The Peninsula has a splashy new food hall. Frankly, it’s boring and basic

It seems like everywhere you go, there’s some kind of food hall aimed at giving you a regional, not-so-corporate experience. Los Angeles’ Grand Central Market offers gorditas and hyped-up artisanal breakfast sandwiches, while Baltimore’s Lexington Market promises glimpses of the port city’s culture via stout crab cakes and fried chicken.

In San Francisco, a lending library and low-cost meals make the La Cocina Municipal Marketplace a true community attraction, and esteemed local vendors bring throngs of tourists to the Ferry Building.

If food is a mirror of culture, food halls get butts in seats with the promise of being a gastronomic portrait of a place — more so than food courts with the same national concepts and stamped-out menus, at least.

The food hall provides diners with the convenience of a typical food court — something for everyone! — without that gauche eating-at-a-chain-restaurant feeling. Like food-truck parks, they can provide communities with spaces to hang out in and lots of interesting foodstuffs to take photos of, but with better seating. And like architectural hermit crabs, food halls fit well into liminal, semi-abandoned spaces, like former transportation hubs and warehouses.

In short, inasmuch as I, Soleil Ho, am allowed to say anything is cool, the food hall is largely seen by diners and real estate developers as the “cool” alternative to the food court.

State Street Market in Los Altos hits all of those beats, but the result feels uncannily synthetic.

With its soaring ceilings and 20,000-square-foot plot designed by tech office and stadium designer Gensler, the Los Altos food hall is a picture of ambition. The project by Los Altos Community Investments concluded its years-long development last fall, beginning a gradual rollout of the concepts within: fast-casual concepts conceived by Michelin-lauded chefs Meichih Kim and Michael Kim (Maum) and Srijith Gopinathan (Ettan); a Mexican-Californian destination restaurant by chefs Traci Des Jardins and Robert Hurtado; and a slate of stalls from Bon Appetit Management Co. (You might know the latter from its fare at Oracle Park and Chase Center.)

There’s a modular, interchangeable feel to everything here. In the main part of the hall, separated from El Alto by an open-air paseo, diners can order in person or use tabletop QR codes to order a melange of dishes from each of the stalls. The digital mode is preferable here, since the staff at each stall generally refuse to answer questions or guide your ordering. You might as well pretend they’re not even there, since that’s how they treat you.

Each kiosk has a small amount of customization to it: Little Blue Door, Gopinathan’s Cal-Indian stall, is lined with blue tiles that evoke the decor at Palo Alto’s Ettan, for instance. Most of the food, from Impossible chicken nugget meals to rockfish ceviche, is served on aluminum trays.

At State Street, there seems to be a lot to choose from, but I was struck by the sheer redundancy of the menus. You could get a roasted chicken from Little Blue Door and Banks & Braes, a kiosk that does American food. Banks & Braes also serves fried Brussels sprouts, which is something it has in common with Murdoch’s, the bar in the center of the hall that also does American food. You can get a gluten-free tofu bowl from both seafood stall Ostro and salad bar Grains & Greens.

The overall structure of this food hall, with its majority of stalls centrally operated by Bon Appétit and owned by the investment company, is different from more traditional examples like Grand Central Market and Public Market Emeryville. In those, each stall is usually operated semi-independently by individual vendors. That traditional structure contributes to the more down-home, farmers’ market-like reputation of a food hall, which attracts diners who crave diverse and personalized interactions with their salads.

State Street Market’s approach to its food is novel for food halls, but the unremarkable food is a strike against the merits of centralized ownership. The “Roman-style pizza” ($12 for 1/4 pan) at Banks & Braes — really, sheets of dry focaccia loaded with ingredients like pepperoni and Calabrian chiles — was a La Croix-strength rendition of both pizza and flatbread. Better could be found at State of Mind Public House, the pizzeria next door.

Ostro was the source of that perplexing crab sandwich ($22.95). The mixture of Dungeness and Jonah crabmeat was unseasoned and seemed scant compared to the engorged sourdough loaf the mixture was swiped onto. We grimaced at the taste of the rockfish ceviche ($14.95), which bulldozed over the fish with strong Tabasco notes and not much else.

The more “cheffy” concepts didn’t fare much better.

At Little Blue Door, the display of whole, spice-rubbed chickens spinning on an attractive rotisserie caught my eye, but when I received my little tray of chicken ($22), coconut rice and Malabar curry, the bird was cold. A side of warm masala egg puff ($9) was chalky, its puff pastry exterior tough and overworked.

Bao Bei, a Korean-Taiwanese concept by the Kims, is unique, but here I found the ideas hampered by bad technique. A fried shrimp bao ($9.50) evoked shrimp toast — a fun idea! — but the heat of the fried bao and fried shrimp croquette turned the packed-in cabbage slaw into a wilty, soggy mess. The Kims’ take on dan dan mian ($15) advertises custom-made wheat noodles, but the effort of the noodlemaker was stymied by cooking technique that left the strands a claggy mass.

These two kiosks were “curated” by these acclaimed local chefs. According to a representative of the market, they are partners who own the concepts and develop the menu, though they rely on Bon Appétit’s staff to not put shame on their names during day-to-day operations. It’s all the more disappointing when I know that these chefs are capable of stupendous work.

The savior of the food hall isn’t technically in the food hall: El Alto, Des Jardins and Hurtado’s full-service restaurant, has a sophisticated, well-realized atmosphere that makes you want to sit up straighter. If you’re missing Cala, Gabriela Cámara’s Hayes Valley restaurant, you’ll find a lot to love in this duo’s marriage of Californian and Mexican culinary sensibilities.

On that note, definitely try the tuna tostadas ($18 for two). Cubes of silky tuna are mounded atop slices of avocado and smoky morita chile aioli, with pops of finger lime pulp added to brighten the palate. I was also impressed by the simple additions of Spanish-style rice ($4) and duck fat-fried King City pink beans ($6), especially after I swirled in spoonfuls of the house salsa macha. This is a great place to snack.

If you can’t make it into the dining room proper, hang out at the bar and nosh on snacks like the exceptional chips and salsa ($9). Made from the restaurant’s own nixtamalized masa, the thick chips have a satisfying and brutal snap to them.

Regarding the question of whether State Street Market is a good food hall, I know it must seem really unsatisfying to come away with the conclusion that the best part of it is a normal restaurant. But El Alto’s excellence exposes two key metrics that hobble this food hall: uniqueness and execution.

That said, genericness, like what you’ll find at Banks & Braes and Ostro, isn’t an unforgiveable thing. But it’s hard to understand how generic food is true to the food hall idea. In combination with its listless execution, this frankly seems like a wasted opportunity. Why come up with bad semi-original concepts when there are so many interesting ideas out there just waiting for a chance to land in a splashy space like State Street?

State Street Market. 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Wednesday; 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Thursday-Friday; 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Saturday; 9 a.m.-8 p.m. Sunday. 170 State St., Los Altos. www.statestreetmarket.com

This story has been updated from its original version.

Soleil Ho is The San Francisco Chronicle’s restaurant critic. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @hooleil