Pike Place Market ranked among great American ‘food halls’

Take a look at the nation’s 10 best “food halls” as ranked by real estate insight firm Cushman & Wakefield. Take a look at the nation’s 10 best “food halls” as ranked by real estate insight firm Cushman & Wakefield. Photo: Grant Hindsley, SEATTLEPI.COM Photo: Grant Hindsley, SEATTLEPI.COM Image 1 of / 104 Caption Close Pike Place Market ranked among great American ‘food halls’ 1 / 104 Back to Gallery

Pike Place Market is one of the best of its kind.

That’s not news to Seattle.

Since its salvation in the 1970s, the market has been a center of downtown life and one of the city’s best sights. An expansion coinciding with the Alaskan Way Viaduct’s demolition will secure its place as the city’s most vivid expression of Seattle’s soul.

But it can be hard to judge your own town. Maybe Seattleites find it lovely because they love Seattle.

So it is, at least, good news that one of the world’s leading real estate insight providers puts the old sanitary market near the top of the heap.

Surveying the nation’s “food halls,” researchers at Cushman & Wakefield found Pike Place Market has all the key features of that booming section of the nation’s cityscapes. Check out the gallery above for a look at how Pike Place Market stacks up.

According to the study, spaces like Pike Place allow small, casual eateries to launch with low upfront costs. Those establishments are filling the void left as diners abandon franchise fast-food restaurants.

“No other retail category has generated as much aggressive growth in the past few years as food-related retail,” the Cushman & Wakefield researchers noted. “And arguably, there is no hotter trend currently within that category as food halls.”

Click through for the whole study.

The researchers describe Pike Place as a “great example of the ‘classic American food hall’” that needs no introduction as it is so often a backdrop for films and television set in Seattle.

(They also repeat the popular fiction that the Starbucks café at the market is the chain’s first. It is the second Starbucks.)

Seattlepi.com reporter Levi Pulkkinen can be reached at 206-448-8348 or levipulkkinen@seattlepi.com. Follow Levi on Twitter at twitter.com/levipulk.