Manhattan Food Court Is Now in Session

In 1971, the same year mall-maker James W. Rouse first attempted the modern food court at Plymouth Meeting Mall in suburban Pennsylvania, the Journal of Theoretical Biology published an essay by English evolutionary biologist W.D. Hamilton titled “Geometry for the Selfish Herd.” In it, Hamilton argued: “Most of the herds and flocks with which one is familiar show a visible closing-in of the aggregation in the presence of their common predators.”

Starlings huddle when sparrow hawks approach; sheep, when dogs near; and nice people when encroached upon by the mean. So too it seems do restaurants huddle near each other when the cold economic wind howls through Manhattan.

In the last year, a new breed of Manhattan dining experience has emerged: The Fancy Food Court. From the high-end court-cum-Italian mercato of Eataly across from the Flatiron building to Todd English’s strange subterranean The Plaza Food Hall by Todd English to Jeffrey Chodorow’s dystopian FoodParc at the Eventi Hotel in Chelsea, upscale food courts are emerging as the latest dining trend. Restaurants cluster together by the warmth of a communal dining area as high overhead and high turnover lurk nearby, licking its chops. But whether this defense mechanism is indeed protection or itself constitutes a danger is still to be determined.

For us children of the suburbs, there is no more magical (and menacing) a place than the mall food court. Mine—on the third floor of the Willow Grove Mall in Abington, Penn.—was where my young heart was awakened to the pangs of first teenage love (she wore a Dead Milkmen T-shirt) and my juvenile palate exposed to cuisines as diverse as Italian (Sbarro), Cantonese (Master Wok) and Creole (Bourbon Street Grille). For Cinnabon—a brand born in the incubator of the indoor shopping center—my friends and I would head to the Plymouth Meeting Mall to the original Ur-food court. But from the hostile looks from our parallel mall doppelgangers, all zitty and triumphant, with icing-caked faces and CDs shoplifted from The Wall in their pockets, we knew we weren’t welcome. Soon we’d be back to Willow Grove, with its comforting chiming clock and baked ziti with pink, glue-like tomato sauce.

In traditional mall parlance, the food court is generally considered to be a multi-vendor dining space with a communal self-service dining area whose borders are formed by the contiguous food court vendors, each of which operate independently. It’s an agora of fried shit. In mall theory, they are key components to shopping centers since they, as they say in the mall business, are “shopping extenders.” Food court counters are the troughs at which consumers gather so they need not wander off-premises to forage. Like the Vegas buffet, they are convenience for capitalism’s sake. Since the shopping mall was born in a suburb of Minnesota back in 1956 as a simulacrum of the Downtown experience—but without the Downtown dangers—malls have been a suburban phenomenon.

The first successful food court, after the initial botched Plymouth Meeting execution (“too small and insufficiently varied,” according to trade publication Shopping Centers Today) was successfully delivered in 1974 in Paramus Park Mall, a stone’s throw from Manhattan. But the food court, as a watering hole and a temenos of teen angst, is as suburban as the carpool and shoplifting ChapStick. “Let the city kids have their Washington Square Park,” we suburban youths used to comfort ourselves, “with their dealers and their chessmen. Let them have their St. Mark’s Place with the cheap tattoo shops they’ll not enter and the cube, rusted still. We’ve all seen Kids, that stuff is terrifying.” We of the demographic donut had our food courts and proved ourselves daily, carrying trays of Chick-fil-A and Whoppers, moving from table-to-table like awkward bees. Our braces faced toward heaven.

For better or for worse, New York City has been largely spared the food court phenomenon. This isn’t to say that Manhattan is virgin soil for a cluster of food vendors. Food courts have of course existed, notably in places of transit like Grand Central Terminal and, in some form or other, at area airports. But these were places one passes through and usually out of like gas stations. (Show me a man who stops at an airport food court on his way home, and I’ll show you a man with an unhappy home.) After all, food courts have always been less about food and more about fuel.

When the Oyster Bar opened at Grand Central Station in 1913, the anchor property of what is now arguably one of Manhattan’s largest food courts, oysters were the New York equivalent of hot dogs: cheap, fast and common. Nevertheless, the food court as an independent entity, as a destination, was unknown in Manhattan. This probably was a good thing. For as you can’t have a bullfight without a bullfighting ring, you can’t have a food court without a shopping mall. So if food courts are sprouting, growing large and fast like sunflowers, what does that make Manhattan but one large mall?

This new brand of Manhattan fancy food court breaks the mold but preserves this spirit. What often appear to be distinct vendors are merely Hydra-headed iterations of a hidden force, the owner. At Eataly, for example, although there are 13 distinct venues, Mario Batali and his partners, Joe and Lidia Bastianich, own all of them. At The Plaza Food Court by Todd English, one can down Woodbury Littleneck clams in one slurp at The Ocean Grill and Oyster Bar and then fig and prosciutto pizza in another area (not that we recommend doing this), but the money flows into the same place: The Coffer by Todd English. At FoodParc—a food court too cool for a “k”—Jeffrey Chodorow and his son Zachary have corralled dumplings, burgers, eggrolls, coffee and flatbread into close proximity with seeming independence, only to collect the proceeds from all the venues. Essentially, what you have is the simulacra of variety but not the real thing.

“The whole point of a food court,” says Bill Grimes, the former New York Times restaurant critic and author of Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York, “is that it is an authentic expression by authentic individuals with some kind of genuine culinary form as opposed to some central commissary that, like a spoke from wheel, emanates from a hub.”

