Eat your way through it
Los Angeles finally has one of the Italian restaurant and market emporiums known as Eataly. Get ready to dig in.
It seems the Los Angeles food world has been waiting for Eataly to open for, well, forever. If you’ve visited the locations in New York City, Chicago, Boston or Italy, you’ll understand why. The large-scale Italian marketplaces, which include restaurants, cafes and markets, are like Disneyland for Italian food lovers. Imagine giant rooms full of fresh pasta, bubbly pizzas, rounds and rounds of cheese, baskets full of fresh bread and walls lined with bottles of wine stacked to the ceiling.
The Los Angeles Eataly, in the revamped northeast corner of the Westfield Century City mall, is finally open.
Eataly founder Oscar Farinetti says he’s been thinking about an L.A. location since opening the first Eataly in Turin, Italy, in 2007. Lidia Bastianich and her son Joe, as well as chef Mario Batali (Joe and Batali are partners in the L.A. Mozza restaurants along with Nancy Silverton), are all partners and collaborators. There are now 13 locations in Italy, four U.S. Eatalys, and multiple iterations around the world for a total of 39. The next U.S. location will be in Las Vegas.
Now that the doors to the 67,000square-foot, three-level Italian food destination are open, here’s what you need to know:
Eataly is not a food hall. The company has partnerships with different vendors and chefs, but it is responsible for most of the products in the marketplace. Baker Fulvio Marino makes about 10 different kinds of bread using flour he grinds himself (working with Community Grains in California) and a mother yeast for the different restaurants and take-away counters in Eataly.
There are separate counters devoted to butchery, mozzarella cheese (made by Di Stefano Cheese), pizza, fresh pasta and local produce. Eataly is working with chef Jason Neroni of the Rose Cafe in Venice to collaborate on L’Orto dello Chef, a counter with salads, grain bowls and juices.
There are four restaurants, including La Pizza & La Pasta, La Piazza, Terrace and Il Pesce Cucina, the last a seafood restaurant by Providence chef Michael Cimarusti and partner Donato Poto.
The Farinettis are excited about panigacci, a flatbread they are importing from Wow Panigacci di Podenza, a bakery in Tuscany. The flatbread is at La Piazza, in the main restaurant area, at the back of the market, where you’ll also find a mozzarella station, lasagna station, polpette station, fritto station and salumi and cheese.
There is a Lidia Bastianich cooking school where you can take Italian cooking classes overlooking a view of Santa Monica Boulevard
The rooftop restaurant will open “soon” according to Farinetti’s son Nicola, Eataly’s chief executive. He promises the 6,000-square-foot space will have indoor and outdoor seating, a restaurant and bar.
There is a dairy room downstairs where Homa Dashtaki of White Moustache Yogurt is making yogurt. She makes 288, 8-ounce glass jars a day, which she fills by hand.
For the first time, Eataly will sell American wine. There are 143 American bottles in the market.
There’s a chocolate counter by the Piemonte company called Venchi, where you can find 50 single-wrapped varieties of chocolate.