Eataly Review

So… Eataly. We meet at last.

Hey, the sorbet was good. That counts right? I suppose it pretty much has to - since that was the only thing I actually bothered to eat there. In all fairness, I didn’t expect to wander into the place when the evening started, I just sort of stumbled across it while walking home from a grad school info session. It took me a second or … fifteen… to realize what it was I saw in the periphery of my vision before it clicked and I realized “Hey, that’s that Italian super grocery store jazz whatever hooplah all the foodies are abuzz about at the moment… or a month ago… or whenever it was.” Anyway, since I apparently don’t care that Mario Batali screws over his wait staff, I decided to hop in and give it a try. “This is my chance to get on the ground floor of the Culinary Advant-Garde” I thought.

Being a responsible adult human male who totally remembers to put the toilet seat down and opens doors for ladies and totally never whacked his girlfriend in the back of the head with a wii remote twice I thought “I’ll be responsible and limit myself to five dollars… pick up a couple of tiny samples and be on my way.”

Well… Unlike the Advant-Garde film, which you can see for free because nobody wants to watch a lesbian mow her lawn backwards for two hours, being on the cutting edge of the culinary scene is a bit on the expensive side. Individual chocolate truffles for $35 per pound and $40 sticks of salami (oh baby, mine isn’t that expensive - wink wink nudge nudge say no more) - well they sort of priced me out pretty quick. I keep forgetting that food is expensive in New York because, well, I don’t think anything I cook at work is all that fantastic - never mind that it’s $40 on the menu, to me it’s not any more spectacular than something I threw together using $8 worth of Ingredients from the Met.

Of course, It’s not like I walked into Eataly expecting deep discounts - the online reviews I had read prior to my adventure prepared me for that - plus it’s on 23rd street in Manhattan - that would be pricey even if a celebrity chef hadn’t tagged his name onto it.

An other problem I had with the place was its layout. 

It’s designed to be a slow casual experience designed to get you to respect your ingredients and take your time yada yada yada blah blah blah. At the same time it falls into that grocery store trope of arranging all the items in such a way that you HAVE to walk past the impulse items. Then it’s got some old Italian town market crap going on. It doesn’t really work… and It’s set up in such a way that half the time I wasn’t sure if I was in an aisle or had somehow wound up behind the counter. Honestly I fully suspect that at least half of the workforce are tourists who’ve found themselves very very lost.

Now even with all that, I wouldn’t exactly say that there was a dizzying array of foodstuffs. Now what there was looked good, but the dried pastas were pretty much the same I could get at The Met, and pouring $6 per pound for pasta scraps seemed a bit much for me (Try the pasta, it’s got a real nice profit margin - Master Chef Elzar, Futurama) The Wine & Beer selection wasn’t that impressive. It’s easier for me to find a nice Italian wine in the shop down the street on Grand Avenue. It’s as simple as that.

Long story short though: I tried the Sorbet.

The Amaretto-Apricot sorbet, to be specific… and it was REALLY good. Light and Creamy with little crunchy bits and a flavor that lasted with me on the whole train ride home. The only better frozen dessert I’ve had was Mango Ice Cream from a random back-alley stand in the Netherlands once (there may have been mitigating factors that made that the best ice cream ever, but I digress)

I kept trying to find a way to rationalize it, and say “Well, it’s good - but was it really worth $5?” but the texture was just perfect. The flavor definite, but not to the point of being overwhelming. It was perfectly balanced and fantastic. I couldn’t stand it. It was too good for a place that felt like an upscale Costco to me. The best I could think was “Maybe not Five Dollars, more like 3 Euros.” but that’s the EXACT SAME PRICE.

So it was really good. But am I excited to go back? Am I going to take out-of-town friends to visit the place? Will I frequent the place with my in-town friends? In my opinion, I’ll always be more excited about the Amish Market in Laurel, Maryland or Samantha’s Southern Cuisine in Clinton Hill. So the answer to your (okay, my) questions in the order asked are: Not really, No, and Probably Not.