Eataly #2 Is Ready to Open

“We’ll be there... This summer a second Eataly will be opening in New York. The news has been in the air for months, but now it is much more than just a rumor—it’s almost ready. The location is rather interesting: the Four World Trade Center.

Italian breakfast: cappuccino e cornetto

Pizza and facaccia bread at Etaly Store

              Nicola Farinetti, CEO of Eataly

“We don’t have an exact date yet, really because we are trying to organize a grand and stylish opening”, says Nicola Farinetti, from whom we are trying to get some sort of preview. The CEO of Eataly USA – son of Oscar Farinetti, the father-founder of Eataly – manages to make us even more curious. We can’t wait! 
 

The central roleof breakfast
“Colazione (breakfast) is something we have never dealt with before,” says Nicola. “The World Trade Center opens at 7:00AM, so it will be fascinating. We are going to have four different types of breakfast. The rst will be a full breakfast service, at which you can book business meetings.

It is a challenge that we like; something we have never tried and that we want to concentrate on a great deal.” Then there will be the “Colazione della Nonna” (‘Grandma’s Breakfast’) in the bakery, with cakes, pastries, etc.

Naturally there will also be an “American Breakfast” that they are trying out now with an egg sandwich in the classic Italian ‘panini’ bread. (“We are experimenting and changing what we don’t like,” Nicola tells us).

And last but not least, there will of course be the classic Lavazza coffee bar where you can have a traditional Italian breakfast; a quick cappuccino and a croissant, “Our aim is to have ve hundred people inside our store at 8 o’clock in the morning for the rst time.”
 

Nicola is passionate and enthusiastic. We remember him from the opening of the rst store in the Flatiron district six years ago; he has the same adrenaline. And he has the smile of someone who, despite being young, knows a lot.

The Farinetti family has not yet put a foot wrong with any of its stores, now found all over the world. The opening of the New York store in 2010 undoubtedly brought them luck. Today it is a place where you simply must go, even if only for a visit.

But there won’t only be breakfast served at this new spot... “Of course, but you could say that breakfast is the new, big feature. At the end of the day our format is this: eat, buy and learn – all under the same roof.” 

A store dedicated to bread
We tried to get another sneak-peak out of him, and we succeeded. This store
will be dedicated to bread; an important ingredient of an Italian breakfast...“The
World Trade Center was once a market,” Nicola tells us, “and also a place where something terrible happened – born out of an incomprehension between cultures and the madness of a few individuals. We decided we wanted to tell the story of a food that unites the whole world; that isn’t born naturally like an apple or chicken, but that is created by man – bread. We want to re-unite the world’s populations through their individual breads.”

All the different types of bread in the world will be made here – from America, South Asia, South America, along with our Italian ‘panini’, naturally. In fact there will be breads from all Italian regions, with a program that will change every two to three months according to what the bakers manage to produce from their ovens.

And there’s something else important, “we will try to invite communities to tell us about their breads, because we like the idea of explaining why a given type of bread exists... At Eataly we will tell the story of Nigerian bread alongside that from New York, because all types of bread in the world have one thing in common... the use of grain.”
 

More and more inside news...
The new Eataly will have all of the third oor of the fourth tower, around 40,000 square feet. And it is going to be a different kind of store. “It will have a horseshoe shape,” says Nicola, “and on the side where the memorial is we’ll have this incredible glass window that overlooks the pools. We will put the restaurant there and the market on the other side, so you will feel the division between market and restaurant much more than in the Flatiron store.” And Nicola gives us some more news. He is too excited not to tell us.

“We’re going to have a ‘quick- service’. For the rst time we are bringing the Maioli brothers over from Cervia to make piadina from Romagna. We are incredibly lucky because Olive Garden produced an advert stating that a piadina was a ‘quesadilla that spoke Italian,’ so they eliminated the problem of communication, and now all we have to do is explain exactly why ours is so delicious and unique. So that will be a regional Italian development that we hope to be able to illustrate well, again linked to the concept of bread, but a different type – at.”
 

And will they organize educational events like at La Scuola in the other store? “We won’t have a school like that, we will have something different,” Nicola reveals. “But I can’t tell you everything now... I can only tell you that while at the Flatiron store we have focused on recipes for their educational aspect, downtown we will focus on the product...”

The nal sample he gives us is regarding the Italian bakery, which there is such a shortage of in New York. If they succeed, we may just have to move our whole newsroom... “We are going to make pastries! We will have a crazy selection of pastries, the classic type that are sold by weight. That is if we don’t end up going crazy in the process, since it is so dif cult to make them like the Italian ones.”