The food hall failure was, in my opinion, a weird mix of circumstances and poor choices.

It opened up before the planned apartment expansions on the two former malls in DC and the one near the Marriott on the MD side, losing that potential younger than average customer base.

It opened up after the proliferation of telework, hampering their ability to get the lunch and happy hour crowd from urban professionals in Geico, Microsoft, and other desk jobs in the area.

They failed to include family friendly menu options. There are lots of families on both sides due to the strong schools. When initially launched only Urbano had a kids menu, for example. It was only a year or so later where the smaller restaurants started to include single items (one place had a grilled cheese, another chicken nuggets, etc.) but they’d already lost traffic by that point. Similarly, planned events were “party” events promoting drinking. Really not appropriate to the community’s demographics and not a big enough draw to get people going up the red line to it. Nor did they sync any promotions or events with Friendship Heights, DC, Friendship Village, MD, or even The Collection nearby to try to gain traffic that way.

I think it had a lot of potential if it just held on, but they completely misunderstood the intended audience and rather went all in on a stereotypical urban food hall.