Is Chicago's food hall era over?

On a recent weekday just before 5 p.m., a small bottleneck formed at Sterling Food Hall as beleaguered office workers scrambled to place their drink orders at the Flamingo Bar before the start of weekly pub trivia.

Despite 10-degree temperatures outside, almost 50 people, from Gen Z to Boomer age, filtered in, a few still wearing work ID badges. Cans and pitchers of beer, Cokes and pine tree negronis filled tables along with communal fries, vodka roni slices from Pizza Dada and harissa hot chicken sandwiches from Hot Chi, two vendors among the more than dozen dotting the hall.

“How’s the kimbap?” a thirty-something man asked after requesting the empty chair next to me. Recent addition 82 Kimbap was drawing buzz for its Korean rice rolls packed with pickled radish, egg and proteins like beef bulgogi, creamy tuna salad and braised tofu. (The last was especially good dabbed in perilla vinaigrette).

The next couple of hours unfolded with the rise and fall of chatter about workplace drama, laughter and cries of “Oh, I know this!” to a soundtrack of throwbacks like “Toxic” by Britney Spears. It was a heartening, if subdued, depiction of the kind of happy hour that once prevailed in the office-dense Loop and West Loop.

But this happy hour wasn't in a pub. It took place in a Downtown food hall.

Such momentum suggests there’s hope after all for the food hall, which roared on the scene over a decade ago as the millennial younger sibling of the chain-heavy, suburban food court. After a heydey, COVID-19 arrived, subduing office occupancy and killing several food hall concepts — including, on Jan. 23, Fulton Market’s once-thriving Time Out Market.

Some saw Time Out’s closure as a warning sign. But not so fast, say those steering the city’s surviving food halls.

Despite the headwinds of hybrid work and the prevailingly less-than-cool image of the Loop, a few stronger currents still favor the concept. Office tenancy is creeping back up, and coworkers want compelling lunch options and perhaps some wallet-friendly social connections before heading home. Such spaces also remain incubators for promising concepts and are getting more savvy about marketing themselves to tourists, who appreciate local options close to the sights without the hassle of booking tables.

Success may look a little different now, and it’s up to the operators to lean in.

“When we started Revival, it was a very different feeling of what a food hall was and what we wanted to do and what people who subsequently started food halls gravitated to,” said Bruce Finkelman, managing partner at 16” On Center, which opened Revival Food Hall in 2016 (now Sterling) and From Here On Food Hall & Market in the Old Post Office Building in 2022. “We wanted to build a neighborhood place, a third place, for downtown or in a downtown building. Now you start looking at the purpose more as being an amenity to a building, and almost like a reason for people to come back to work.”

In the mid-2010s food halls were ascendant, cropping up in cities nationwide as multifaceted marketplaces featuring local and chef-driven food vendors and artisans. Between 2010 and 2017, the number of food halls in the U.S. increased by roughly 700%, reaching 220 by 2019, according to brokerage Cushman & Wakefield. As of 2023, that number hit 360.

In Chicago, marketplaces like Revival, Aster Hall, Block 37, Time Out Market, Wells Street Market, Fulton Galley and Politan Row sprang up en masse amid soaring office structures and tourist hotspots Downtown and in the trendy, mixed-use West Loop.

Notoriously hanging their hat on offering a variety of interesting food options, food halls like Revival regularly featured cooking and cocktail classes, bands and DJ sets, often packing the house for a few hours after work. Finkelman recalled the feeling of being “like the kitchen at a dinner party; this was their place,” he said.

Building on the hype, food halls arrived in less foot traffic-heavy neighborhoods, albeit with mixed success. On the edge of Chinatown, 88 Marketplace has become a chef’s magnet for affordable sushi, noodles and Chinese groceries since it opened in 2021. But some other concepts haven’t panned out. One Eleven debuted in Pullman in 2019 as an incubator for Black restaurateurs; by the fall of 2021 Dominique Leach’s barbecue spot, Lexington Betty Smokehouse, took over. The vegan XMarket, which opened in 2023, lasted just one year in Uptown.

‘What are you guys doing to bring customers in?’

COVID-19 killed some food hall projects, including Politan Row and Wells Street Market. In a statement, Time Out Market CEO Michael Marlay attributed its closure last month to the pandemic and inconsistent foot traffic due to remote work, though vendors have since pointed to loss of revenue due to neglect and lack of investment, according to reporting by Eater.

“Honestly, I wasn’t excited with the sales, and I was one of the busiest vendors there, which they told me a few times,” said Jessica Perjes, co-owner of Tacotlán in Hermosa. The family-owned birria joint had a stall at Time Out Market from late October until a week before it closed. “I was like, what are you guys doing to bring customers in?”

