What’s in a name? The mall formerly known as the CambridgeSide Galleria finds out. - The Boston Globe (2024)

Here is what it is: Thirteen food counters and a full-liquor bar, the latest in Greater Boston’s burgeoning collection of higher price-point fast-casual dining emporia.

The stalls are filled with locally run haute fast-casual spots, among them Anoush’ella, for Mediterranean, and Juicygreens, for juice.

There is also C-Side, a full-service, wraparound bar. Cocktails, beers, and glasses of wine can be enjoyed here or at any of the food hall’s tables. The seating is cozier, fancier than it once was: In one of its corners, looms a giant big-screen TV and couches.

But as in all of its 30-plus years, Cambridgeside defines itself by what it is not.

This, CambridgeSide marketers say, is not a mall food court but “an energetic new food and drink experience.”

And for that matter, CambridgeSide isn’t a mall. Or at least, that was the vision from the very beginning.

Whether this latest remodel is enough to carry CambridgeSide through this new era of in-person shopping remains to be seen. Historically, however, its nimbleness and ability to track trends has been its strength.

That story begins in 1990, when New England Development opened the $100 million complex on a redeveloped plot in East Cambridge, pitching its three-stories of stores to middle-class shoppers as an alternative on the Cambridge side of the Charles to pricier shopping districts across the water.

As longtime CambridgeSide marketer Melissa LaVita explained in a recent interview, it was envisioned as an alternative to malls.

“We don’t really use ‘mall,’ ” LaVita said. Indeed, at the outset, this place was something else: a galleria.

When it opened, Boston Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell gushed in a 1990 column that it was “as wonderful as most city malls are terrible,” given the way it meshed so neatly with the cityscape.

A “galleria,” technically speaking, meant it had shops arrayed under one glass-topped roof. The term also lent a certain European quality, and was in vogue for its time. (See: The Longwood Galleria, The Porter Square Galleria, and Quincy’s Galleria at Presidents Place).

Times changed.

By 2017, the CambridgeSide not-mall had been confronting the same e-commerce headwinds that were buffeting regular malls across the country, as consumer habits changed. Many of the shopping centers that thrived in the pre- and early-internet era were losing their luster, losing tenants, and closing.

At the time, CambridgeSide was seeing 7 million shoppers a year, according to New England Development. It intended to keep as many of them as it could.

As part of a $30 million renovation that year, CambridgeSide shed its neon lighting and bright colors, and updated its floor tiles, among other modernization efforts. And it dropped “Galleria,” becoming, simply, CambridgeSide.

“The area was changing and we felt it was time to do this refresh and change the perception,” said LaVita. “Look how much East Cambridge has changed. Look at Kendall Square and everything happening in Cambridge Crossing. We’re really in the middle of all of that. So we wanted to convey that something different was happening.”

It’s no secret, said Sharmila Chatterjee, senior lecturer in marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management, that malls and mall-adjacent places have had to adapt as the value proposition of shops selling the same things that can be bought online diminished.

CambridgeSide wasn’t immune.

While big draws like the Apple Store remained, and new retailers like Mango and Lululemon have recently begun leases there, some of the shopping center’s anchors — Sears, Macy’s, Best Buy — have disappeared in recent years.

In a 2019 renovation, CambridgeSide announced plans to convert its third floor into office space. Soon, at the former Sears and Macy’s, two lab-space buildings rose. At the former Best Buy, home for now to “Harry Potter: The Exhibition,” new housing is planned.

Along the way, it became clear the garden-variety food court no longer sated the office- and lab-workers, tourists, hotel guests, and shoppers across the river that form its customer base.

So yet another renovation commenced this year.

The “food court” vanished in February. A “food hall” has now appeared.

“The biggest difference is the tenant mix. In a food court, you see your traditional national tenants. Taco Bell, Burger King,” LaVita said.

Here the options come from local chefs, and are meant to be paired with craft cocktails. There are nods to flavors mall-rats will recognize. In one cheeky touch, the bar’s drink list includes an old fashioned reviewers have said tastes just like an Auntie Anne’s pretzel. Otherwise the aim is to eschew expectations that typically come with mall food courts, and for the dining to be a destination, rather than a place simply to fuel up on the go between stores.

To make that work — to get people to go out of their way to wind up in a food court — necessitates a difference in packaging, said Chatterjee, of MIT.

“A name is a psychological phenomenon,” Chatterjee said. It tells customers what to expect, and how to feel.

Whether the trendy nomenclature pays off depends on the follow-through, Chatterjee said.

“If you just put a new label ‘food hall’ on but don’t change the offering, that would not work,” she said.

The name CanalSide isn’t new. It has actually been used on the property since 2017, when new signage was added to its massive parking garage to help visitors who kept getting lost in it. (One half of the spaces are on the “CambridgeSide,” the other “CanalSide.”)

This also isn’t the first time the dining portion of CambridgeSide has gotten a new name. For many years it was called “Food Festival,” a branding experiment that ended in 2016.

CambridgeSide is still experimenting. In one of-this-era choice, it has been promoting CanalSide not with photos of dishes at the popular restaurants, but with generative AI. A candy-colored collage roughly approximating popular types of food has been used on sandwich boards and screens inside the building, as well as on highway billboards.

Up close, there are peculiarities: spaghetti noodles that merge strangely with their toppings, bowls of gelatinous cubes, a sunny-side up egg placed directly on a table, a hybrid object that appears to be a mash-up of a tomato and a strawberry.

Asked why Cambridgeside would do this rather than promote photos of real foods on offer at its real-life restaurants, like Anoush’ella’s photogenic bowls, LaVita said her team “wanted people to look at Cambridgeside a different way. It’s not your food court. We wanted something fun.”

As for what’s next at CambridgeSide, openings of new retail draws such as Victoria’s Secret and Zara are slated for next year. Standard mall stuff. There may be more strategies — and names – to come. Maybe sooner than later, said Chatterjee.

For malls of all kinds and in all places, she said, “It’s a question of survival now.”

Spencer Buell can be reached at spencer.buell@globe.com. Follow him @SpencerBuell.