Could This Be the Location of Anthony Bourdain's Giant Food Hall?

Last week, a slew of new details about Bourdain Market, the hugely hyped international food hall from celebrity food person Anthony Bourdain prompted a new round of speculation about where the hawker center/market will actually be located. So far we know that it will be 100,000 square feet, that it will be in Manhattan, that it will have a rooftop beer garden, and that it will open in early 2016. We've also seen a few sketched renderings. Armed with that knowledge, tipsters have sent in rumors and theories both to Eater and to our friends at Curbed, and so now it's time to lay out the possibilities.

Quite a few commenters suspect the Terminal Stores, the large warehouse complex out on 11th Avenue and 28th Street. There's not solid evidence on this one yet, but let's look at the facts. The space is in the middle of a three-year renovation, which promises to populate it with a combination of offices and restaurants, kind of like Chelsea Market – Uber just signed a lease for office space there, and Danny Meyer recently opened his Southern bar, Porchlight, in one corner. And the enormous basement space, formerly home to the notorious 80s- and 90s-era nightclub the Tunnel, is being converted into a food hall. That project should be finished and filled by mid-2016. Now, on the one hand, food halls are popping up left and right these days, so maybe that's not saying much. On the other hand, compare this rendering of Bourdain Market by Roman and Williams...

...to this image from a recent event hosted at the Terminal Stores:

Facebook/Hammer & Claws

Those I-beams and brick arches are undeniably similar, no?

Quite a few other tipsters theorize that it's going into SuperPier, an enormous retail complex being built at Pier 57 in Chelsea. One even writes in that he "Went on a real estate broker tour there a year ago, and they said they had a huge Asian hawker market coming from a celebrity chef." Late last year, Curbed was told something similar: that the second floor would become a 19,000 square foot Asian food market. While that's not nearly enough space, SuperPier supposedly will dedicate 90,000 square feet of space total to restaurants, so perhaps Bourdain wrangled a bigger space than initially planned. SuperPier will also have a large rooftop courtyard. The facts don't quite match up, and it's hard to reconcile the renderings of Bourdain Market (which feature a lot of brick) with the plans to build SuperPier out of shipping containers.

Others have speculated about Hudson Yards, but at last report, it was getting a food hall apparently unrelated to Bourdain Market. And there's still the possibility that, as long rumored, the market will go into 3 World Trade Center. Though the office portion of that building doesn't open until 2018, the retail section, which juts out from the foot of the building (and therefore would allow for a rooftop beer garden) should be open sooner.

In any case, Bourdain's partner Stephen Werther has promised that the location will be announced in a few weeks, so all should become clear soon enough.