2 weeks Ago By Elizabeth Chorney-Booth
Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page. Food court – it’s a dreaded phrase for any discerning food lover.
A mall, office building and airport food courts tend to be populated with lacklustre, fast-food chains and random stalls selling variations of deep-fried meats with some kind of gloppy sauce, marketed as anything from Chinese to Southern food. It’s the kind of meal you eat because you have to, not because you particularly want to. “Food court” has become a dirty word.
But “food hall?” Well, that’s culinary gold. Food halls – venues amalgamating a curated assortment of good quality food counters or vendors – have been a thing for some time in the form of posh British department store food sections or Singaporean hawker centres, but the trend of foodie-centric food halls only started to truly take hold in North America in the last decade or so. Calgary has had food hall-ish destinations for a while in the form of quick service vendors at our various farmers’ markets, but no business really put a stake in the ground and declared itself a “food hall” until late 2018 when the Fresh and Local Market and Kitchens (then called the Avenida Food Hall and Fresh Market) opened its doors.
In the years since, we’ve had several more food halls emerge, with the First Street Market, District at Beltline, and the Concorde Group’s Pineapple Hall being the most prominent. Seoul Streets, the latest food hall to open, takes a slightly more thematic approach, modelling itself after a typical Korean street market. Seoul Streets is located on the Plus-15 level of the TC Energy Tower in a space previously occupied by Sunterra Market and is the creation of Han Kim, a longtime Calgary businessman and restaurateur.
Kim grew up working in his parents’ Korean restaurants here in Calgary, and after seeing the long hours and overwhelming commitment his folks put in, he elected to go to university. He earned an MBA and moved to Korea to work in a lucrative corporate job, vowing to stay out of the restaurant biz. But the hospitality bug is a hard one to shake, and the restaurant world called to him.
Upon returning to Calgary in the early 1990s, Kim took over his dad’s Fresh Selects restaurant and has owned a series of restaurants, many in the downtown core, ever since. That downtown restaurant experience, combined with his time enjoying the food culture in Korea, led to the development of a food hall evoking the spirit of Korea’s famous street culture. There are visual references to areas in Seoul like Myeongdong and Yongsan throughout Seoul Streets’ two-storey venue, as well as vendors representing the variety of fast casual food available in Seoul.
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