Downtown’s new Finn Hall features 10 restaurants that are ‘all Houston’
Unique chef-driven concepts offer a variety of city’s best cuisine in dramatic setting
A new era of the downtown Houston food-hall boom commences Monday when Finn Hall officially opens to the public with 10 chef-driven food outlets, a craft beer and wine bar and a cocktail bar.
Set in the Art Deco opulence of the JPMorgan Chase building at 712 Main, Finn Hall is the first of three food halls — Bravery Chef Hall and Lyric Market are also on the books — to open downtown. With 20,000 square feet of space, including a sleek mezzanine cocktail bar, Finn Hall is named for Alfred C. Finn, the architect of the JPMorgan Chase building, who was considered one of the leading Art Deco-style architects in Texas throughout the first half of the 20th century.
The food operators in the main hall are laid out around a center bar called St. Jac’s, offering beer, cocktails and 12 wines on tap. On the mezzanine level, guests will find Swallow’s Nest, an Art Deco cocktail lounge with tufted red leather booths and cozy tables. The bar will serve specialty and craft cocktails as well as wine by the glass. Guests can order from any menu downstairs, and a server will bring food and drinks to the table.
For some established restaurateurs, Finn Hall allows a different way to position the brand in the busy downtown marketplace. For other vendors, the food hall is their first restaurant.
Levi Goode, CEO of Goode Co., is no stranger to the Houston restaurant scene, yet his Goode Co. Taqueria in Finn Hall represents the first time he’s expanded his TexMex concept since the taqueria opened in 1981. The food-hall model, he said, made for an interesting way to present a long-established brand.
“There’s no denying that food halls have made a splash across the country,” Goode said. “I think it really connects with new diners, new ages and backgrounds.” He added that Finn Hall represents a new way of “bringing our old-school way of cooking to a modern urban environment.”
Restaurateur Alli Jarrett, who owns Harold’s Restaurant & Tap Room in the Heights, saw the hall as a way to test-drive a new concept of fresh and affordable seafood and raw bar. If her Low Tide takes off downtown, she hopes to expand the brand to the suburbs, such as Sugar Land, Pearland and The Woodlands. She also sees Low Tide as filling a seafood void in the marketplace that has few “middle” options but is serviced by the everyday Red Lobsters on one end and McCormick & Schmick and Truluck’s on the higher end.
Within Finn Hall’s restaurant collection, she says she’s offering something distinctive. “There are no cuisines here that are the same,” she said. “Everything here is unique, but it’s all Houston.”
Trent Patterson, director of operations for Dish Society, which put its fourth store in Finn Hall, agrees. “This isn’t a food court,” he said. “It feels more upscale. There’s not a McDonald’s in the corner. Everything in here is uniquely Houston.”
Patterson added that Finn Hall’s dining options distinguish it from fast food in the tunnels where many downtown workers fetch breakfast and lunch.
Though Dish Society has had its eye on downtown, a full-service, seven-days-a-week restaurant on the scale of its other Houston restaurants might not have made financial sense. The food hall, however, is workable and provides more brand awareness. “It’s a great opportunity not just to market to a new client, it’s a big opportunity to spread the knowledge of who we are.”
Ditto for Cori Xiong and Heng Chen, owners of the Chinatown darling Mala Sichuan. Finn Hall, Xiong said, provided an opportunity to present Mala Sichuan cuisine, served family style, in a new format for the food hall (individual servings).
“It’s so much better than what I imagined in my head,” she said of Mala’s stall, where guests can see directly into the kitchen line. “It’s more theatrical than a traditional restaurant.”
Finn Hall allowed chef Shannen Tune to take his Craft Burger business from food truck to dine-in restaurant. A menu of about a dozen specialty burgers will be served alongside gussied-up, hand-cut fries and milkshakes, such as Bananas Foster. Tune has waited for years for his brick-and-mortar dreams to come to fruition. Not only is he opening at Finn Hall, he recently signed a lease to open a restaurant in the Heights, due in October. Called Carol Kay’s, the “Caribbean meat and three” concept will feature dishes such as oxtails, jerk chicken and curry shrimp served with sides such as rice and peas, macaroni and cheese and sweet potato casserole.
For Daniel Ajtai, Finn Hall offers a new start with his own business. The former chef at La Grange and Cottonwood is making his own name with Yong, named for his mother, serving “authentic Korean food, simplified.”
“I consider myself very lucky,” he said. “I got in here very late.”
But he got in. Just like Jay Le, one of the owners of Sit Lo, serving Vietnamese street food. He and his siblings Adrienne Le and Jeff Jacobson will be working alongside their mother, Suzi Jacobson, the chef, on a project sprung from two years working as Bowl’d Up food truck. Sit Lo, Jay Le said, isn’t just a new direction for their food, it’s an opportunity for growth. His goal is to create a brand that can be franchised.
Le added that smart culinary operators need to look at where business will thrive in the future. The food-hall concept, he said, “is where the food truck was in 2010.”
Max Gonzalez, who has a solid customer base for his Catalina Coffee and Amaya Roasting Co., was in no rush to expand his gourmet coffee business. But Finn Hall, with its enviable street-level spot in a handsome, historical building, was something he couldn’t pass up.
“For us, the history and architecture of the building were important,” he said. “You already have built-in character. It’s priceless.”
It also doesn’t hurt that his Amaya Coffee owns the best corner position at Rusk and Main. What better way to draw traffic into the building than coffee, he asked.
Finn Hall’s vendors were carefully curated by Oz Rey, the food hall’s developer, to represent not just familiar names such as Goode and Dish Society but unique, under-the-radar concepts, including Yong and Sit Lo.
The company had discussions with more than 100 potential operators before settling on 10 to open the hall, said David Goronkin, president of Oz Rey.
“We wanted to make sure we were discovering the best the community has to offer,” Goronkin said. “This is Houston — all authentic Houston.”
The hall’s vendor mix also offers cuisines not currently available downtown. “If I want a $50 steak, I have a lot of choices downtown,” he said. What’s not readily available are authentic Chinese (Mala Sichuan), inventive pizza (Mr. Nice Pie), made-to-order falafel (Oddball Eats) and upscale fresh seafood presented in a casual environment (Low Tide).
Finn Hall’s opening will shake up the downtown dining scene by offering so many culinary experiences under one roof, seven days a week. But it’s not the only such concept planned for downtown. Bravery Chef Hall, at 409 Travis in the Aris Market Square tower, is set to open in January, and Lyric Market, at 411 Smith, is scheduled to open in the summer.
Houston’s first food hall, Conservatory, opened at 1010 Prairie in 2016.