EATALY, THE ITALIAN WINE & FOOD STORE, “CONQUERS” THE HEART OF MANHATTAN: 15.000 VISIT THE FLAVORS OF ITALY EVERY DAY. THE WINE SHOP SOLD 500 BOTTLES “IN ONE DAY” AND HAS A TURNOVER OF 300.OOO DOLLARS A WEEK…

That Americans love Italian food & wine is nothing new. But Eataly, the wine & food store designed by Oscar Farinetti, located between 23rd Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan, New York, has discovered how amazingly strong their passion is. You can find New Yorkers and tourists in the store shopping amid Italian meats, breads and focacce prepared on-site, as well as mozzarella and fresh pasta, piles of Parmesan and Trentingrana, designer products by Alessi and Bialetti (just to name a few), counters where you can taste cold cuts and cheese, restaurants where you can eat the pasta freshly prepared just a few feet away or meat specialties like “Beef”, selections of products ranging from extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar to Italian tomatoes, botargo from Sicily and Sardinia: all of this in a dense cloud of aromas. Between 7.000 and 15.000 people visit Eataly every day. The company has employed 530 people since August and it is not yet fully operational. And if the total turnover is not yet predictable, Joe Bastianich, who together with his mother Lidia is one of the biggest names in American food (and wine producer in Friuli and Tuscany) and both are members of Eataly New York (along with Farinetti and the chef Mario Batali) told WineNews that the figures relating to the wine bar are impressive: 350 to 500 bottles sold per day, for a turnover of 250 to 300.000 dollars a week, and alternating 9.000 bottles on the shelves.
It is a real “conquest” for the flavors of Italy in one of the most important business capitals of the world. “It is not just Italian food,” adds Joe Bastianich “but also quality seen through Italian eyes, because we also search insistently for quality products, from cheese to vegetables, from milk to yoghurt that are produced near New York”.

In other words, it is exporting not only products but also the know-how, style and sensitivity of Italian taste. “Italian food is the first ethnic food for Americans,” said Lidia Bastianich, an authority on Italian cuisine in the U.S., who sprang into the public eye with her restaurants and food shows on TV, “so much so that at the height of the economic crisis, Italian wines and food stayed stable and have now started to increase earlier than other sectors, as consumers are increasingly hungry for knowledge, flavor, and are more and more quality-oriented”.

Federico Pizzinelli