Just shy of 15 months in its downtown digs, the Fort Street Galley food hall is abruptly pulling the plug after a rocky run.

A representative from the Pittsburgh-based Galley Group, which operates the Detroit food hall along with several other Midwest locations, confirmed that Fort Street Galley will shutter permanently at the end of business Friday.

"There were various factors that led to this difficult outcome, among them the decision to scale back our operations nationwide and focus energy on our flagship locations in Pittsburgh & Minneapolis," said Chad Ellingboe, vice president of operations for Galley Group, in a statement.

The closure comes as the group appears to be downscaling amid a major leadership shakeup. Friday will also be the last day for the Galley Group's Cleveland food hall, which opened about the same time as Detroit's. And a Chicago outpost closed last fall after just five months in operation, right around the time Ben Mantica, one of the company's two co-founders, reportedly left the group. (Sources familiar with the company's dealings say Tyler Benson recently left Galley Group as well.)

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JP Garcia, who runs the popular Filipino stall Isla with his wife, Jacqueline Diño, said they were alerted to the closure Tuesday, but the short notice was a long time coming.

"We’re in the heart of downtown, but business never picked up," Garcia said. "Dinner service was always hit or miss. It wasn’t going to amount to enough to cover rent. ... I had the inkling that it might start snowballing downhill when they decided to close two days out of a week. Sales were already not there and they’re gonna lose two more days of sales. So I had an inkling then. So it really didn’t come as a surprise to me.

"But I still had hope they were gonna try to at least revamp it somehow.”

Isla was the last of the four original stalls that opened when Fort Street Galley debuted in December 2018. Positioning itself as an incubator for restaurant talent, the Galley Group operated on a slightly different business model than a typical food hall, taking a flat 30% of revenue from vendors to cover nearly all business expenses outside of food and labor. (Traditionally, most food halls act as landlords and vendors simply rent space from the operating group while covering their own operating costs.)

While Galley Group's model has proven successful in its hometown of Pittsburgh, Garcia said it didn't work in Detroit.

“In hindsight, with the incubator-style concept that 30% is really a killer," Garcia said. "That’s what took down most of the stalls that were here. I’ve worked the stall every single day since day one. And that was probably the only way I was able to survive, because I could control those labor costs.”

Signs of trouble for Fort Street Galley cropped up early. Two of its original vendors, the Korean-style sushi spot Pursue and Mediterranean sandwich slinger Allenby were both given the boot by management before the six-month mark for not hitting their sales numbers, even though the opening vendors had agreed to yearlong residencies.

At the time, the founders agreed to some missteps, and pointed to issues like bad weather, lack of parking and high price points as reasons for the food hall's struggles, but also promised to adapt. They brought in vendors that had been successful in other Galley Group locations like the Southern-inspired Table and Detroit-style pizza outpost Michigan & Trumbull, as well as an on-trend fried chicken joint.

The changes seemed to help little, especially as the booming restaurant scene in metro Detroit has begun to show other signs of slowing. Though its tenure was much shorter, Fort Street Galley joins a growing roster of high-profile restaurant closings in the first two months of 2020, Gold Cash Gold and Craft Work in Detroit and Greenspace Cafe and Bistro 82 in Oakland County among them.

As for the Fort Street Galley space, a representative from landlord Bedrock said they are actively exploring future uses for the space and are also working to find placements for the food hall's employees throughout Bedrock's portfolio.

Send your dining tips to Free Press Restaurant Critic Mark Kurlyandchik at 313-222-5026 ormkurlyandc@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @MKurlyandchik and Instagram @curlyhandshake. Read more restaurant news and reviews and sign up for our Food and Dining newsletter.