From Orlando to Los Angeles and in between, shopping center owners have realized that fine dining has progressed from a tactic to keep shoppers from leaving to a draw in itself.
"It's been a shift in leasing. Ten years ago, when you thought of mall dining, you'd think of the food court or Chili's. Now, they're positioning it as an anchor tenant," said Kathy Anderson, a Phoenix-based tourism consultant for General Growth Properties, Chicago. Anderson will lead a roundtable discussion on Culinary Tourism at the International Council of Shopping Centers' Fall Conference in Chicago later this month.
According to the National Restaurant Association, more than two-thirds of table-service restaurants report that visitors are important to their business. At fine-dining establishments, approximately 40 percent of revenues come from tourists, the association says.
"People in a travel mode expect to have a lovely evening and expect to relax," said Rosemary McCormick, president of McCormick Marketing and the Shop America Alliance, Chesterfield, Mo. "When you're a tourist, dining out must happen three times a day."
And while there's always a place for the food court chains for quick bites, better dining is becoming more of a focus, said Erik Wolf, president and CEO of the International Culinary Tourism Association, Portland, Maine. That means serving more local ingredients or dishes, even from the better chains taking shopping center locations, and creating memorable dining experiences.
"More and more people want to experience food as an attraction," Wolf said.
Serving this more sophisticated food consumer dovetails with the changing retail environment. Department store consolidation has required that developers look to different uses as anchors, said Carolyn J. Feimster, president of CJF Marketing International, a North Brunswick, N.J.-based consultancy. Malls are even being designed to include a greater focus on dining.
"The Galleria in Fort Lauderdale has be four restaurants around a plaza," Feimster said. "This creates food as a destination in itself."
As a result, developers and marketing companies are creating visitor-oriented shop-and-dine packages that often include gift certificates, discounts and passes to events such as cocktail-mixing classes. International Plaza and Bay Street, a hybrid mall in Tampa, FL, promotes its 15 restaurants heavily to visitors (including guests at the attached Renaissance Hotel) as well as its residential market, said Nina Mahoney, the mall's marketing director.
The open-air component of the project and the evening activity generated by the restaurants and bars give the Taubman Co. center a resort-like feel, she added.
"Even the residents say, 'I feel like I'm on vacation here,'' Mahoney said.
The Mall at Millenia in Orlando, Fla., produced a brochure promoting its restaurants, including PF Chang's, Brio Tuscan Grille and McCormick & Schmick's, largely because of the heavy competition in dining, said Brenda Lounsberry, marketing director for the center, a joint venture of The Forbes Co. and Taubman.
"You have to create an experience for shopping," Lounsberry said. "Restaurants enhance the experience."
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