Some of the cultural caché seems to have shifted toward highly specialized supermarkets focused on specific cuisines. When I polled my social media for favorite food halls, most cited 88 Marketplace; Asian grocer and food court Gangnam Market; and Korean-leaning supermarket chain H Mart (“Does H Mart even count?” two rather tellingly asked.)

Last year, a handful of Chicago Food subredditors declared the trend mostly over.

“It’s not the most interesting scene honestly,” one wrote.

“I’m both wildly underwhelmed and wildly overcharged whenever I do go to one,” wrote another.

In such a cutthroat space, food halls can’t count on individual vendor buzz alone, even if said vendor has more than 50,000 TikTok followers, like Tacotlán. Perjes recalled asking management to be kept in the loop on everything happening at Time Out Market, “because if I know it, I’m able to tell my customers and drive more traffic on my social media,” she said. “I didn’t see that from them. They’d put events on a big old board, but I wasn’t there often enough to see it.”

Being open late and on weekends in a touristy entertainment district also provided the location with unique potential. The market’s huge television broke during a considerable part of the NFL season, when fans would’ve come to watch the Bears’ surprisingly successful run. When Perjes asked about it, she was told fixing it was too expensive.

“It took so long for them to try to figure it out,” she said. “They ended up getting a smaller TV, and brought it downstairs. It helped; we started seeing a lot more traction in the food hall. The whole thing was like, what is going on? Do you guys even care?”

‘People are really craving that third space’

For Downtown food halls, things are — kind of — looking up. Weekly office occupancy hit a post-pandemic record of 55.8% last fall across several major U.S. cities, and averaged 58.7% in Chicago in September 2025. This is according to the security systems company Kastle, which has tracked office activity by counting badge swipes since 2020.

Foot traffic and transactions at the food hall in the Old Post Office have increased between 18 and 20% year over year since its 2022 debut, per Finkelman. Over the past year, the hall is seeing bigger spikes in repeat customers three to four times per week as more companies call employees back to the office.

Sterling has filled all but one vendor stall since parent company STHRN Hospitality assumed ownership from 16” On Center 18 months ago. (They spent the first six months “battling misinformation that the hall had permanently closed,” STHRN cofounder Kelly Campbell told me.)

This summer, Sterling upped its advertising spend and partnered with Chicago tourism to get on more tourists’ radar. Weekly sales are up about 33% compared to a year ago, and visitor traffic has increased. In the fourth quarter of 2025, Sterling averaged 1,712 customers per operating day, 297 more each day compared with the same period in 2024.

Mutaz Abdullah, owner of Seedo’s Levantine Bakery at Sterling, is happy to average 150 transactions most weekdays at lunch. He has since opened a second location at Madison and Wells, in a former outpost of the counter-service Mediterranean restaurant Mezza Mediterranean Grill, which the self-described Loop lifer Abdullah opened with his partners in 2003. In 2008 they also opened Habanero Baja Grill.

“We have not reached the levels I experienced opening and running those concepts, especially on Mondays and Fridays when it’s about half of what it used to be,” Abdullah said. “I could argue we’re probably 80% there on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.”

Abdullah still believes in the potential of the food hall. He hopes efforts in the early 2020s to revitalize Downtown with more city-subsidized residences will help shore up the slow rebound of office occupancy. For now, he thinks there’s enough of a captive audience to try and refill the third place void.

“I think people are really craving that third space that’s not just a restaurant, bakery or coffee shop,” Abdullah said. “Sterling has the space, there’s a bar, there’s a bunch of great, interesting vendors.”

STHRN cofounder George Banks told me that in addition to in-building, off-premise catering, Sterling sees the most growth potential in the “in-between hours” — as in an afternoon bite or happy hour. (The Flamingo Bar and several vendors offer discounts daily starting at 4 p.m.)

Indeed, according to a recent dining trends report by OpenTable, 35% of Americans planned to prioritize happy hour drinks and snacks when dining out in the historically quiet (and dryish) January. On that note, dining at 4 p.m. was up 13% compared to the previous year.

Food halls remain uniquely positioned to appeal to a food-minded public, allowing them to restaurant shop. They also offer a lower-risk entry point for restaurateurs to dip a few toes into a concept to see if it has legs.

In the fall, 175 people turned up for the first of Sterling’s discovery-focused Showcase series, paying $10 in advance ($15 at the door) to sample bites from any three vendors. About 225 came to the second. Sterling plans to bring it back in the spring and to feature more programming like last year’s wine tasting and DJ set collaboration with the sommelier and DJ duo Samples & Samples.

“There are definitely younger people not rushing out who want a drink at the end of the day,” Campbell said.

The question of how many remains elusive in a culture that still embraces some remote work such that it can be a bargaining chip for coveted prospective employees. When folks do come into the office, they’re eager for human interaction. And many still want a drink and a hang once 5 p.m. finally arrives.