The biggest surprise for me from my Canadian mall visits was how big of a deal their food courts are -- on this side of the border, the food court is often the emptiest part of the malls I've visited, but up here, it's the exact opposite. It's clear that Tsawwassen Mills' designers fully understood that, building what might be the largest mall food court I've ever seen, and placing it right in the middle of the mall, effectively having it do double duty as the central court too. And unlike pretty much any US mall I've seen, there is no direct entrance to the food court -- I imagine the designers decided that making people who just want to go to the food court walk past the shops would be good for business.
Even in Quebec and Ontario, the mall food courts I've seen are far bigger, busier, and more impressive than the ones I've seen in the US. In the case of the Toronto Eaton Centre and the Montreal downtown malls, the malls probably do get a fairly large number of downtown office workers who eat lunch at these food courts. In fact, I know that was the case in Montreal. It is not uncommon for Canadian malls to have 7-8, or even more, different food outlets with different kinds of Asian food along with several other non-Asian eateries. It's hard to find even half that variety at an American mall even in places like Houston with a large Asian population.
ReplyDeleteProbably the most impressive food court I've ever been to was at the Rideau Centre in Ottawa. Not only was the food court massively large with a large number of outlets, but the outlets even served their food on real dinnerware with real silverware. When you were done eating, they had manned stations around the food court where you'd take your finished plates and they'd separate and clean things right there. It was quite strange to see something so fancy given the food outlets were things like A&W, KFC, and so forth. It was very impressive. Granted, I'm sure they stopped using real dinnerware during Covid and who knows if it ever came back so I don't know if it is as fancy as it was when I went in 2017.
This part of the mall certainly looks quite different from the somewhat modern, industrial look that we saw in the Red Wing post. Like most malls with lots of natural lighting, they tend to look quite different at night. But, yeah, all that exposed wood makes this look quite a bit like a 1970s or early 1980s mall, but with quite different architecture.
Sounds like Vancouver's mall food courts are pretty similar to the ones you visited! I've certainly never seen one with real, reusable dishes and silverware anywhere, though!
DeleteThis mall has a lot of different styles to it, with each numbered section having its own look. As I said previously, the area we've been looking at so far (on either side of the food court) is probably the most boring one.
It seems the word for the stations where they wash the silverware and such is 'scullery'. Now you know, lol. Here is a brief description of the Rideau Centre food court with some photos. The sculleries are the little things with the purple signs with the silverware icons. It seems this was done to reduce disposable items while giving the place an upscale feel. Link: https://www.ghadesign.com/food-destinations/cf-rideau-center/
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