Penn Station-Adjacent Food Hall the Pennsy to Shutter Next Month

Midtown’s four-year-old Pennsy Food Hall, located at 2 Penn Plaza, between W. 32nd Street and W. 33rd Street, is shutting down. Real estate giant Vornado will be pulling the plug on the food hall at the end of March, Commercial Observer reports.

The 8,000-square-foot space currently houses six food vendors, including popular meat purveyor Pat LaFrieda and vegan hot spot the Cinnamon Snail. Chef Adam Sobel, who owns the Cinnamon Snail, wrote in a post on Instagram that he had been notified that the Pennsy would be closing its doors on March 31, and Sobel subsequently made the decision to completely shut down the Cinnamon Snail due to the loss of that space.

“For us, it’s really detrimental,” Sobel told Eater in an email. “Our overhead in NYC will not be sustained without our location in the Pennsy, and we will be closing our entire business down.”

The Cinnamon Snail has operated inside the Pennsy Food Hall since it opened in January 2016, while other vendors have rotated in and out. The hall had previously shut down temporarily in 2017 in order to complete renovations that included adding more outdoor seating and a central bar to the operation.

Food halls have been multiplying across New York City in recent years — The Deco, Essex Crossing, and Urbanspace West 52nd have all opened in the past several months — but the Pennsy’s failure could indicate that there are limits on how many food halls the city can sustain, although a source familiar with Vornado’s plans in the area said that the Pennsy was always supposed to be a temporary food hall to help gauge eating habits in the area ahead of the company’s planned renovation of 1 and 2 Penn Plaza.

In an earlier Commercial Observer report, the outlet noted that real estate experts are watching the booming landscape of food halls skeptically, especially in overexposed markets like New York City, and there could be more closures in the future.

Vornado did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Eater.

Update, 2:54 p.m.: This story has been updated with additional comment.