A former Sears department store at a Los Angeles area mall has already been reinvented once as a sprawling food hall. Now owner Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield is testing another strategy.
The landlord is converting part of its food emporium — Topanga Social — at the Westfield Topanga mall into a rotating residency for celebrity chefs, branded food concepts and nostalgia-driven pop-ups through a partnership with Chain, the company co-founded by actor and writer B.J. Novak.
The six-month experiment comes as URW, a global real estate firm that owns about 15 malls across the United States, looks to revive a food hall venue that has lost most of its original vendors since opening in 2023, reflecting a broader push by mall owners to use limited-run attractions and experience-driven dining to generate repeat visits.
“Malls are back, and it’s not just nostalgia, it’s a younger generation discovering something an older generation kind of took for granted: that hanging out somewhere in person, with nothing to do but gaze and graze, is actually really fun,” Nicholas Kraft, Chain’s chief creative officer, said in a statement.
Developers nationwide are working to reposition food halls after the COVID-19 pandemic prompted mass consolidation, showing that these foodie-focused properties need more than a variety of high-quality vendors to survive.
Repeat visits are harder to sustain without a steady flow of new concepts and experiences, according to Jamie Brooks, managing director of retail leasing at Cushman & Wakefield.
“Malls need to continually reinvent themselves, and pop-ups are one way to do it,” Brooks told CoStar News. Even so, “not every mall can sustain a food hall.”
Topanga Social opened with a lineup of more than 25 locally based chains; most of those operators have shut down. Customers complained about slow service and food quality, while vendors pointed to spotty foot traffic and tight operating margins.
Chain’s debut next month will test whether branded collaborations and social media-friendly menu items — such as the Cheez-It cheesesteak — can bring customers back after opening day.
Food hall strategies
Unlike a traditional food court, where customers typically stop for a quick meal before returning to shopping, Topanga Social — like other food halls — was designed as a destination. The concept combines dining with entertainment, events and social spaces, reflecting a broader effort by mall owners to transform food offerings from an amenity into an attraction.
In fact, developers of early food halls said they created the spaces to be the opposite of mall food courts. Early food halls featured a mixture of different higher-end cuisines that local chefs were testing out, the opposite of the national fast-food, lower-cost outlets that have long dominated food courts in malls. That history reflects an inherent irony in the URW effort playing out in a mall.
The experiment comes as the sector faces broader challenges. Food halls have generally fared better on the West Coast than on the East Coast because of climate, density and consumer behavior, Brooks said, adding that the concept expanded too aggressively during the past decade and has become overbuilt in some markets.
About 450 multitenant food halls currently operate in the U.S., compared with around 220 in 2019, and the number of projects in the pipeline grew about 25% between 2023 and 2025, according to a January report from restaurant industry advisory firm Colicchio Consulting.
The New York-based firm led by former Cushman & Wakefield executive Phil Colicchio said 96 food halls are on track to open nationwide in 2026: 26 in urban markets and 70 in suburban or peripheral areas.
The food hall category continues to perform “on par with or better than traditional restaurants, reinforcing the model’s long-term viability,” the study found. New projects are increasingly targeting suburban markets, including Stix Asia in Las Vegas, an 18,000-square-foot food hall designed around live cooking and cultural programming for residents.
Colicchio said the most successful food halls function as cultural hubs rather than simply collections of restaurants.
“Food alone is no longer the singular destination, energy is,” Colicchio said in the report.
Chain’s mall debut
Chain began as a West Hollywood parking lot pop-up in 2021 built on reimagining familiar chain-restaurant dishes through a fine-dining lens.
Founded by Novak, Kraft, Jack Davis, Byron Ashley, Abe Burns and chef Tim Hollingsworth, the company has since expanded into festivals, branded collaborations and catering for events including HBO’s 2024 Emmy party. Its ChainFest events have featured chef-created riffs on menu items from brands including Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and Panda Express.
Chain’s opening at Westfield Topanga on Sept. 2 will mark the first time the concept lands in a shopping center — with dishes from chefs including Roy Choi, Mei Lin, Calvin Eng and Mason Hereford, while food brands such as Cheez-It and General Mills cycle through as temporary activations.
The space will pull decorative elements from Chain’s earlier events, including arcade games, a vintage photo booth, Pizza Hut-style lamps, McDonald’s character tables, a Chili’s-branded chair and a Colonel Sanders statue, with visitors entering through an oversized red takeout box.
The first rotating brand stall will be Cheez-It Court, a temporary counter that’s one component of Chain’s broader residency rather than a takeover of the entire food hall.
The concept aims to merge Cheez-It with “the unmistakable nostalgia of food court classics,” transforming it into “the ultimate gathering place for our fans and their closest friends,” Nicole Sorensen, vice president of marketing for Cheez-It, said in a statement.
Its three-item menu contains a Cheez-It-seasoned cinnamon roll called the Cheez-Y-Bun, a Wagyu hot dog coated in panko and cracker crumbs, and a cheesesteak served on a seasoned hoagie roll. The stall will feature throwback uniforms, cracker-patterned counters and early-2000s design elements.
Nostalgia sells
The mall’s dining history stretches back to the 1960s, when restaurants and snack counters surrounded an ice rink at what was then Topanga Plaza. That combination of food, skating and elaborate interior attractions made the center a place for customers to spend time rather than simply shop.
The rink eventually gave way to a standardized format. During a $16 million renovation in 1984, the former attraction was converted into a 15-stall food court.
That conventional upstairs food court remains separate from Topanga Social and will continue operating during Chain’s residency.
Chain has also attracted interest beyond the restaurant industry. Fox Entertainment acquired an equity stake in the company and reached a first-look development agreement that could connect Chain’s pop-ups and festivals with Fox programming and Studio Ramsay Global.
For URW, the question is whether a steady procession of chefs, branded stalls and new menus can solve one of the central problems facing food halls: keeping customers interested after the novelty of an opening fades.
Although the residency is scheduled to end in February, Chain has left open the possibility of staying longer.
“The mall food court is one of America’s greatest dining institutions,” Kraft said. “As a company that celebrates pop cuisine and shared nostalgia, this residency at Westfield Topanga was an incredible opportunity to bring so much of what Chain has developed over the last few years to such a storied place.”