THE DEPARTMENT STORE FOOD HALL IS BACK THIS TIME WITH A CHAMPAGNE BAR
Department store Grocery retail, long gone in Canada, is making a comeback. First up: Toronto’s Saks food hall by Pusateri’s by rebecca tucker There is irony in the rebirth of an archaic British retail model in Canada by a New York department store
In the 1930s, the city of Winnipeg held an odd record: It was at that time home to the longest meat counter in North America.
Odder still, for those of us below a certain age, is that the meat counter was inside a department store.
The Eaton’s in the Manitoba capital was — when it boasted those 200 metres of carnivorous splendour — the main source of, well, everything for residents of the growing community: clothing and housewares, yes, but also food. In addition to the meat counter, the 850,000- square- foot store was home to a luxurious imported foods division, a bakery that operated 22 hours a day, a vast “coffee bar,” cafeteria and a selfserve grocery store akin to modern supermarkets, whose product offerings catered to the city’s growing cultural influences, including French, Ukrainian, kosher and even Icelandic.
In the early to mid- 20th century, most Eaton’s stores featured some element of grocery retail, as did those of its competitors. Flagship locations had fine-food counters and dine-in options, while most smaller stores featured a “groceteria:” a fully stocked supermarket that usually comprised an entire floor, often the basement. Call it the food department.
These have long since disappeared in Canada, but the tradition remains in Europe, the U.K. in particular. “Food halls” are full- service, usually opulent food retail operations with a mix of grocery and prepared items; their defining characteristic is a location within a department store. Harrod’s in London is the most iconic example, along with Galeries Lafayette in Paris and KaDeWe in Berlin. Established more than a century ago as a sort of intermediary between the greengrocer and the supermarket, and a precursor to the mall food court, they offered one- stop convenience over individual visits to the butcher, baker and cheesemaker, with no compromise in quality and sourcing.
The opulent Eaton’s Winnipeg food division may not have been labelled as a food hall at the time, but Canadian food historian Mary F. Williams notes that it was “a food hall, by any other name.” However you describe it, this tradition didn’t hold up quite as well in Canada because by the time this country was establishing its own consumerist practices, supermarkets had become popular in the U.S., so we followed that model.
Now, the food hall is making a comeback. This week, Canada got its first in more than half a century, with the launch of Pusateri’s Food Hall at the new Saks Fifth Avenue at Sherway Gardens in Toronto. It’s a fitting partnership between the luxury U. S. department store chain, making its first foray north of the border, and the 50-year-old Toronto grocery retailer, known for catering to an affluent customer with refined tastes, much like the iconic Harrod’s food hall it was inspired by.
With the Pusateri’s Food Hall, the traditional model has been given a remarkable upgrade, more in line with today’s consumer trends than any modern grocer: artisanal goods; fresh-baked bread and locally made cheeses; a juice bar and a champagne bar. With their food hall, Saks and Pusateri’s have turned an old idea into that most contemporary of things: a culinary destination.
“We feel like the market is ready for it,” Frank Luchetta, president of Pusateri’s, says over the phone on the day of the food hall’s unveiling. “It’s a foodie type of experience that you can’t really get (elsewhere).”
The journey toward the Saks Food Hall began two years ago, when the company’s then-president, Marigay McKee, was given the job of reinventing the iconic luxury retailer. “We wanted to bring a different twist, something that’s been missing in the market,” says Stephane Ledoux, regional vice- president for Saks Fifth Avenue in Canada. “There was ( an idea) of ‘ let’s bring the service experience to another level, and bring in an element of culinary arts.’ ” The chain was approached by numerous candidates but ultimately settled on a partnership with Pusateri’s. As Luchetta puts it, “Having two iconic luxury retailers together just makes sense.”
There is some irony inherent in the fact that the rebirth of an archaic British retail model was ushered into Canada by a New York City department store chain that is part of the now-Americanowned Hudson’s Bay Company. Ironic, too, is the fact that — for Saks — progress and revitalization meant turning toward the food hall, a retail model that Williams says has largely died off in its de facto birthplace of Britain — or at least been tailored more toward tourism than functionality.
