Please forgive me regarding this.I read Jane Jacobs The death and life of America's great cities And he preaches with the fervor of someone who has recently been preached to. But Jacobs spends much of his classic urban planning book arguing against special neighborhoods in cities, the prime examples being “cultural” and “arts” districts. It's great when people are coming to see the show, she says, but otherwise they're likely to be standing empty and anxious, waiting for the next performance.
Dallas has one. (Two if you include Fair Park.) But our own twist on the throwaway district is what we call the “Restaurant Park” or “Restaurant District.” The idea we're implementing is to put a bunch of brand new restaurants next to each other, serve great food and drink, and hope that a successful neighborhood will develop around them. The idea has failed many times, but Dallas keeps trying. When will you learn?
First, I'll explain why it sounds like the restaurant district is theoretically doomed away from our city. Next, we will look at real-life examples on the ground to see if the theory holds.
The biggest theoretical problem with restaurant parks is that they are only used for a few hours each day. At lunchtime, hundreds of cars gather in the parking lot and customers rush in. After an hour or two, everyone leaves. The neighborhood experiences a hangover-like lull before the process repeats itself at dinner.
This is not ideal for area residents or nearby retailers who would probably want more morning and afternoon activity. Not ideal for traffic jams and parking. The compartments will be full at certain times and empty at other times. It's also not ideal in terms of safety. Because a constant stream of tourists is safer than huge crowds and ghost towns.
The restaurant owner told me that being close to other restaurants is a plus. If there are competing stores near your location, it means hungry customers are already in the area and already know to visit your location for food. But Restaurant Park offers a slightly different story. people only Visit the area to eat. And people can only eat in one place at a time. Strip malls that offer a variety of meals while providing groceries and clothing to neighborhood residents and office workers are different from first-time destinations where you make an extra effort just for one meal. . In Restaurant Park, you are on an island and your competitors are also trapped on the island with you.
Finally, you need to challenge the assumption that if you put a restaurant park where you want people to go, everyone will go there. Lab staff placed the cheese in a new part of the maze, apparently believing that the rats would arrive there. We simple mice really like having cheese right next to where we're already relaxing. When a piece of cheese crosses a river or lands on a brand new suburban complex, it feels like a real estate developer in a lab coat taking note of our actions on a clipboard.
Provided by AT&T and City of Dallas
Case Study: Dallas Restaurant Park
You can see all of these patterns in action at a restaurant park in Dallas. The most famous example is Trinity Grove, a deliberate attempt to force downtown Dallas workers to cross the Trinity River at mealtime. Trinity Groves developers have plans to start with a food park, followed by high-rise apartments, retail and townhomes in the coming years. But first we had to use cheese to get us to the end of the maze.
What's interesting about Trinity Groves when you visit it now is that while the restaurant park is failing, the broader real estate business is succeeding. The last time I was there, I counted, he had five empty, shuttered restaurant spaces. Some of the surviving restaurants have expanded by taking over older spaces in the neighborhood, meaning the decline is even worse than it seems.
Hailed as a “restaurant theme park” when it first opened, the Trinity Groves building has only three stores left from the first-generation concept: St. Rocco's, Cake Bar and Kate Weiser Chocolates. After two he is not a restaurant. Saint Rocco's, like all recent additions, was created by Trinity Groves' leadership team rather than a partnership with an outside restaurateur.
Beto & Son, the park's only successful new business, has done so well that chef Julian Rodarte is now CEO of Trinity Groves and is filling other spaces with additional ideas of his own. Currently, the park is surrounded by high-rise buildings, so it seems like it's only a matter of time before some of the empty spaces are converted into more grab-and-go retail businesses, like Cake Bar.
Another lab mouse experiment occurred when the Village, a middle-class housing complex, decided to build an attractive destination in its center. Since the hub was built in the heart of the apartment complex, one might have expected it to focus on walkable amenities for residents, such as grocery stores, home goods stores, and pharmacies. Although there is a small grocery store and gym, Village has become more ambitious, building a luxury hotel, one of the best fine dining restaurants in Texas, and a food hall. Next, after creating a destination-worthy experience, we had to design features for non-residents, especially the huge underground parking garage. (DART runs beside the complex, but the nearest station is about a mile away on foot.)
Now, one of the Village's famous restaurants, La Mina, is permanently closed (update: it's been rebranded to a “club restaurant” of sorts), and the food hall across the street is… , I don't know what it is. The last time I visited for cookies, it looked mostly abandoned. At midday, when all the village's homeworkers would theoretically be there for a quick bite, the food district is deserted. I don't know what the villagers use this street for, but it seems like the only thing people in Dallas do is visit it for the famous Meridian restaurant. Even Meridian is experimenting with new menu formats and styles. Sources who work or have worked at Village restaurants say executive turnover is high on hospitality teams.
