It may occur to you, as you circulate among the pasta snobs, wine geeks, and amateur cheese sniffers who move, like agitated schools of fish, through the new mega-Italian-food destination Eataly, that you’ve entered some strange, previously uncharted dimension of the food universe. It certainly occurred to my daughter Jane as we waited for our lunch to arrive at the vegetable restaurant Le Verdure, one of the many dining venues in the sprawling food-hall complex. During the course of our little adventure, we’d already observed avid food tourists taking videos of tagliolini and stood in airport-length lines for a taste of Neapolitan pizza. We’d sampled spoonfuls of Martian-green pistachio gelato and tried vainly to get a table at the complex’s most upmarket restaurant, Manzo, where the menu is devoted entirely to meat. “I wouldn’t call this a real restaurant, Dad,” said Jane, when we finally found a seat in the milling crowd. “It’s more like a circus, with lots of food.”
This is high praise coming from a 10-year-old, of course. And there’s a lot about this sprawling big-top production that seems to have been designed with a deliberately simple, even childish sensibility in mind. There’s the goofy, weirdly catchy name, coined by the company’s founder, Oscar Farinetti, who runs a chain of popular Eataly stores in Northern Italy. There’s the giant, hastily decorated space (on the ground floor of the old Toy Building on lower Fifth Avenue), which looks like a cross between an earnest food-fair exhibition in Turin, say, and one of the darker quadrants of the Paramus Park Mall. The walls of Eataly are plastered with lots of temporary-looking signage describing the ingredients, regions, and purveyors of Italy, and on busy evenings, the angular layout can feel so overcrowded and confused that the staff hands out “How to Eat at Eataly” flyers, complete with detailed instructions and a tiny diagrammed map.
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