But it makes sense that McKee’s main idea for reinvention surrounded the introduction of food halls to Saks when you consider she came to the luxury department store’s executive team straight from a gig with Harrods, the textbook example of the retail model.
Launched in 1834 as a grocery store, Harrod’s is today perhaps the most famous department store in the world. It employs more than 12,000 people — 5,000 in the Knightsbridge store alone — and includes outlets in numerous airports, an aviation branch, and a bank. It pulls in more than $1 billion a year.
Its food hall takes an entire floor of the store’s five- acre site. It sells everything from fresh produce, meat and fish to imported cheeses, bakery- fresh breads and dry goods from around the world — to say nothing of its several sit-down restaurants, including a steakhouse and an oyster and champagne bar. With its vaulted ceilings, gilded display cases and high prices, Harrods is a food-lover’s fantasy — provided that food lover has plenty of time, tolerance for crowds and deep, deep pockets.
Luchetta, too, says that he and his team visited a number of European retailers and in the end “took a page out of the Harrod’s food hall.”
The Saks- Pusateri’s partnership is not the first time a department store in Canada has found inspiration in that archetypical example.
Lady Flora McCrea Eaton, wife of Eaton’s heir Timothy Eaton, led what was perhaps the last great revolution in department-store dining.
Established in 1869, Eaton’s had long operated as a food retailer, issuing separate grocery catalogues in its early decades, and flagship locations contained foodaterias. But when Lady Eaton became the company’s vice- president in 1923, she made it her mandate to elevate Eaton’s work in the food division from utilitarian to extravagant. In the 2004 book Lunch with Lady Eaton, author Carol Anderson observes that, “London’s Debenham’s, Selfridges and Harrods ... were her natural terrain.”
Lady Eaton opened five full-service, upscale restaurants in the chain’s largest stores, and carved out space for imported foods and luxury pantry items. In Eaton’s: The Trans Canada Store, Quebec resident Françoise Borel — whose father worked for the Montreal location in the 1930s — recalls the Fine Food Shop on the first floor as having been “extraordinary; there was nothing like it in Montreal at the time. Fabulous food from France, excellent fresh meat, cheeses, and on and on.”
Lady Eaton saw department- store dining then as Saks and Pusateri’s do now: as a potential for reinvention.
But for her, it wasn’t long before the Loblaws and Dominions moved in, building vast, standalone grocery stores modelled after those popping up in the U. S. By 1933, Loblaw was operating more than 100 groceterias in Ontario; by 1949, it introduced its first “super market.” Before long, these massive, self-serve markets made redundancies of department-store groceterias and, by the mid-1960s, Eaton’s had shut down most of its food retail; The Georgian Room, the Eaton’s eatery considered by many to be the first fine-dining restaurant in Canada, closed in 1977.
And now Canada is primed for a department- store dining renaissance — if it is not in fact already underway. Williams, whose mother worked for Eaton’s after she graduated from the University of Toronto in 1919, notes that there has been change afoot, particularly in Toronto, where the basement level of the Queen Street Bay has in recent years seen the opening of a number of small, grab- and- go food retailers and dry-goods sellers. “Going to the bottom of the Bay is a bit like going into the food hall of the Galeries Lafayette in Paris,” she says, “Offering this, that and the other snack.”
Indeed, while the mid- to late-20th century may have seen a shift toward the convenience of large- scale, everything-in-one-place grocery stores, that pendulum is swinging back. Accord- ing to Statistics Canada, sales in the specialty food retail sector — which includes artisanal, luxury goods as well as ethnic foods and products — rose by 35 per cent between 2009 and 2010 (the last period for which data are available), outpacing general retail.
And as consumers take a greater interest in small-scale production and ethical sourcing, large grocery chains are scrambling to fill a niche that smaller, specialized retailers already occupy. In other words, modern consumer habits are well-suited to the old-fashioned food hall retail experience. Saks will open a second food hall later this year, at its downtown location, the Cadillac Fairview Eaton Centre. One imagines Lady Eaton would approve.