Not much is known about the food park Richardson has built along Route 75, but fast-casual chains (Dog Haus, The Halal Guys) have a large share of the space. Adda, a locally owned Pakistani concept store, closed permanently over Labor Day weekend. This place is a great example of the pitfalls of restaurant parks. It's a bunch of drivers suddenly trying to take over the parking lot at lunchtime. Good luck getting him access to Route 75 from the parking lot on Friday at 1pm.
Despite all these warnings, Dallas continues to strive to make its restaurant district a reality. The latest example is East Quarter. It's a new real estate marketing term for a part of downtown that falls short of the Farmer's Market and Deep His Elm. In an interview with dallas morning news, developer Patrick Todd said he plans to open 12 restaurants in just a few blocks in the East Quarter. Several are already open, including Nick Badovinas' Anthem and Brass Rum, as well as a hidden bar reserved for office building tenants, Chicago chain Etta, local Tex-Mex chain Muchacho, and Tod's Best More are expected to open, including an unnamed chain store that claims to offer the following services: Sushi from all over the country. (Please consider me a “skeptic”.)
To be fair, the East District also has office buildings and residential buildings. They just want to use the restaurant as a lure. Unlike Trinity Grove, where this strategy resulted in a successful development but a failed restaurant, the East Quarter is already firmly integrated into downtown Dallas, with easy access to public transportation and a wealthy neighborhood. Masu. Management would do well to visit another part of downtown, the AT&T Discovery District, to see how restaurants like Ounce, Ichi Ni Sun, Hawthorne and Jackson have failed in the neighborhood. (Ichini has moved to Ichi, the food stall, and changed its brand.)
Provided by The Village
An even stranger experiment is taking place just across Interstate 345 from the East Quarter, where various restaurateurs and developers are considering building a new kind of wall between Deep Ellum and downtown. Decided. This is not a highway. It is lined with “club restaurants,'' places to eat and party, with lounges, DJs, bottle service, and expensive meals. The group's Southern anchor is The Epic, with twin newcomers La Neta (from Las Vegas) and Komodo (from Miami). One block north is the infamous club Bottled Blonde, and across the street is his new hookah lounge and meze spot His Saaya. Just east of these is Green Light Social. His XOXO Dining Room on Ross Avenue at the north end of the Strip will soon be joined by his Drai's, a Vegas-based “supper club.”
This type of regional specialization, not just a region for eating and drinking, but a region for only certain mealtimes on certain days, is almost unheard of. On Monday morning, the entire street might as well not exist.
What can we learn from successful restaurant districts?
You might be thinking: Hey, what about Deep Ellum or Roast Greenville? But they are full neighborhoods, not planned restaurant districts. It's filled with retail, residential, and in the case of Deep Ellum, corporate offices. People walk the streets at all times of the day for a variety of purposes.
Among the deliberate attempts to plant new food destinations, one of the most successful is investment group Exor's new cluster of restaurants in a corner of Bishop Arts. Exxir's savvy mix includes dining (Paradiso, Written by the Seasons) and a bar and all-day restaurant (La Reunion), and he introduced the Village Baking Company for the early morning crowd. They used existing walkable neighborhoods rather than starting new neighborhoods and packed the concept into all three meals. Whether you like their respective businesses or not (Paradise comes up in many of the “Most Overrated Restaurant” discussions), Exer put their plan into action.
The best example of a local “food park” is Koreatown in Carrollton. This is a series of strip malls located at the intersection of the President George Bush Tollway and Old Denton Road. These strip malls house more than 75 restaurants and karaoke bars, and when I visited on a recent Saturday night, the area was very busy with pedestrians and car parking. It was practically reclaimed. My friend and I thought we could build a parking lot behind Koreatown and turn the surface lot into a patio or plaza. I also think DART or a private company should start a high-speed shuttle bus between Carrollton and Dallas' Koreatown.
However, there are two important differences to note between Carrollton Koreatown and AT&T Discovery District. First of all, Koreatown is full of retail stores as well as restaurants such as Daiso, Kino Kinuya, H Mart, and 99 Lunch Market. There are also small independent shops and clinics.
Second, Koreatown offers experiences not easily available elsewhere in Dallas. It offers visitors a unique offer and is named after its unique features. This special experience is offered not because a real estate company tried experimenting with lab mice, but because it evolved organically over years of small business growth.
The lesson here is that successful restaurant districts aren't all that different from successful cities. Paradoxically, the key to keeping people coming back to your “food park” is to offer something else as well. It has good retail stores, some good bars, a grocery store, and a strong corps of locals. Mix neighborhood uses so that traffic and parking are equally busy at all times. Use restaurants as catalysts, not catalysts, for neighborhood growth. And if your neighborhood becomes dominated by restaurants, rather than forcing change, follow the cues of residents and visitors and allow this process to occur naturally.
If you build 12 restaurants on an island and expect everyone to come, you'll be standing in front of the food park at 1:30pm on a Tuesday, wondering why everyone left. Sho.
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Brian Reinhart
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Brian Reinhart became D Magazine's dining critic in 2022 after six years writing about restaurants for the magazine. dallas observer And that Dallas Morning News.
