Time Out Market wanted its Boston location to be an upscale affair.
When the media empire’s scouts began visiting here in 2017 to sniff out possible vendors, they aimed to replicate Time Out’s Lisbon marketplace, which had become an international triumph. After decades publishing restaurant listings in its portfolio of magazines, the London-based Time Out Group’s first brick-and-mortar manifestation was a one-of-a-kind hybrid of high and low cuisine, with Michelin-star chefs serving fast casual dishes on china with flatware. It quickly became Portugal’s biggest tourist attraction. Time Out Market soon expanded to New York, Miami, and eventually more than a dozen cities across the globe.
In Boston, Time Out took an approach not unlike Michelin Guide reviewers, anonymously visiting restaurants several times to ensure quality was up to its standards, before inviting them to join the huge outpost they were planning in the Fenway. So when Nina and Raffi Festekjian learned that the food at their South End restaurant, anoush’ella, met the mark, they were delighted.
“The whole idea was to attract the best of the best,” Raffi Festekjian said.
After six years of operating at the Time Out Market, the Festekjians were devastated Monday to learn the marketplace would shutter its doors on Jan 23. The 27,000-square-foot space at 401 Park Drive will leave a massive hole in the neighborhood’s retail corridor, which will also soon see the departure of the adjacent REI Co-op store.
Festekjian said Time Out’s 15 vendors were told that after building back from the pandemic, revenue fell 20 percent last year. Meanwhile operating costs were climbing, and the market’s lease was coming up for renewal next year. Festekjian said he was told Time Out offered to hand over operations to the building owner, Alexandria Real Estate Equities. Alexandria declined. The decision was made to close the place down.
In a post on Time Out Market’s website Wednesday, CEO Michael Marlay pointed to a variety of post-COVID factors for the decision. The company also announced the closure of its location in Chicago’s Fulton Market District on Wednesday. Their Miami market also closed in 2023, meaning New York will soon be the brand’s only US outpost.
“Following the pandemic, we have seen the Boston Market recover and grow, and we have focused on initiatives driving further growth; however, footfall until today remains inconsistent in the area due to ongoing hybrid working,” he wrote.
Alexandria did not return a request for comment.
Time Out was the first and largest in a wave of upscale food halls to open around Boston in recent years, with the latest set to open in Kendall Square this month. Its failure likely says more about the operations of Time Out, and the nuances of its specific location, than about the idea writ large, said Whitney Gallivan, a veteran retail broker at Boston Realty Advisors.
“I don’t think Time Out closing in Fenway has anything to do with a success of a food hall as a concept, and it has no reflection on Boston,” she said. “Time Out thought they would plop it in and it would be a well-oiled machine and it would just work . . . but you can’t take your their eye off the ball.”
The news shocked vendors such as Mary Lattouf, who in May opened an outpost of her plant-based Lulu Green restaurant in the market. Lattouf said she’d been courted by most of the major food halls in the city, but chose to sign with Time Out in part because of how well she thought the market was run.
“It was a beautiful space, we were very proud to be in the market,” Lattouf said, saying it was a chance for her to expand her presence in the city and to test new menu items that she plans to add to her new Kendall Square location, which will open next month.
“It takes at least a year to make your investment back, and that point is disappointing to us. We were the newbie there,” she said. “That’s very disappointing.”
Physically, the market was striking. The space, which once housed a Best Buy store, was reimagined with high ceilings, poured concrete floors, and big windows that could open onto a 6,000-square-foot patio. Diners at long wooden tables sipped cocktails and munched on sushi tacos and cumin-spiced beef patties. There would sometimes be bands inside and thrift markets and other events on the mini-park out front.
When busy, the place could feel like the buzzy heart of a resurgent Fenway, and it attracted high-profile chefs such as Tim and Nancy Cushman, Jody Adams, and Michael Schlow.
But some of its former operators were unsurprised it eventually went under, saying Time Out’s managers never quite understood how to translate their vision to a Boston audience.
Tony Maws, whose Craigie Burger stall drew huge hype when the market opened in 2019, said he was excited about being a founding vendor — it was a low-cost way to experiment with a new concept, and Time Out paid to build out his space.
