The two-year anniversary of Reno Public Market recently came and went, and while it hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing for some vendors and retailers at the expansive food hall located at the corner of Plumb Lane and South Virginia Street, RPM developer Doug Wiele told NNBW that the ship has been righted and is back on course.
Reno Public Market opened in January 2023 after several years of work and heavy construction to transform the old Shoppers Square retail center into a modern public gathering place. When the concept was first launched, the development team hired a hospitality company to run the food hall and manage vendors, but once that contract ended the development group took over management of Reno Public Market.
“These last two years have been a great experience,” Wiele told NNBW during an interview in the sunny upstairs loft area at the south side of RPM.
The second-floor space was intended to be a sit-down restaurant when RPM first opened, but Wiele said a bar might be a stronger option for the nearly 7,000-square-foot space.
“It’s been a learning experience,” he added. “When we created this place, we did not intend to operate it ourselves — we hired an operator of food halls. We are developers, and this is a hospitality business; it’s not a real estate play. But the first year did not go the way we planned, so we took it over ourselves.”
That shift meant hiring staff and promoting Kyle Denning to culinary director, and having General Manager Mike Mac Millen take over event programming and host a robust slate of community center events, Wiele said. It also meant that vendors and retailers would benefit from an operator that was deeply invested in the project’s success.
“The second year has been a learning curve for us,” Wiele said. “It’s been much better than it was. There’s been some turnover, but that’s what we expected.”
While a handful of vendors and food concepts have come and gone in the first two years, concepts such as Burger NV, Main Vein Coffee Co., and Los Cipotes have proven out and been successful from the start, Denning said. Others, such as Dopo Pizza & Pasta and newer concepts run by seasoned operators, weren’t among the first wave of vendors but have since cemented their status as favorites among locals at Reno Public Market.
The food hall was designed as a roll-in-roll-out concept, Wiele noted. Vendors don’t need to jump through the many hoops required to open an eatery in a standalone location. At RPM, all they need is a sign off from the health department.
“That makes it financially easy for someone who is just getting started,” Wiele said. “It’s all here for them.”
Currently, there are 13 food vendors at Reno Public Market. Junkee Clothing Exchange leased 13,000 square feet on the north side of the building, and soon, Wiele noted, FiftyFifty Brewing Co. will open as well. FiftyFifty was the very first lease signed at RPM, said Weile, who expected the brewery and pub founded in Truckee to open within the next 60 days.
“That’s the next big step (for RPM),” Wiele said. “FiftyFifty is an anchor tenant, and most successful food halls around the country and the ones we are modeled after have a full-service food-and-beverage operation as a partner.”
Landing a well-established retailer like Junkee was a coup for RPM, Wiele admitted. Junkee owner Jessica Schneider told NNBW in April 2023 that she was unable to strike a deal to purchase the building in Midtown that had housed her store since 2008, so she relocated to Reno Public Market.
“We originally thought we would do co-working at that space, but Junkee has been a marvelous addition,” Wiele said. “It appeals to all ages and cultures, it has a tremendous following that is not just locals, and all of them pass through the food hall to get to Junkee.”
Wiele admits there’s still work left to do in addition to getting the brewery open and placing a second anchor tenant in the upstairs space. The west side of the food hall was intended as destination retail, and a series of tenants have come and gone. Currently, only one of six shop spaces totaling 7,000 square feet is occupied.
“We broadly misfired in the first year,” Wiele said. “But we are not done yet. This is a work in progress, and we are significantly more stabilized than we were in our first year.”