Mall Profile #4: Bentall, by Steve Masuch

The Shops At Bentall Centre
Location: Vancouver
Opened: 1967
Approximate number of stores: 20
Anchor tenants: Pharmasave
 
(To listen to our podcast on Bentall, click here)

It’s three minutes in the morning where I’m walking through a little shortcut from the Burrard SkyTrain station to my office. Or it’s four minutes in the afternoon, and I’m going a little slower from work back to the station. Or it’s 35 minutes of me ordering and waiting and sitting and eating.

It’s Bentall.

When the first Bental towers were built in the late 1960s^[1],. they were major buildings defining the new downtown of this proud and eager city. And because of Bentall’s success as an office complex, the underground mall part never changed all that much, no need when it was just always busy by default because of so many people passing through. Then the slow decline of 21st century retail did its thing, followed by COVID hit, and the flow of office workers shrank dramatically, turning a river into a trickle and bringing drought to the rich delta lands of Bentall.

Now the mall is less populated by stores than it used to be. The largest one left is a Pharmasave. There are a few practicalities, like a post office and a magazine stand, and a few oddities, like a motorcycle clothing store. At least the property management company is doing something about it. They’re providing free rent to pop-up stores^[2], and maybe it will encourage that flow of patrons to grow. Maybe the busy times can come back here again.

When I go through these malls, usually I think of them as spaces; a building with stores and lights and parking and all that. But Bentall is an unusual mall, in comparison to all the others. It’s a corridor. An underground right-angled Y-shaped hallway, with an entrance at each of the three terminal ends (and some stairways to buildings above in the middle) and stores lining the hallway. It’s hard to draw a direct comparison to Pacific Centre or Metrotown. You could argue it’s not really a mall, but it meets our definition – indoor space, 15 things that aren’t the food court – so let’s think of it less in terms of space, and in terms of what time period of Vancouver it occupies.

It’s the 90s still, over at the Bagel Stop, with Frasurbane-styled posters on the walls behind the sandwich toppings bar. It’s the revived-retro of local Vancouver over in Lee’s Donuts. In the lower food court, waiting to split the drywall cocoon and emerge as a beautiful butterfly of fast-dining restaurants, it’s the oft-delayed, much-promised future of high-quality global cuisines, flying far from the past worlds of Manchu Woks and Taco Times.

Inside the boxing gym, it’s clobbering time.

And Bentall’s most important time? Lunchtime, the critical time for those downtown malls which rise or fall just on their food courts. In my order of least to most interesting: Pacific Centre, Royal Centre, Waterfront Centre, Harbour Centre, our dear Bentall, and at the peak is the International Food Fair (which rest assured will enjoy its own writeup). But second ain’t bad!

Bentall actually has two food courts, maybe three if you squint. There’s the aforementioned one at the north lower end, which has been under renovation for years. It’s due to open “soon”, and it should bring a bit more energy to the mall^[3]. There’s a few food shops near the south lower entrance near the skytrain exit, including a Dante’s Sandwich shop getting some buzz, and a seating area not too far away, but that’s not a cohesive food court.

Upstairs to the west, there’s the main classic food court, a platonic food court. About thirty tables in a room, lined with restaurants common and uncommon. I don’t know of any other food court downtown where I can get four types of pasta salad, or fresh chowder. Bits of neon still lit brings an 80s feeling to the space. And outside of the food court is a plaza with more seating, ascending stone steps up & out of the plaza to the street nearby. It’s a little pita pocket of quiet.

There’s also pockets of seating carved out along the hallway of the mall, just quiet places to sit for a minute, an underrated thing for any mall, but especially in the heart of Vancouver. It’s hard to lose much time in Bentall; there’s no space where it could go missing.

My favourite times in Bentall are when I guide somebody through the warren of hallways, and they say “I had no idea all this was down here!” or “I didn’t know there was another food court!” It’s like I’m guiding them through some secluded glade, if the secluded glade also had a Purdy’s.

Go check out Bentall. It doesn’t take much time.

TOTAL SCORE

Small Stores: 5.2/10 (With only a handful of stores, Bentall can only go so high, even if they are mostly useful. The couple of unusual ones are the spice that makes this more than a boring gruel of business services)

Anchor Tenants: 2/10 (There’s a Pharmasave, and not a large one…and that’s it? If the Coles bookstore was still there, or something filled the space of a former large store over in the West wing, then this could be higher. But nobody has ever been excited to go to a Pharmasave)

Food Court: 5/10 (A limited but solid line of options gets respect from us. Once the new secondary food court is opened up, this score would rise, but we can’t judge food we can’t eat)

Design/Accessibility 3.8/10 (The mall is done up neat in decor and is well lit for an underground cavern, but the narrow escalators pose some mobility hurdles and some pathways of the mall are a bit confusing)

X-Factor: 4.3/10 (Nostalgia and potential boost up the store a bit, but the fact must be faced: this is not a very interesting mall by most measures. If it wasn’t for the mystery of it being tucked away underground, this mall might not have anything really special besides on-demand chowder)

OVERALL: 20.3/50. Why would you go to Bentall? Because it’s on your route and you need to mail something. Because you want a little break from your usual food court. Or you’re just a chowder freak.