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FIT FOR A FEAST

Westfield unveils a new dining area - but don’t call it a food court

By Maura K. Ammenheuser

The folks behind Westfield Century City are hardly humble when it comes to the new food court there. In fact, they’re not calling it a food court at all.

“We are reinventing the food experience at our shopping center,” said Kenneth Wong, president of Los Angeles-based Westfield America, which owns Westfield Century City, an 810,000-square-foot regional center in Los Angeles serving the posh neighborhoods of Bel Air, Beverly Hills and Brentwood.

The Dining Terrace, as the food court is called, boasts indoor and outdoor seating, “real” dishes and cutlery, and a maître d’. Then there is the food: sushi, Brazilian, Italian and Korean, among others.

Westfield worked with a variety of national restaurants, including Baja Fresh, Fuddruckers, Panda Express and Tacone, persuading them to tweak their menus and presentations to provide “exhibition style” dining, in which the food prep becomes part of the decor and entertainment.

In addition to asking tenants to change their formats, Westfield also required physical departures from conventional food court design. The Dining Terrace requires a large central dishwashing operation, for example, given that its tenants are no longer using disposable plates and cutlery.

Westfield drew inspiration for the Dining Terrace in part from the 15-tenant Harbour Room at Bondi Junction, the 1.1 million-square-foot, $540 million redevelopment that Australia-based parent Westfield Group completed last year at a mall in Sydney. The Harbour Room, named for its splendid view of Sydney Harbour, has hardwood floors, pendent lighting and plenty of glass. Australians even ask about renting the place for parties (though these requests have not been granted so far), and how often does that happen at American food courts?

Like the Harbour Room, the Dining Terrace has an outdoor, upper-level space; it offers a view of Los Angeles. Inside, three or four tenants are positioned in the middle of the space — a deviation from typical food court layouts, which place all tenants around the perimeter — and the remaining tenants form the boundaries of the dining area, in more conventional fashion. Seating varies. Tables and chairs are of different heights, bar-style seating is available at a sushi restaurant occupying one of the central spots, and there is also soft seating, such as might be found in a coffeehouse. The indoor and outdoor portions are separated by automatic sliding glass doors.

The space uses natural building materials, such as wood and stone, and lets in plenty of sunlight.

There are 15 casual-dining tenants in all and open seating for about 900 people. The Dining Terrace occupies some 35,000 square feet, about double the size of the old food court, which stood at the opposite end of the mall.

Even before the scheduled Dec. 12 opening of the Dining Terrace, Westfield was planning similar food courts for its San Francisco Center redevelopment and an expansion at Westfield Topanga, in Canoga Park, Calif. Wong says the company plans to open those food courts late this year.

Century City got the first Dining Terrace because it was an opportunity for the company to show itself at its best in its home city, says Wong. “It’s probably going to work best in our bigger centers in more affluent markets,” he said, noting that the improvements push up the food prices.

Wong would not disclose what Westfield spent on the Dining Terrace. Catharine Dickey, vice president of communications, said overall improvements to Century City cost $150 million and that the center’s sales are nearly $700 per square foot. Neither source would specify how much the new court might generate in sales, though Westfield obviously expects higher rents thanks to the changes, says Wong.

“We’ve reinvented the formula here,” Wong said. “This business is about giving the customer something more than they expect.” And yet, even those customers who insist on eating only what they expect will still find some old favorites at the Dining Terrace, including Baja Fresh, Panda Express and Tacone. “We kept that,” Wong said. “But almost everything else is different.”

Not so much as a cookie
Westfield is not the only development firm that has been shaking things up in the food court department. GK Development is spending nearly $3 million to open Dakota Café next month at Columbia Mall, a 1970s-era center in Grand Forks, N.D. The 11,500-square-foot dining space will have a “North Woods lodge look,” replete with a giant, four-sided fireplace, says Garo Kholamian, president of GK Development, which bought the mall in 2004. This represents an especially big improvement, given that up to now the mall has offered no kind of food court at all. “You couldn’t even buy a cookie,” Kholamian said.

Kholamian is predicting a 12 percent return on investment. He says further that the center’s overall sales will see a boost this year, thanks to not just the food court but also to some new tenants and a play area elsewhere in the center.

Landlords are recognizing the value of investing in their food courts, says Kholamian. “You’re certainly seeing it in newer projects,” he said. “A McDonald’s with a bunch of plastic chairs is not going to cut it anymore.”

General Growth Properties is sprucing up its food courts in some locations. The firm is especially proud of Foodlife, the pavilion at its Water Tower Place in Chicago, says Robert Michaels, General Growth’s president. Foodlife includes 12 eateries that offer a wide range of cuisines, including Italian, Mexican and Thai. Food is made to order, as opposed to the prepared fare at regular food courts. General Growth is also planning an upscale, seven-unit food court for Venetian Plaza, the second phase of The Venetian Resort Hotel Casino, Las Vegas, slated to open in late 2007, says Michaels.

But don’t expect to see an across-the-board culinary and aesthetic revolution in food courts, says Stanley L. Eichelbaum, SCMD, president of Marketing Developments, a Cincinnati-based consulting firm. Developers gravitate to national fast-food chains because of their financial reliability, he says, explaining that this has contributed to “the plastic fast-food environment” with its cheap, less-than-nutritious fare served in a loud, crowded, grimy atmosphere.

“The food court is the weakest area of a shopping center,” Eichelbaum said. But he insists that it does not have to be that way. Food courts elsewhere in the world, Bondi Junction among them, put a greater premium on fresh food than does America.

Whether bad grub is a consequence of low American dietary standards or of developers’ unwillingness to take costly chances, Eichelbaum says, the result is the same. “The only green thing you’ll see in American food courts has been there too long,” he quipped.

If consumers have had their fill of cheap food courts filled with greasy chow, it remains to be seen how developers will respond.

But if more-tasteful food courts — in both the culinary and aesthetic senses — are to take off, it is most likely to happen in hospitable climates such as Southern California that offer alfresco dining à la the Dining Terrace, says Gary Glick, a partner at Cox, Castle & Nicholson, a Century City, Calif.-based real estate law firm. He says he has seen efforts among several developers to provide beautiful, relaxing dining environments, and he argues that Southern California’s affluence helps justify the investment.

But scorning the typical food court is much easier than fixing it, industry professionals say. “It’s something we all want to do — it is not easy,” Michaels said. “It’s easy to go to Sbarro, McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A and be done with it.” Creating an upscale environment with quality food and the right ambience requires thought, he says, and it also requires a restaurant industry operator who knows how to manage fresh food in bulk. Water Tower Place found this talent in Richard Melman, founder and CEO of Chicago-based Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, who says he has created more than 70 restaurant concepts in his career.

“I don’t think it’ll go across the industry,” Eichelbaum said of an upscale food-court trend. The crockery alone adds expense and is less practical than disposable plates. In any case, he says, the essentials still count. “The answer is not in the china,” Eichelbaum said. “It’s in the food.”

“In a secondary market, it’s not worth it,” said Glick. “I don’t think Subway will want to pay the rent to be in the new [Dining] Terrace. I think initially it will be more the states where the climate is better-suited for it and where the economics are suited for it.”

And yet there is more to it than that even from the economic perspective, according to Wong. “Food is increasingly a differentiation of shopping centers and a reason why people choose one over another,” he said. “I think this will have applicability to many centers in the U.S.”

And the Dining Terrace is sure to prove his point, he says. “This will change the perception of food at a shopping center.” n

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