City Acres Market food hall opens in Manhattan Financial District

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• …is Janus’ own JuiceBrothers. The stall offers açaí bowls, smoothies and a wide variety of drinks from the cold-pressed juice Dragon’s Breath (pear, apple, carrot, grapefruit, beetroot, lemon, ginger) to tonics like Gold Rush (alkaline water, turmeric, lemon, ginger, black pepper, coconut nectar) to wheatgrass shots.

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  The juices are bottled in City Acres’ commissary kitchen at the Williamsburg location.

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• “Beyond Sushi really goes hand in hand with being next to Juice Brothers, because people grab the juice, then vegan sushi,” Janus said.

  On the menu at this vegan eatery that puts a creative spin on Japanese cuisine: sushi rolls, noodle soups, noodle salads and rice bed salads that feature unusual ingredients like tomato guajillo, harissa and tahini.

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• The globally inspired dishes here are prepared in-house by executive chef Stephen Yen, whose cooking you might know from the Meatpacking seafood restaurant Catch.

  “Here, we’re trying to be as healthy as possible, because we’re so close to JuiceBrothers and Beyond Sushi. So if I came here to have an açaí bowl or juice, I wouldn’t want to see fried chicken,” Yen said.

  How can City Acres Market price its buffet at a dollar a pound cheaper than most delis in the neighborhood? Yen attributes that savings to coordination between the store’s departments: “Right before something is about to expire [in the market], we will immediately take it, give it to my team of chefs and either do prepared or packaged foods,” the chef said.

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• …The Cinnamon Snail has you covered. The fast food vendor known for its vegan doughnuts, burgers and sandwiches has a counter at the Pennsy food hall near Herald Square, but its City Acres Market outpost marks a homecoming for a brand that launched its beloved food truck in the neighborhood, Janus said.

  “They have such a loyal following, that once the door opened Friday, everyone was coming in like, ‘I heard Cinnamon Snail was here!'”

  Unique items on the menu at this location are “anything that we fry,” said general manager John Galloway. That includes his favorite addition: the Gochujang glazed cripy seitan sandwich ($12), which comes with kimchi, pickled red onion, arugula and sriracha mayo on a grilled pretzel bun.

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• On our way down, we asked Janus why the food hall had to postpone its initially slated March opening.

  -“There was nothing in this space, so we kept running into problems with construction and plumbing,” she said. “We were just overenthusiastic. Once we started construction in December, we were thinking, ‘okay, we can start in four months,’ but that was just not realistically possible.”

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• …there are roughly 50 seats at the “Grocer’s Table” or dining area.

  
  

  Correction: The original version of this article misspelled Bibi Janus’ first name.

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The city’s food hall explosion continues this week, and it’s Financial District office workers who will be swarming this latest destination.

City Acres Market officially opened its second location at 70 Pine St. Tuesday (after a “soft” opening on Friday), with sandwich and salad counters, hot and cold food bars, a downstairs supermarket, and stalls for five popular vendors: Artichoke Basille’s Pizza, Vanessa’s Dumpling House, JuiceBrothers, The Cinnamon Snail and Beyond Sushi.

“This is basically a one-stop shop for everybody,” said Bibi Janus, a founder of the cold-press juice seller JuiceBrothers who does marketing for City Acres. “You can get your smoothies upstairs and if your other half wants to have dumplings and pizza, that’s fine.”

The company that opened its flagship store in Williamsburg in Dec. 2013 aims to feed FiDi’s sizeable lunch crowd, then equip them with groceries at the workday’s end: “After work, we definitely want them to come back and shop again,” Janus said.

That positions City Market someplace between the legion of new food halls like the DeKalb Market Hall, the Pennsy, the Bowery Market and the Canal Street Food Hall, and Whole Foods, which puts a similar focus on take-home prepared foods, stand-alone counters for meats and seafood, and locally sourced, organic produce.

One thing that stands out about this shop, in Janus’ opinion, is its effort to cater to vegans: JuiceBrothers, Beyond Sushi and The Cinnamon Snail specialize in vegan juices, sushi and baked goods and sandwiches, respectively. City Market also employs an in-house vegan chef.

Take a tour of the new space and its tasty offerings below: