The Case Against Hudson Yards Dining

When the first phase of Hudson Yards opens for business next March, New York will have a brand-new dining neighborhood. Not just a new building with a handful of restaurants. Not just a food hall with a collection of vendors. An entire neighborhood, with a performing arts edifice, a Spanish market, five high-rises (one of them taller than the Empire State Building), a leafy outdoor pavilion, 25 food and beverage concepts, a mammoth shopping center, and a 150-foot-tall work of public art known as the Vessel — a series of interlocking staircases that will offer bird’s-eye Instagrams of all the slick commercialism.

The $20 billion project, which will eventually include a middle school, more skyscrapers, and a 10,000-square-foot restaurant 101 floors above Manhattan, is the most expensive real estate development in the history of the United States.

It’s hard not to marvel at the potential of what this could be: an eclectic amalgamation of global culinary traditions, or a new neighborhood designed to mitigate a specific urban problem, be it the affordable housing crisis or the displacement of independent restaurants by fast-casual chains and luxe retailers.

Hudson Yards, alas, is neither of these things. It is a taxpayer-subsidized development that solidifies Manhattan’s slow transformation from one of the world’s most distinctive urban centers into a nondescript international mall for the wealthy.

A “neighborhood for the next generation” is one of the taglines for Hudson Yards. Another is “the new heart of New York,” a curious statement for a place that will not functionally exist for another six months. It’s also a breathtakingly cynical (or honest?) thing to say about a slice of the city where one-bedroom apartments will start at $5,300/month, where remaining condos will cost no less than $3.9 million, where the only hotel, initially, will be a luxury Equinox Hotel, and where the retail center is designed for what the website calls “life maximizers.”

When that mall — the Shops and Restaurants at Hudson Yards — opens in the spring, not one of the six full-service restaurants will have a female owner. Just two of the counter-service concepts (Belcampo and Milk Bar) will have a woman proprietor. The only place for pizza — New York’s quintessentially affordable street food — will be a D.C.-based chain where a lunchtime margherita starts at $11.50. The only Chinese-leaning restaurant will be an “East meets West” spot run by a Dutch guy known for his competent Continental spots in airports, concert halls, and museums.

Hudson Yards is what happens when two multi-billion-dollar developers, Related Companies and Oxford Properties Group, choose the dining options for an entire neighborhood. Related, in particular, is bringing over four tenants (chefs David Chang, Michael Lomonaco, Thomas Keller, and the D&D London group) from its Midtown retail and restaurant complex, the Time Warner Center.

Keller, the country’s only chef with two three-Michelin-starred restaurants — a man whose tasting-menu prices make him a bona fide ambassador for the one percent — co-curated the selections. And so this is a good time to mention that Estiatorio Milos, one of New York’s priciest seafood restaurants, located just a hop, skip, and a jump away in Midtown West, will clone itself at Hudson Yards.

The curious effect is that those living in Hell’s Kitchen — like me — are now flanked by the same elite group of restaurateurs on the northern and southern edges of their neighborhood, at Time Warner and Hudson Yards, respectively. Yes, some of those restaurant concepts will be different here on the far West Side. Chang isn’t opening up another Momofuku Noodle Bar; he’s giving us a new Korean restaurant. And Keller isn’t cloning Per Se; he’s tipping his hat to the Mad Men era with something called TAK Room. But what isn’t changing is who will profit — a bunch of very established dudes — and those who won’t — the small and critically acclaimed restaurants who risk so much of their own livelihoods to make sure that the West Side remains such a vibrant place to live.

Virtually all of the high-profile restaurants at Hudson Yards will be housed in the upper levels of the mall, as is the case with the Time Warner Center; when that complex opened in 2003, then-New York Times critic William Grimes noted that it gave New York “a new restaurant district. This one just happens to be vertical, and created all at once.”

Prices aside, the verticality that Grimes mentioned has always been one of the most alienating aspects of the edifice. The Time Warner Center doesn’t have a single streetside bar or cafe, a place for people to linger. Arriving at any of the restaurants here, even the more affordable ones like Bouchon or Landmarc, requires walking past some of the city’s most expensive boutiques and up multiple escalators. Walking by Time Warner, something I do a few times a week, means walking by empty stores.