As Grimes goes on to explain: “It shouldn’t be, ‘We’ll have eight different ethnicities but essentially it’s coming from what could be corporately considered one brain.’” Alas, it is. It’s as if that old canard about all the Indian joints on East Sixth Street having one kitchen finally came true.

The food court phenomenon didn’t, of course, appear out of the ether. All along, it’s been driving up slowly with its headlights turned off. In fact, the food court can be seen as the natural progression from the fancy food truck, which was the fun food trend of recent note. “The mega restaurant was the trend of the bubble, but with the credit collapse, high rents and high overhead became untenable,” Joey Arak, a real estate go-to man for Curbed, explains. “So, restaurateurs began to look for alternatives.”

The alternative drove up and parked outside. The food truck is the pedal tone between the mega restaurants of the boom and the food courts of today. Take, for example, the fortunes of Jeffrey Chodorow, a former shopping mall real estate tycoon whose hyperbolic, hypertrophied restaurants have come to symbolize New York restaurateur hubris. Wild Salmon, his giant seafood venture, foundered before it went belly up in the shallow shoals of a shit economy. His Damoclean Kobe Club, a steak house beset by swords and middling food, closed in 2009. He went on to open Ed’s Chowder House, a casual seafood restaurant across from Lincoln Center, at the same time—which has become something of an anchor for the area. You could see Ed’s as the Ruby Tuesday’s for the block, one that now also includes a ‘wichcraft, a Tom Colicchio chain that is the envy of any fancy food court experience.

At the same time upscale restaurants were foundering, however, food trucks were fast becoming the SWAT teams of the food world. Rapidly deployed, adaptive and mobile, food trucks had sufficiently low overhead to be able to devote themselves monomaniacally to the pursuit of perfecting one item, be it tacos, burgers, waffles or dumplings, to their ideal form. Restaurateurs took note.

“Opening the food court has a lot to do with the economy,” Zachary Chodorow admits. “But if you look at what has been popular trend wise, you see a lot of single-item restaurants.” So a food court, which takes the space of a mega restaurant of yore and fills it with lots of small interchangeable vendors, hedges its bets. It’s the restaurant as Henry Ford might have seen it. “By collectivizing the dining room, they’re saving on overhead,” explains Michael Sorkin, professor of architecture and director of the graduate urban design program at New York’s City College. “Rising prices beg high turnover formulas of one sort or another.” Meanwhile, on the periphery of the food court, various iterations of the latest trendy comfort food—be it barbecue or burgers—can quickly adapt, shutter and reopen at will.

From a business perspective, food courts clearly make sense. And from a purely culinary perspective, I’m not sure food courts are such a bad idea. Certainly this new breed lacks neither ambition nor, in some cases, finesse. FoodParc serves a mighty fine burger at 3B’s: 5 oz. of Pat LaFrieda’s No .7 Hanger Blend with American cheese, secret sauce and the works on a soft roll (all for $6.95).

Todd English’s vision of a food hall where one can perch on a stool in the Plaza Hotel’s basement and, without rising, be brought cuisine from around the world is alluring—even if in its execution it tastes like crap.

A plate of fried vegetables at Le Verdure, one of the five sit-down restaurants at Eataly, is as crisp as a fall breeze and as salty as a mistral. It would be a great thing on the menu of any sit-down restaurant. In fact, like the Washington and Fulton Markets of the 19th century, Eataly combines produce vendors and butchers along with prepared food venues, and is probably the food court at its best. But to the extent it succeeds, Eataly breaks the taxonomy. “There’s nothing about Eataly I find disturbing,” Grimes says. And I tend to agree. But food courts don’t get a free pass.

Yes, FoodParc may bring a good burger to the area (as well as egg rolls stuffed with Katz’s pastrami); and one can’t find “chermoula-marinated shrimp spiedini” anywhere but at the The Plaza Food Hall by Todd English; and, yes, Eataly’s mozzarella is a small and perfect thing destined for greatness. But Sorkin sums it up well when he says all foods courts “are the universalization of the airport experience.”

They are, in other words, too convenient. Traipsing through the outer boroughs or, nose to pavement, the beige concrete canyons of Midtown, in pursuit of the errant, hardy and delicious tofu fa or pupusa gives bagging your lunch its piquancy. It’s the umami of effort. Food courts, however, are canned hunts with no challenge and little pay off. The quarry is big and bloated, the flavors bland and the ethnicity plasticized and pre-digested. In Barthian terms, food courts are all plaisir and no jouissance.

New York City has always been a city of coyness, secrets, dark corners and foraging. For every nouveau speakeasy splashily lauded, there’s a real one, little known and fleeting. For every Serge Becker taco hotspot in Nolita, there’s an Ecuadorian joint serving chicken stew from a Midtown freight elevator. More importantly, for every morsel of scarmoza, there’s a journey out to Arthur Avenue. For every mini lamb gyro ordered with ease in a Midtown basement next to a tourist group from Missouri, there are a thousand potential New York conversations on the street to have in its hot pursuit, thousands of interactions, hundreds of arguments to be had, adventures to undertake, errors to make.

That’s why we transplants from suburbia so resolutely flock together, slouching toward the city, to huddle against the sparrow hawks of homogeneity and rage against the dogs of convenience. But in food courts, we only find a simulacrum of the Downtown—with the danger of suburbs. That’s where we find the enemy within.