CW Retail - Food Halls Report

Brookfield Place: Hudson Eats/Le District

B rookfield Place is another project on the list where multiple dining concepts reside under one roof. It is home to Hudson Eats, which features a mix of purveyors ranging from chef-driven concepts like tapas from Chef José Andrés to sushi, bagels and street fare. It also embodies the European-style single provider concept of Le District (Brookfield’s French-themed answer to Eataly) which includes three sit-down venues (Le Bar, Beaubourg and L’Appart) and four food station “districts” (Market District, Garden District, Café District and the Restaurant District) where shoppers can find fresh cut flowers, fresh baguettes, whole fish, cheese plates, champagne, oysters and steak frites as well as patisseries, chocolatiers and baristas and pretty much everything in between, from a Gallic perspective. Manhattan’s Battery Park City neighborhood is Brookfield Place, originally known as the World Financial Center and currently owned by Toronto-based Brookfield Properties. The project is a massive, mixed-use office and retail plaza consisting of six buildings totaling more than 7.9 million square feet (MSF) of commercial (mostly high-rise office) space. Situated immediately across the street from the World Trade Center Memorial site in

The project was renamed in 2014 following extensive renovations, including those made to its retail space. The majority of the space created to house Brookfield Place’s current lineup of eateries was created during that time. We estimate the food offerings here to total roughly 30,000 SF of space. This project actually shares direct underground access to the same subway transportation hub (World Trade Center PATH station) that also feeds the newly opened Westfield World Trade Center Mall and its broad offering of food concepts led by Eataly. As to the question as to whether one area can support this many food hall projects, we don’t view that as an issue. An explosion of residential growth in this area has added thousands of new apartment and condominium units to the neighborhood over the past decade. The World Trade Center Memorial has emerged as one of the top New York City tourist destinations, and is expected to continue to draw roughly three million tourists per year to the immediate area. Consequently, with a strong local residential and daytime population demographic, plus immediate access to one of Manhattan’s primary transportation hubs and one of its most popular tourism draws, the question is: can the market support all of these concepts?

CUSHMAN & WAKEFIELD

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