In her groundbreaking 1961 work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs argued that an “intricate ballet” of sidewalk personalities — a deli guy stacking crates, a barber bringing out his folding chair, a mother with her child on a stoop — was a vital part of the modern cityscape. These personalities constituted “eyes on the street,” a phrase that would become hugely influential among urban planners in efforts to keep major cities safe. But Jacobs also knew that eyes on the street provided something else, something missing from modern, overplanned dormitory-style neighborhoods in the vein of Battery Park City, or the Crystal City complex outside of D.C. Those benefits were, quite simply, a sense of joy and community, a vibrancy that felt endemic to the small streets of Jacobs’s own Greenwich Village.

That vibrancy will be a touch harder to come by at Hudson Yards, where a linchpin of the neighborhood is a million-square-foot mall — bigger than the Whitney and MoMa combined — where the literal point is to vacuum people off the streets and funnel them skyward, to a bubble of upscale commerce. The shopping center’s clustering of restaurants on the upper floors is a style of urban planning that favors destination diners (and those who live in the luxe apartments) over anyone who hopes to walk down the block and feel the energy of people spilling out of crowded bars and culinary establishments.

It’s a reinvention of New York that would make a Las Vegas casino-owner proud.

Hudson Yards, of course, is more than just a mall; the entire thing will be 28 acres when it’s finally complete in 2035. There will be a few streetside dining options elsewhere throughout the complex. A Sweetgreen recently opened on the ground floor of 10 Hudson Yards — an office building next to the Shops — as did a Think Coffee across the street. And there will be yet another Maison Kayser near the 7 Train. But try strolling by a corporate-style counter-service spot at night; they’re never quite empty, but they’re also never quite full. Fast casual isn’t known for fostering communal dinnertime bonhomie as much as it’s a place to dine solo with your earbuds in.

For now, the only real restaurant-style venue at street level will be the 35,000-square-foot Mercado Little Spain, located at 10 Hudson. It’s hard not to get truly excited about the venture as it’s helmed by three of the world’s great culinarians: José Andrés, a Spanish-American chef, and the brothers Albert and Ferran Adrià, two Catalan avant-gardists. None of them have any presence in New York.

Their Mercado will have three full-service establishments, outdoor dining, and lots of stalls. One only hopes they use their roomy space and ample finances to host pop-ups for the scores of small Cuban, Peruvian, Bolivian, and other Latino spots in Hell’s Kitchen; Albert Adrià already has a remarkable track record in highlighting the foodways of the larger Spanish-speaking world, from Mexican at Hoja Santa to Japanese-Peruvian at Pakta, both in Barcelona.

Related tells Eater that they reached out to a number of female chefs, but said those individuals weren’t able to put up enough funds for the buildouts. It’s tempting to criticize the world at large here, to lament how the dominance of men in finance and tech creates institutional impediments to women raising money. It’s also tempting to assail larger male-led restaurant groups for not tapping more women to lead high-profile hotel and stadium projects (although it’s worth giving props to Chang for putting chef Eunjo Park in charge of his Hudson Yards restaurant). But what’s perhaps most aggravating and disingenuous is how a multibillion-dollar company is effectively blaming its lack of diversity on the capital requirements of its own building, instead of digging into its pockets to help finance those most in need of economic empowerment.

A new neighborhood should mean new opportunities, especially for underprivileged residents and businesses without access to finance. Just as major developments have affordable housing requirements — those units will eventually make up a scant 10 percent of the Hudson Yards apartments — the city should work to ensure retail space in those new districts is reserved for smaller operators.

The developer has other concerns. Related Urban’s CEO, Kenneth Himmel, told Eater New York he didn’t want to “take a chance” on lesser-known operators who haven’t demonstrated “great success” already. “People who are moving in here as office occupants and residents want to know that great brands have committed to the project. That’s what they want to know. That’s a seal of approval,” Himmel said. His statements are a cold affirmation of self-perpetuating capital and power structures that protect the privileged and keep out the marginalized. And his views stand in stark contrast to a luxury development like Gotham West, where more experimental concepts like Corner Slice, a debut pizzeria, and Jianbing Company, which sells Shanghainese crepes, haven’t prevented the landlords from attracting patrons willing to spend $4,000/month on one-bedrooms.

Eating at Hudson Yards could have been a lot of things. It could’ve been an effort in creating a sense of community. It could’ve been an attempt to solve problems of under-representation in the culinary world or address structural issues in business finance. And it could’ve been a way to cater to a dining public that’s increasingly enamored with restaurants as entry points to understanding a country or culture. Hudson Yards, alas, is about brands. It’s about chains. It’s about rich men helping other men stay rich.