Hopefully you told him how to spell it.
I don't mean to insult your friend (is he from GGP/Howard Hughes?) but if he hasn't heard of Zara, he doesn't sound like he's well-informed about retail trends, and that doesn't bode well for the world-class transformation we're all hoping for.
I will point out that Zara, like H&M or American Apparel, prefers a street-level space in a city. They're European, so they only like to take mall spaces if they're way out in the suburbs. All three Chicago-area Zara locations are in malls, but all of them have direct access to the outside or to the street.
Riverwalk being a really strange beast, it has NO spaces with direct access to the outside.
I also hope they do something about the food court. All the newer, successful malls I've seen either break up the food court and scatter the eateries around the mall, or they give each eatery its own enclosed space with dedicated seating and a glass wall. That way people who are passing through don't have to get mixed up with people carrying food trays and don't have to smell 10000 kinds of greasy food. Since this requires more space, you usually have to trade sheer numbers of eateries for a much smaller number with wider menus. Maybe you keep one Cajun place for the hell of it and then bring in Panera and Jamba.
Or you could go the local route and invite prominent NO chefs to do fast-food concepts. Field's in Chicago introduced something like this called Seven on State, which is wildly successful despite being on the seventh floor and despite having a traditional food-court layout with a common area of tables.
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