The Crosstown food hall is not a single restaurant but the ground-floor concourse of Crosstown Concourse, a redeveloped 1927 Sears, Roebuck & Co. distribution building in Memphis’s Crosstown neighborhood. Several independently run food and drink vendors operate around a shared atrium with communal seating, the standard structure of a food hall rather than one kitchen under one name.
What building is the Crosstown food hall actually inside?
It sits on the ground floor of Crosstown Concourse, a roughly 1.5-million-square-foot building originally constructed by Sears, Roebuck & Co. as a regional catalog distribution and retail center. The building was vacant for decades before a nonprofit-led redevelopment reopened it in 2017 as a mixed-use complex. A fuller account of that building’s history and redevelopment is covered separately in the explainer on Crosstown Concourse and its Sears origins, and that piece is worth reading first for anyone trying to understand what the structure was before it held any restaurants at all.
How is the food hall structured?
Crosstown Concourse’s own materials describe the ground floor as home to a cluster of separately operated food and beverage tenants arranged around a central atrium, rather than a single dining room with one kitchen. That is the defining feature of a food hall model as distinct from a restaurant: shared seating, multiple counters, and vendors who set their own hours, menus and prices independently of one another. A visitor moving through the space is choosing among several small businesses rather than ordering from one.
Because tenants change and hours vary by vendor, this is the kind of detail that goes stale quickly. Anyone planning a visit should check current tenants and hours on Crosstown Concourse’s own site rather than relying on a list here, since a written article has no way to keep pace with vendor turnover.
What else is in the same building besides food?
The food hall is one function inside a much larger complex. Crosstown Concourse also houses Crosstown Arts, a nonprofit contemporary art space with rotating exhibitions; Church Health, a nonprofit healthcare provider; Crosstown High School; residential apartments; office tenants including affiliates of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital; and a YMCA. The building was designed around the idea of a “vertical urban village,” where people who live, work, study and eat there overlap in the same shared ground-floor space. That mix is part of what distinguishes the food hall here from a standalone food court built purely for retail traffic — a meaningful share of the people passing through on any given day are residents, students or staff, not visitors.
Readers interested in the gallery side of the building can start from the Museums & Galleries archive, which covers Crosstown Arts alongside the rest of the city’s art and history institutions.
Do you need a reason to go besides the food?
No — the ground floor is open to the public without any connection to the building’s other tenants. But because Crosstown Concourse functions as a working building with a school, a clinic and housing inside it, the atmosphere is closer to a functioning civic space than a purpose-built tourist attraction. That is consistent with how the site describes itself: a building meant to be used daily by the neighborhood, not a destination built around a single event.
Where does this fit in Memphis’s neighborhood geography?
Crosstown Concourse sits in the Crosstown area, on the edge of Midtown Memphis, a collection of neighborhoods distinct from both downtown and the more suburban east side of the city. Midtown’s food, arts and residential character is covered in more depth in the piece on what Midtown Memphis actually is, which places Crosstown Concourse within the wider district rather than treating it as an isolated site. The area is also within reach of Cooper-Young, a separate Midtown food and retail district covered in the explainer on what Cooper-Young is.
How does this compare to other food gatherings in Memphis?
Memphis has more than one model for grouping food vendors, and it is worth being precise about which is which. The Memphis Farmers Market, held seasonally downtown, is a market of producers and prepared-food vendors that operates on a set schedule rather than daily. That structure — outdoor, seasonal, market-day format — is explained in the piece on what the Memphis Farmers Market is. Crosstown Concourse’s food hall, by contrast, operates indoors, year-round, inside a permanent building, which makes it a different kind of institution even though both bring multiple independent food vendors together under one roof or one event.
For broader context on how Memphis’s food scene is organized by neighborhood rather than by a single downtown strip, the Food & Drink archive and the Neighbourhoods archive both cover districts — Cooper-Young, South Main, Broad Avenue — that function on their own separate models.
How do you get there, and do you need a car?
Crosstown Concourse has its own on-site parking, consistent with most Midtown destinations built or renovated in the car-oriented decades of the mid-to-late 20th century. Memphis’s public transit network does serve the area, but frequency and route coverage vary by line. The general question of whether a car is necessary for getting around the city, including Midtown, is addressed directly in the honest answer on whether you need a car in Memphis, which is the more useful starting point than any single venue’s parking details.
What should a resident know that a visitor might not?
For people who live nearby, Crosstown Concourse’s ground floor functions less like an occasional outing and more like a piece of daily infrastructure — a place to pick up food between a shift, a school run or a clinic appointment inside the same building. That daily-use pattern, alongside the building’s residential units and school, is part of what separates it from a food hall built purely for foot traffic from outside the neighborhood. Anyone weighing whether Crosstown fits into an ordinary week in Memphis, rather than a single visit, may find more relevant context in the Living in Memphis hub, which covers how districts like this one function for residents rather than tourists.
The short version
- The “Crosstown food hall” is the ground-floor concourse of Crosstown Concourse, not a single restaurant.
- It follows a standard food hall structure: multiple independent vendors, shared seating, one atrium.
- The building itself is a converted 1927 Sears distribution center, also home to a nonprofit art space, a health clinic, a school and apartments.
- Vendor lineups and hours change; confirm current details on Crosstown Concourse’s own site before visiting.
- It sits in the Crosstown area on the edge of Midtown, distinct in structure from the seasonal, outdoor Memphis Farmers Market downtown.
Related reading
getting around, planning, itineraries, food and the riverfront, The Memphis Guide, What Is Memphis’s Coffee Scene Actually Built On?, What Is Hot Chicken? Memphis or Nashville, Explained
Access Memphis is an independent guide written from published, checkable sources. We have not visited the places described here and we do not publish personal recommendations or invented ‘local favourites’ — where something is singled out as notable, we say who says so. Opening times, fares, closures and prices change at short notice, so treat everything here as a starting point and confirm with the museum, operator or venue directly before building a day around it. We give no advice on visas, insurance, health or safety; use your own government’s official guidance for those.