Food Court Gourmet

San Francisco’s Ferry Building Marketplace and New York’s 45,000-square-foot temple to artisanal Italian food, Eataly, are exemplars of a new concept in culinary design that fuses retail with dining to create bustling, gourmet entrepôts. The latter is a collaboration between Slow Food proponent Oscar Farinetti and a trio of New Yorkers, Lidia and Joe Bastianich and star chef Mario Batali. There, the greatest design challenge, says Alec Zaballero of TPG Architecture, was "massaging" five restaurants, a cafe, a wine store, and the countless mini-departments into the historic structure, a 1903 property in the Flatiron District.

In renovating the interior, TPG benefited hugely from the existing fabric, with gems like original terrazzo and sugar-cube-marble-mosaic flooring. "The design aesthetic was a celebration of the history of the space," says Zaballero. "We salvaged materials as we found them, refabricating historically approved facades, and when we didn’t have original features we used polished stained concrete."

This is not an intimate dining experience: The occupancy is 1,400 and eating areas are designed to merge with the retail scrum, which adds to the churning buzz of the place. "Imagine an Italian hill town market," says Zaballero. "It has that sort of spontaneity and creative chaos."