If the Big Apple has one food trend that needs to die, it’s food halls – those indoor clusters of same-old “favorites” that might or might not be available at any particular time you go.
Just-opened Shaver Hall on the ground floor of the former Lord & Taylor building on Fifth Avenue, now owned by Amazon, hopes to buck the recent trend of flops. I wish them well but the model is as stale as cheese left to mold in the sun.
The Dallas-based The Food Hall Co. is behind Shaver Hall. Jeff Bezos should fire whoever decided to install a Texas-based outfit in what was until 2019 one of the city’s most iconic shopping venues.
In the last couple years, Shaver Hall has had tons of hype in WWD, Forbes and Travel + Leisure — and, yes, the New York Post — even as the city was fast losing its taste for food halls.
The public chewed up and spit out food courts branded by the great Jean-Georges Vongerichten at the Tin Building and popular chef Todd English at the Plaza hotel.
Next to go will be Singapore-themed Urban Hawker in Midtown, which will shut down on July 17. The recent body count also includes Gotham West, Canal Street Market, Market Lane, several locations of Urban Space, Citizens Market Hall and Williamsburg Food Hall. Like Shaver Hall, they all claimed to be “a food hall like no other.”
But the Big Apple is a giant, five-borough “food court.” Who needs to eat cliché dishes at cramped tables in charmless, warehouse-like settings when there are vastly more interesting options at actual, comfortable restaurants outside your apartment door.
Close to my Upper East Side home are French, Italian, Japanese, American and British eateries. We also have – right across the street and around the corner! – sit-down places for Afghan kebabs, South African grilled meats, Spanish tapas, Ecuadorean fish soup, Irish stew, Indian tandoori, Thai curry and Mexican paletas.
With so many intriguing options, I can’t get excited about pepperoni slices at Shaver’s outpost of F&F Pizza.
Food halls’ shortcomings are no secret. Because operators lease stands to outside vendors but don’t actually manage them, customers find inconsistent food, unpredictable opening hours and long waits for what’s supposed to be “fast” food.
At least Shaver Hall isn’t as awkward as many of its ilk, thanks to decent chairs and adequately spaced tables and counters. It has eleven “chef-curated” stands, three sit-down restaurants and two bars, as well as a stage for live entertainment and televised sports. (The audience was rapt for the Germany-Paraguay FIFA match, but ignored a singer-guitarist’s feeble renditions of early Beatles another afternoon.) Most offerings are similar to those at roughly 100,000 grab-and-go spots nearby. The best I had was a bowl of peppery tan tan noodles with roasted and ground pork for $18 at Tonchinette, which calls itself a “streamlined spin” on the Tonchin ramen spots in Midtown and Brooklyn.
I also enjoyed an al pastor taco with a corn tortilla and fine-shredded pork from Taqueria al Pastor ($4.95). But Zazu Mediterranean was “out of” chicken shawarma at 11 a.m.
Even a unique conveyor built of cheese doesn’t make Shaver Hall worth a visit. At the first US location of London-born Pick & Cheese, guests sit around a 200-foot long oval counter as dozens of numbered plates of cheese and morsels zoom past on a fast-moving belt. (The numbers correspond to descriptions in a printed menu.) Too bad they were out of a half-dozen varieties at lunchtime. The three I picked from what was available ($5.95-7.95) all tasted fine, especially creamy-and-crumbly Humboldt Fog goat from California. But I went batty making sense of the color-coded plates plates and labels as items whizzed past me.
A Bodega station includes sparsely stocked shelves of so-called “daily staples” such as Hot Girl Pickles and Khloe Kardashian-created Khloud Protein Popcorn — neither of which I would consider canon to NYC bodegas. A self-serve tap wall offers 20 wines and beers by the glass, but ordering them is so confusing, there wasn’t a single customer every time I checked.
The best deal in the house might be in the lobby just past the food hall’s door. An Amazon cart offers free bananas to everyone — a generous stroke from Jeff Bezos’s company that won’t likely make much of a dent in its $716.92 billion annual revenue.
Maybe they know Shaver Hall is bananas, too.