10/31/2019 An Appraisal of Eataly, the Manhattan Italian Food Hall - The New York Times

DINING & WINE | CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK

Eataly Offers Italy by the

Ounce
Eataly NYT Critic’s Pick Italian $$$ 200 Fifth Avenue, Midtown South

212-229-2560

By SAM SIFTON OCT. 19, 2010

NEW YORKERS understand full-contact grocery shopping.

They brave the madness of Fairways on a weekend, of

Zabars during a holiday rush, of Whole Foods and Trader
Joes and neighborhood Greenmarkets. They jostle through
Key Foods and Food Emporia alike. They prepare for these
trips as if for a Himalayan trek, which in New York City is
called a schlep.

And they return home triumphant if bruised, because

this is how shopping here is done: Got that tilefish! Got that
purple kale! (Honey, you forgot the milk.)

Now comes Eataly, an enormous and enormously

crowded new Italian-food market and restaurant collection
that opened recently off Madison Square Park: 50,000
square feet of restaurants and peninsular provisions, with a
fishmonger and butcher (and vegetable butcher) and an
espresso bar, a wine store, a cheese store, a cooking school,
a kitchenware department and a great deal more.

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10/31/2019 An Appraisal of Eataly, the Manhattan Italian Food Hall - The New York Times

It is giant and amazing, on its face, a circus maximus.

But what are we really to make of it? Is Eataly a menace (so
big and corporate) or an answered prayer (OMG, they sell
Barilla bucatini)? Does it represent a step forward for
Italian food at the upper end of the economic spectrum of
New York, or is it simply a mass-market retail play that
capitalizes on the fame of its most visible partners, Mario
Batali, Joe Bastianich and his mother, Lidia Bastianich?

Does Eataly strike a chord for those desirous of food

made close to home, with its house-made bread and
mozzarella, its fresh pasta and local bass? Or does it display
carbon footprints to rival those of an airline, with its dry
pastas shipped in from Naples, its prosciutto from Friuli, its
October-grown organic strawberries from Central and
Southern California, from Florida, Central Mexico or Baja?
Is Eataly good for us? Or is it the opposite?

The short answer is: yes. Yes to all those questions in

different ways, to different degrees.

The Eataly experience is reminiscent of the one Dean &

DeLuca introduced to Manhattan in 1988, when its small
corner store in SoHo was expanded into a huge operation
on the corner of Broadway and Prince Street. (Its
proprietors hope it will not be reminiscent of the one Dino
De Laurentiis introduced to Manhattan in 1982, when he
opened DDL Foodshow. A kind of proto-Eataly on the
Upper West Side, it closed two years later.) Dean & DeLuca
then was cool and vaguely exciting, a seemingly one-stop
shop for an enormous amount of expensive grub and a fast
shot of espresso. But it was also uncool and vaguely
menacing, a seemingly one-stop shop for an enormous
amount of expensive grub and a fast shot of espresso. You
could hate the place, even as you shopped there twice a
month.

Eataly opened in New York on Aug. 31, the first

American branch of a Turin-based chain founded in 2003
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by Oscar Farinetti. The crowds have been insane ever since.

This has in turn brought more crowds. And it has,
alternately, repelled them. As any New Yorker will tell you,
there is no point in waiting in a sidewalk line for 30 minutes
on a weekend day simply to enter a store. It’s not water
from the fountain of youth they’re selling in there. It’s
groceries.

To be fair, though: those groceries are pretty good.

There is a restaurant at Eataly that serves fish. It’s

called Il Pesce, and it is hard to get a table there because no
reservations are taken and the chef is Dave Pasternack, who
is also the chef and a partner with Mr. Batali and Mr.
Bastianich in the excellent Esca in the theater district. Il
Pesce is worth visiting: Mr. Pasternack’s plates of crudo and
cured sardines and delicately fried seafood are as good as at
his flagship, and cheaper, too.

There is a restaurant called Le Verdure, at which it is

somewhat easier to get a table even though no reservations
are taken, because it serves only vegetables. It is bruschetta
city there.

There is a pasta area (La Pasta, which takes no

reservations) that abuts a pizza one (La Pizza, and likewise),
in which silken, expertly prepared Batali-style pastas are
served, as well as Neapolitan pies cooked by actual
Neapolitans, in a gold-tiled oven brought in, presumably in
parts, from Naples.

You can go to these two at 11:30 a.m. for lunch and get
a table, or at 5:30 p.m. for dinner. At other times, you could
face a 90-minute wait, during which you are, of course,
encouraged to buy things. The pastas are excellent, but in a
city that is starting perhaps to out-Naples Naples for pie
supremacy, Eataly’s pizzas are not yet worth the time spent.

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And there is a first-come-first-served bar area, La

Piazza, where you can stand at a marble-top table and drink
wine or eat salamis and cheese as if in Venice. These tables
are very tall. It can be amusing to watch servers and
customers reach up to a table to get at a plate. I pass on
through.

