By Retail Insider
The highly anticipated Hargrave St. Market at True North Square in downtown Winnipeg opened last month to much fanfare. It is already seeing crowds and adding much needed foot traffic to the city’s downtown core.
The 30,000-square-foot food hall is located on the second floor of the 242 Hargrave mixed-use office tower. It is part of the mixed-use development that will feature more than 1.5 million square feet of office, hotel, residential, retail, parking, and public plaza space in five towers at the newly constructed True North Square project.
Hargrave St. Market focuses on chef-driven concepts and is home to some of the city’s best local operators including Bobby Mottola’s first-to-market Yard Burger, The Good Fight Taco, Rose Bar, and his second Pizzeria Gusto location (Gusto North). Also part of the tenant line-up are Saburo Kitchen (new concept for Yujiro Japanese and Gaijin Izayaka), Fools and Horses (third location), Miss Browns (second location) and Lake of the Woods Brewery (from Kenora, Ontario) which will also be brewing beer on site in addition to operating a retail store and taproom located on the first floor of the tower.
As well, a new 5,000-square-foot grocery store will open within the market in late February, serving an expanding residential base as well as thousands of office workers in downtown Winnipeg. The Italian urban grocery concept is curated and operated by Mottola.
The design of Hargrave St. Market was led by Montreal-based retail design specialists GH+A and executed by Winnipeg-based architecture firm Architecture49.
The tenant offerings in the mixed-use 242 Hargrave were curated by Toronto-based retail consultancy Beauleigh, which also brought the new Time Out Market to the Montreal Eaton Centre recently as well as the Queen St. Fare food hall in downtown Ottawa. Beauleigh also delivered grocerant concept Eataly to the Manulife Centre in Toronto’s Bloor-Yorkville area. We also reported this week that Beauleigh is strategizing the retail mix at Manulife Place in downtown Edmonton, following Holt Renfrew’s closure on Saturday January 11th.
Marcelle Rademeyer, President & CEO of Beauleigh, said, “We are very proud of the amazing talented group of operators we were able to assemble, all of whom are extremely passionate about what they do. Working with the team at True North who were not only receptive to new ideas but eager to effect change in the city, was such a pleasure and key to the success of the project. Hargrave Street Market is a catalyst for change in downtown Winnipeg.”
Downtown Winnipeg is seeing big changes. Besides the new True North Square project, the Portage Place shopping complex will be redeveloped under new ownership to include new residential buildings. The downtown Winnipeg Hudson’s Bay department store is also expected to see changes – the 675,000-square-foot building was HBC’s flagship for Canada until 1978 when the company moved its headquarters to Toronto, and the Bay store now only occupies two floors of the massive building. Given its recent assessment of $0, however, development may take time.
