Diners at Atlanta’s Ponce City Market are probably most concerned about how to decide between delicious options from stalls like seafood joint W.H. Stiles Fish Camp, casual Mexican spot Minero and bao-heavy Simply Seoul Kitchen. But by visiting the 300,000-square-foot, mixed-use market in the former Sears, Roebuck & Co. building, they’re also helping support local and sustainable efforts in some unexpected ways.
Anne Quatrano, Sean Brock and Hannah Chung are, respectively, the Southern chefs behind those concepts. Named for Quatrano’s great-great-great-great grandfather, Fish Camp serves up Georgia trout, Gulf oysters and South Carolina clams and crudo. Minero, a spinoff of
Brock’s original South Carolina concept, handcrafts its tortillas daily using the traditional nixtamalization process (a fancy word for steeping and cooking corn). Chung, a native of Seoul, South Korea, creates all-natural, kimchi, Korean BBQ steamed buns and Korean BBQ sauces.
But what really impressed me during an October visit to Ponce City Market was the way planners have maintained the historic building’s impressive bones while pursuing LEED Core & Shell Silver certification. Much of the building, which includes shops, offices and loft apartments, in conjunction with the food hall, still is in development, lending the space a feeling of constant evolution. That’s appropriate, given the constant rate of experimentation and flux across foodservice.
Travel and Leisure magazine placed Atlanta at No. 19 on its 2015 list of Greenest Cities in America, in no small part due to the city’s Eastside Trail, which offers easy access to Ponce City. The Ponce City Market website reports that just by reusing the building’s shell, 1,198,050,000 MBTUs of total energy were saved. Combine that with a rain-recapture system that reduces site water use by 50 percent and a 10 percent to 15 percent targeted energy savings above the minimum code, and this is one big green machine.
If Ponce City can bring dozens of corporate and private vendors together under one massive roof to achieve such impressive energy savings, it shouldn’t be a stretch for noncommercial operators to work within their own larger organizations to do the same. Your facility could be climbing the green lists in no time.