Only one restaurant, Manzo, takes reservations. In

keeping with its name, which means beef in Italian, Manzo
serves a lot of meat. The chef is Michael Toscano, who was
at Babbo, and the menu has a lot of that restaurant’s
macher flare: ridiculously crisp and pillowy sweetbreads;
agnolotti to shame even the excellent version available for
$6 less at La Pasta; an incredible, luscious veal chop
smoked in hay, with gigante beans and speck; a beautiful
rib-eye for two, with a tiny cup of beef broth as chaser, and
cloudlike pommes soufflées just because.

The wine list is exceptional, the service divine over

starched tablecloths that shine golden in the light of votive
candles. But Manzo is at all hours in the center of a
supermarket, across from the fishmonger and right outside
the classroom where Ms. Bastianich teaches classes in
Italian cooking. One table is pressed up against the door
that leads into that room. Manzo is a feng shui nightmare.
You might go once.

But pick up dinner instead and head home to cook it, or

stop in for an excellent gelato, or a Lavazza espresso and a
glass of Nardini, and you may find yourself returning. In
these activities, anyway, Eataly’s charms are apparent and
building. Those lines for the restaurants will or won’t
dissipate over time. The point of the place is ultimately
shopping.

There isn’t much in the way of ice- or steam-table

prepared food of the kind at Fairway or the local deli. But
the collection of pastas — fresh and dry, much of the latter
from Gragnano, outside Naples — is phenomenal, perhaps
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unparalleled in Manhattan. You can pick up surprisingly

good prepared sauces from the marketing arm of Mr. Batali
(these are available at other retail outlets, too), or sublime
ingredients for making your own from the long library
stacks of Eataly’s canned San Marzano tomatoes, marinated
artichokes and peperoncini, salted anchovies and other
goodies from the Italian larder.

From the bakery behind the pizza ovens: good breads.

From the chocolate station up front: dessert.

Packaged meats and poultry are available, too, mostly

from the celebrity butcher Pat LaFrieda, whose name is
becoming so ubiquitous in Manhattan restaurants that it
would not be a surprise to hear that the company has
started to market meat vodka, or special-blend breakfast
cereal. The name is faddish and the products expensive.

A few sausages won’t break the bank, though. On a

night with a 120-minute wait for a table at La Pasta, I was
able to secure the ingredients for what turned out to be an
excellent family pasta-and-meats dinner, with bread, cheese
and a flinty, excellent Ligurian vermentino, for about $7 a
head, all in. Good value.

So, too, are some of the vegetables available in Eataly’s

narrow greengrocer area, particularly a wide and fabulous
collection of fresh mushrooms and, at least for these last
few moments of early fall, plump, soft tomatoes.

But airlifted vegetables put the lie to Eataly, too. The

Union Square Greenmarket is only six blocks south of the
complex. Last week, Mr. Pasternack of Il Pesce was down
there showing a gaggle of visiting white-coated Italian chefs
around, pointing out the bounty of our local farms. The
crowds rivaled those at Eataly. In New York City, there is
always somewhere else.

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An Eatalian Tour

Want to take the measure of Eataly without waiting in

too many lines? Enter on Fifth Avenue and stop
immediately at the Lavazza booth. Have an espresso to
focus the mind. (Is it after dark? Have a grappa, too, for
courage.) Forget about putting your name in for a table at a
restaurant — get a baby-blue shopping basket and get to
work. You’ll want dry pasta from Gragnano, near Naples.
The paccheri — big tubes of durum wheat the color of gold
— hold sauce well. Also, maybe prosciutto bread from the
bakery and a few packets of pork sausages.

Along the West 24th Street wall, you’ll see the Market
area: sauces and condiments and oils. Get something to
cover the pasta and the meat. (The Batali-brand cherry-
tomato sauce isn’t bad.) Next: a ball of fresh mozzarella
from the bar selling same on the far side of the room where
everyone’s standing at tables with sliced sausages and wine.
(Ignore them!) Go south toward West 23rd Street, to the
vegetable butcher’s stand. Some basil will suffice, though
you might see fruit for dessert if you haven’t already
succumbed to caramel pralines from the chocolate station.

Finally, cut across to the checkout, near housewares,

for La Nostra Gazzosa lemon soda. Head home via the wine
store next door: a nice dolcetto should match that pasta just
fine.

Eataly NYT Critic’s Pick

200 Fifth Avenue (Between West 24th Street and West 23rd Street)
Midtown South 212-229-2560
eataly.com: http://eataly.com

Menu singlepage.com/eataly

Price $$$ (expensive)

Reservations Accepted

Wheelchair Access Wheelchair Accessible

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10/31/2019 An Appraisal of Eataly, the Manhattan Italian Food Hall - The New York Times

This information was last updated: Oct. 30, 2019

The restaurant review will return next week.

A version of this review appears in print on October 20, 2010, on Page D1

of the New York edition with the headline: Italy by the Ounce.

© 2019 The New York Times Company

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