halls don’t have liquor stores in them but may have a bar.
I know, but several people have mentioned liquor stores in malls, and I was responding to them specifically. Obviously, most higher-end mall restaurants served liquor.