But it quickly became clear, Maws said, that Time Out’s high-end vision didn’t mesh with the needs of the neighborhood, which tends to cater to sports fans and students.
“They were very rigid in how they saw this market operating without understanding that different markets were going to need market-specific characteristics,” Maws said.
Soon after it opened, Maws said, he suggested that the market air Women’s World Cup and Red Sox games on its big projection screen, but was told “this is not what we do, we don’t want this to be a sports venue.”
Management eventually agreed, Maws said. But every time he went to offer some ideas for driving foot traffic, he was rebuffed. The standard line, he said, was “shut up and deal.” It was arrogant, he said, and when the pandemic shut down Time Out for several months, Maws chose not to reopen.
“You approach some of the most successful restaurant owners in the city,” he said. “And then you tell us what made us successful doesn’t matter to you.”
What’s next for the site is uncertain.
401 Park first opened in the 1920s as a Sears Roebuck distribution site, and was redeveloped into office and retail space and renamed Landmark Center by Samuels and Associates, the Boston-based developer that has rebuilt much of the Fenway neighborhood. Samuels renovated the ground floor and brought in Time Out before selling the building to Alexandria, one of the region’s largest biotech developers, in 2021 for $1.5 billion.
As part of the sale, Samuels continued for several years to manage programming on the plaza outside the building, bringing attractions such as an ice skating rink on the green space during winter to drive foot traffic. Last winter, though, under Alexandria’s management, the ice skating rink wasn’t installed.
A popular beer garden outside, run by Trillium Brewing Company, will reopen from winter maintenance this week, said chief executive Esther Tetreault, who was surprised to learn the food hall would soon close.
“We are committed to the Fenway neighborhood and look forward to continuing to be a destination for locals and visitors alike for years to come,” she said.
Alexandria, too, has faced headwinds as the city’s market for lab space has cratered. That may account for why several of Alexandria’s other retail properties are vacant, including the former Cambridge Brewing Company and Smoke Shop BBQ locations in Kendall Square, which abruptly closed last year.
At 401 Park, one of the building’s anchor office tenants, restaurant-tech company Toast, relocated its headquarters to Fort Point last year. According to real estate firm CBRE, more than one-fourth of the lab and office space in Fenway and Kenmore Square is vacant, and many workers still work hybrid schedules, sapping lunch crowds. Meanwhile, the Regal Fenway movie theater next door closed in 2023, and ongoing construction has limited street parking and steered patrons into an expensive parking garage on site.
All that means fewer people passing through the market, Gallivan said. She has worked closely with Rockpoint, the real estate firm that runs High Street Place in downtown Boston, and said operating a food hall is its own kind of alchemy, particularly in Boston.
“Boston is known to be more nuanced in the restaurant arena. National outlets often come in and fail,” she said, because they don’t take the time to understand the audience. “In New England, you need to drive people in the winter with a skating rink.”
Still, patrons having lunch at Time Out Market Boston on Wednesday expressed their dismay, and were curious about what new tenant might occupy the cavernous space.
“What’s going to be here? It’s such a great place to come to,” said Susan Siegen, who lives across the street and regularly visits with her husband, Craig Sonnenfeld. The couple sees the closure as a loss for the neighborhood. Sonnenfeld suspects that the parking situation may have contributed to the food hall’s demise.
“It’s impossible to park,” he said. “In our building, when there’s a ballgame, it’s gotten up to be $50, $60.”
Igor Rabovsky, 37, works as an accountant in the Fenway neighborhood and he visited the market once a week or so to get lunch from anoush’ella. The closing caught him by surprise. The place is usually busy, he said.
“It’s a little sad because most of these places are local restaurants, or outposts to local restaurants, and it’s a good space to go to before like a game,” he said. “It’s a little cheaper and more casual than other spots.”
David Henson, 24, a student at the Boston University School of Theology, was disheartened to hear the announcement.
“I saw on the news that the market is closing and I figured I’d come out here for one last hurrah,” said Henson, who sees the market as a staple of the neighborhood. “Anytime somebody from out of state comes to visit, I’m like, ‘Let’s go to Time Out Market.’ ”
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