[snootchiebootchies]

Originally Posted by troutman

Are You Ready for the Foodie Court?

http://www.gq.com/story/david-chang-food-court

Now the food court is about to get even tastier—and a whole lot healthier and higher-end than a sugar bomb the size of a pizza.

That concept might sound weird to Americans, but elsewhere in the world, fancy food halls have long been culinary meccas. Mostly in Europe: Fauchon in Paris, Dallmayr in Munich, and the holiest of delicious temples, Peck in Milan. (Mario Carbone of Parm and Carbone introduced me to it, and seriously, it's the best place ever created.) In 2010, New York got its first taste of this when Mario Batali opened a U.S. branch of Eataly, the Italian Thunderdome. Five years later there are Eatalys all over the planet, and now everyone wants to open a single-cuisine department store/food court.

I'm starting to see versions of this in more and more of our big cities, from the thirty-plus-vendor Grand Central Market in downtown L.A. to Gotham West Market in New York City, with its amazingly diverse spread of tacos, ramen, and everything in between. Another prime N.Y.C. example is Hudson Eats at Brookfield Place, the bustling new food court in Lower Manhattan near my editor's office, where he worked on this column while eating an insanely good grilled cheese with butternut squash and sage brown butter from Little Muenster.

Another great example of this would be the Alder Street food truck pod in Portland, Or.