EATALY
In the world’s great cities there are destination food halls, which command our attention. Who could visit London without a stop at Harrods to get lost in their cavernous food salons? In New York, Zabar’s, or Whole Foods at Columbus Circle, provide enough selection and stimulation to keep a food shopper enthralled for hours. And Paris, well, the entire city is one gigantic food hall. Let’s just leave it at that.
So I was shocked to discover a relatively new food hall in the industrial city of Turin, Italy, which blew away all my precepts of what a food hall is.
Eataly is a Food Hall the way the Yankees are just another baseball team. Which is to say, in their respective classes, these are best of their bunch.
Eataly is a 27,000-square-foot complex on the outskirts of Turin. Yes, they sell produce, but there is so much more. For starters, there are eight, in-store restaurants serving expertly prepared entrees. One even serves shaved, fresh white truffles on every menu item.
This is a food store where everything, and everyone, is environmentally conscious; where they make cakes on premise that rival the best of Vienna, where they make chocolates on premise that rival the best of Switzerland, where they display fresh fruits and vegetables as though they were jewels in the window at Tiffany.
Which is why Eataly has caught on and spawned sister stores in Bologna, Milan, and two locations in Tokyo. A new store opens in New York next spring, and there is talk of one opening in Toronto, Canada. Lucky are those who live in any of these neighborhoods.
Despite the premium-quality of the goods, the careful selection and helpful, courteous, conscientious staff, nothing at Eataly is priced beyond what working class, and middle-income earning families, can afford.
Eataly is the brainchild of Oscar Farinetti, an Italian entrepreneur who sold his chain of UniEuro electronic stores and decided to do something good, and socially conscious, with the proceeds.
The aim of Eataly is to dispel the notion that high quality farm products are the birthright of a privileged few.
Eataly attempts to popularize the availability of clean, tasty, additive-free foods, leaning largely on the motifs of “local” and “seasonal.”
I peppered a five-hour visit to the food hall with many edible pauses; I stopped in the market café and had one of the most memorable espressos on a two-week visit to Italy.
I stopped for lunch at the seasonal in-store restaurant and ordered two perfectly cooked farm-fresh eggs sunny-side-up and reveled in the fresh white truffle, which was shaved over them.
In the bakery, I tasted amazing commercial breads, which I have found in Italy over the last three years – and they are made on site!
The pastries at Eataly are tasty, tender, and their cakes are decorated as though by master patissiers, while the hand-made chocolates at Eataly appear to have come from the atelier of a fine Swiss, or Belgian, chocolatier.
The homemade ice creams, made with milk that is free of antibiotics and all that jazz, are sensually rich and creamy.
To promote conservation, they bring fresh milk onto the site in large vessels, which are stored, refrigerated, inside a machine which has to be thought of as a large vending machine; customers can buy clean, empty milk bottles, or bring their own from home, and insert the bottle into the machine, throw in a few coins and fill their bottle with wholesome, fresh milk.
In the wine cellar at Eataly, one can also buy, or bring empty bottles from home, and fill them with a selection of bulk wines kept in large vessels. While you can’t take beer home in the same fashion, Eataly does have a large beer hall where you can sample multiple types of beer on tap and take home six-packs of hundreds of different beers.
Eataly boasts 10,000 different foods and beverages; and when one gets tired of shopping, one can always settle into a chair in the small library corner of the store where there are numerous cookbooks and food-related books to offer shopping diversity. Also, there are six Apple desktop computers in this quiet corner where one can surf the Internet.
This new destination food hall, now sits among the great gourmet retailers of the world as a "must see" experience. Eating and shopping becomes a richer experience for many as this Italian everyman's emporium takes root in a variety of our greatest cities.
Eataly is on the southern outskirts of Torino, in an area called Lingotto, atVia Nizza, 230 / 14.
Eataly Torino is open daily 10 am to 10.30 pm. The seven on-site restaurants, pizzeria and bars are open from noon to 3 pm daily and again from 7 pm to 10:15pm.
Jim White
Jim White lives in Napa Valley, California, where he makes wine, and writes about food and wine for his own site napaman.com. Jim is also a co-founder and active partner in one of North America’s most successful commercial bakeries, FGF Brands, in Toronto, Ontario. Over a span of 30 years, as one of North America’s leading food and beverage product developers, Jim successfully brought to market more than 10,000 products. Jim attributes his product development success to the journalistic approach he brings to each food assignment; he has an innate curiosity to know how things work, or why they taste the way they do. It makes sense that Jim propels his food career with journalistic principles as he has had a parallel career in journalism for all the years he created food products. In the 1970s, Jim was a foreign correspondent in Africa, covering wars and famines, writing for the largest newspapers in North America, for UPI and the Associated Press. In the 1980s, Jim became food editor and restaurant critic of The Toronto Star, one of the largest newspapers in North America. Although twice named “Best Food Writer in North America,” Jim has also always been passionate about the visual element; he is an accomplished photographer, and over the years has sold images to Life, Time and Newsweek magazines.