Excerpt from “The 10 Best New Food Halls Across the Country” by Sharon McDonnell. Read the full article here.
Ten vendors serve everything from Burmese to Jamaican to Vietnamese to Middle Eastern in this 80,000-square-foot steel-and-glass food hall that opened in January. Cooking classes, demos, and a food-history series in its Teaching Kitchen take students around the globe to with Ghanaian plant-based meals and how to forage for spices. Salt City, created with the help of the Allyn Family Foundation, fulfills the decade-long dream of Adam Sudmann, its market manager. Inspired by Asian hawker stalls, San Francisco’s La Cocina, and Minneapolis’ Midtown Global Market, Sudmann formerly ran a popular local dinner pop-up series held in galleries and parks, named My Lucky Tummy, plus a local restaurant/food incubator, With Love, that featured a different national cuisine every six months. The ex-New York City events producer noticed many talented foreign-born home cooks in his adopted city (he married an upstater) since almost 10,000 refugees have settled in Syracuse in the past decade. Other events include Wellness Wednesdays for yoga and meditation, and Shop Small Sunday, a monthly event where over 40 antique dealers and craftspeople crowd its parking lot. Curious about that name? It comes from Syracuse’s nickname, an ode to its history of salt quarries.