The crowd at Tangram’s food hall.
Photo: Courtesy of Tangram
On a Sunday afternoon in March, a stream of young people and families flowed continuously through the second-floor food court at Tangram, Flushing’s largest shopping mall. Nearly everyone milling about carried a container of something delicious: One woman and her son picked at bánh mì fries piled with spicy mayo and other toppings. Another woman gnawed on a candied-fruit kebab while pulling a shopping cart as her two children trailed behind scooping soft serve out of paper cups. At GanBlaze, a Chinese barbecue counter inside the food court, John Cheung stared at rows of marinated lamb skewers, fish tofu, and frog legs glistening inside a refrigerated buffet. He had other plans that night and was trying to save his appetite but intended to return soon. “I want to try it,” he said, “but I want to watch an Instagram reel of it first.” Outside the Maiko Matcha Cafe, a group of four men took a selfie with their colorful matcha lattes. Nearby, one man mused to his partner, “I don’t want a dumpling, but I’m in the mood for something like a dumpling.”
In the three years since its opening, Tangram’s night-market-style food hall has become a destination for Queens residents, food-loving travelers who want to sample some of the city’s most Instagram-friendly dishes after waiting in line to buy a Labubu or cuddle a kitten at Kokoro Cat Café, and highly discerning teens seeking out specials they saw on social media.
“It has a more modern cuisine, and it caters more to a Gen-Z Asian American crowd,” said one college-age diner, who gave her name as Eris, during a recent weekend. Jack Gomez, another customer, who was sitting at a table with a view of CitiField, said part of the appeal is that it’s just a nice place to hang. “In Manhattan, there are not a lot of places that are central hubs where families and kids can come together,” he said. “This feels like a community space, whereas places in Manhattan feel pay-to-play.”
The modern food halls that emerged a decade and a half ago — spots like Jeffrey Chodorow and Ed Schoenfeld’s FoodPark and Gotham West that, as Pete Wells wrote in 2014, were efforts to “upgrade the food court, long the province of soft pizzas, sludgy stir-fries and swollen cinnamon rolls” with trendy ramen and high-end pizza — were once symbols of Obama-era cool. As Jonathan Butler, the founder of Smorgasburg and Berg’n (a now-closed food hall in Crown Heights), said at the time, “Food is kind of the new rock and roll — it’s the thing that the public is just so excited about.”
The excitement didn’t last. As the novelty wore off, and the rise of remote work shrunk crowds, a wave of closures followed. Two years ago, the developers behind the Market Line, which featured 30 stalls from many well-known New York outposts such as Nom Wah Tea Parlor and Veselka, cleared out their Lower East Side space below Essex Market. Gotham West folded after 11 years. Canal Street Market and several Urbanspace locations shuttered too, although some were taken over by other operators. In February, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Tin Building, built at a reported cost of $200 million, went belly up after only three years in the South Street Seaport. The space is being converted into a balloon museum.
Vongerichten has blamed the Tin Building’s declining profits on a lack of foot traffic — indeed food halls in underground spaces, such as the Market Line, struggled to attract visitors because they were not easily visible from the street level — although some locals balked at its prices and said the place was “doomed from the start.”
Phil Colicchio, a food industry consultant who has authored reports on food-hall trends, believed the seafood market’s expenses rose quickly, before they were able to build an audience to sustain itself. “People realized they were going to have to spend a lot of money to go there and it no longer became a neighborhood market,” Colicchio told me. “They needed more people coming more frequently.” He adds that the model is also a relic of a different New York. “The food halls that were designed pre-pandemic were designed for what we all knew then,” he said. “They were not designed in any capacity to bring you interesting programming after 6 p.m. It’s not their fault the world changed. They chose not to modify their spaces, and they paid a high price for it.”
In Queens, however, Tangram Mall’s operators figured out the key to making it work: Attract the Zoomers. Helen Lee, executive vice-president at F&T Group, which co-developed the mall, immigrated to Queens from Taiwan when she was 7 years old but found few places to hang out with her friends when she was growing up. She made Tangram a welcoming place for younger customers by borrowing concepts she encountered on trips to malls in Asia. Having more places to sit and do homework is just as important as offering the latest seasonally appropriate sensation. “Asia is a decade or two ahead of us from the whole food-hall experience,” she said. “It’s very much about taking the food alleyways and hawker stalls and putting them in a more sophisticated modern setting. Asian malls have perfected that recipe of good food, good community, and good design, and they wrap it up in a nice, clean, safe, aesthetically beautiful space.”
More than that, Lee’s team recruits vendors offering affordable dishes with the potential of becoming viral and promotes new dishes heavily in Reels on Instagram, TikTok, and RedNote, the Chinese lifestyle app gaining popularity as a TikTok alternative. The vendors are a mix of businesses already established in China, Taiwan, or Japan looking to open their first U.S.-based outpost, and local restaurateurs who want to launch new operations.
During the pandemic, Yuna Xu decided to bake traditional Portuguese-style egg tarts and sold them out of her Flushing apartment. When she saw an advertisement that Tangram was looking for food-court vendors, she applied with her concept for Na Tart and received a lease. “We tasted her egg tarts, and we were blown away,” Lee said.
Now, Na Tart is one of Tangram’s most popular food stalls with specials such as pork floss and durian and new locations in Manhattan’s Chinatown and San Diego. “Tangram has been very good about trying to create a night market, and it’s very busy here on Friday nights,” Xu said. “We have a location in Manhattan now, but people still come to Flushing. They know the concept.”
Lee also credited her vendors for constantly changing offerings tied to different seasons to keep people coming back. This month, for instance, Matcha Cafe Maiko is offering a pink-strawberr-and-vanilla-flavored soft serve in celebration of cherry-blossom season. “At the end of the day, it has to be good,” Lee said. “If it’s not memorable, no one is going to come back repeatedly and tell all their friends about it.”
Whether newer food halls will look to Tangram’s success for inspiration remains an open question. For the past two years, the Texas-based Food Hall Company has been transforming the former Lord & Taylor building’s ground floor into a 35,000-square-foot complex known as Shaver Hall with two restaurants, two bars, more than ten food stalls, and live-music stages. The Midtown destination is slated to open this spring and may have a built-in audience: Amazon purchased the property for $1.15 billion in 2020 to be its New York headquarters. Steven Soutendijk, executive managing director at Cushman & Wakefield, believes Shaver Hall will function as an amenity for Amazon’s office employees, which will give it something of a cushion. “Since Amazon is the one investing in it, you assume their threshold for pain is higher than the average food hall operator,” he said. “There’s a much higher tolerance for losing money at the food hall or breaking even.”
