On the ground floor of Printemps New York, beneath towering light fixtures shaped like Seussian lily pads, shoppers can try on glossy Roger Vivier Mary Janes while sipping Champagne that flows from a roving cart. The French luxury department store, which is spread across two levels inside a landmark Art Deco building in lower Manhattan, is part of a new generation of food-meets-fashion collaborations transforming luxury retail into full-fledged hospitality experiences. And it’s perhaps the most ambitious of these ventures yet.

Up until now, typical American department stores followed a different playbook: Open a standard café serving niçoise salads and other lunchtime staples to peckish shoppers in search of convenience. For its first US flagship, the 160-year-old French retailer tapped Gregory Gourdet to oversee all five culinary programs. The Portland, Oregon-based James Beard Award winner, known for his diasporic cooking and impeccable, fashion-forward sensibility, seemed like a perfect fit.

“They wanted to think outside the box,” the chef says. That they have: Mere feet from the Mary Janes, the Red Room Bar offers cocktails and small bites. The pastry counter at all-day Café Jalu stocks Haitian chocolate brownies and a range of viennoiseries. At fine dining restaurant Maison Passerelle, one can break for cane syrup-glazed duck and diri ak sos pwa (Haitian-style rice and beans), accompanied by vintage Christofle silverware hand-picked by Gourdet in France. Up the escalator and past women’s ready-to-wear, chic raw bar Salon Vert serves a six-course midday meal tailored to the power lunch crowd. And if those roving Champagne carts prove elusive, guests can pop by the petit Champagne Bar tucked beside the beauty department and order a glass on the spot.

At Printemps, the fare is as much a part of the destination as the shopping, luring people off of their phones and into the brick and mortar spaces, encouraging exploration and the chance to linger. “We want more of a hospitality feel to the whole thing,” says Gourdet. It’s an intentional cohesion, where dining and shopping are stitched together in one polished, sensory experience.

Dining inside a department store isn’t new. Barney’s had Fred’s, Bergdorf Goodman has BG, Ralph Lauren unveiled RL Restaurant in 1999, with dozens of branded coffee shops to follow around the world. But this latest wave of high-fashion dining, with Gourdet and a new guard of culinary voices, suggests a palpable cultural shift. Dior tapped Dominique Crenn for its Café Dior in Dallas and Monsieur Dior restaurant in Beverly Hills, Tiffany & Co.’s Blue Box Café in New York is run by Daniel Boulud, and Gucci Osteria, guided by Massimo Bottura’s team, is also in Beverly Hills (where it earned a Michelin star), as well as Seoul, Tokyo, and Florence. So why are fashion’s biggest names now going all in on hospitality?