Mario Batali wants Eataly Boston to become a city centerpiece for the next 50 years
“Anyone can do a pop-up. This is not a pop-up. This is a 50-year investment. Hopefully we’ll become a part of the gastronomic culture that is Boston.”
Chaos swirled around him during a preview event at Eataly Boston Tuesday morning hours before the Italian market opened to the public, but Mario Batali was in his element. Standing between shelves of pasta in his signature orange Crocs, the celebrity chef and cofounder of the B&B Hospitality Group gregariously shook hands with almost everyone who walked by, treating them like old friends.“Fresh from Torino!” Batali exclaimed, exchanging warm greetings with two brothers in Italian. “Or maybe New York!” Italy and New York are at the core of Batali’s booming culinary empire. The chef, who trained for three years in the Northern Italian village of Borgo Capanne, became a fixture in New York’s Italian dining scene in the ’90s, debuting Babbo Ristorante e Enoteca in 1998. But for the second time in two years, Batali is launching a project in Boston, with Eataly following the 2015 opening of Babbo Pizzeria e Enoteca, an Italian restaurant in the Seaport.At Eataly Boston on Tuesday, Batali offered a tour of the 45,000-square-foot Italian food emporium to Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, the duo devouring samples of beef short rib on crostini drizzled with olive oil as cameras flashed. An older woman approached Walsh, asking him about the food they were eating. “Everything’s local here,” the mayor assured her.
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While Walsh’s statement wasn’t entirely accurate, the mayor wasn’t far off. Many of the foods on Eataly’s shelves are imported from Italy, and the “bread mother,” the pre-fermenting agent used in all of Eataly’s bread, is a 130-year-old starter dough from a village bakery in Torino. But the vast majority of the market’s fresh cheese, beef, poultry, and seafood is locally sourced from high-quality businesses.
“It’s just an amazing opportunity for us to capture the geo-specificity of the deliciousness of New England,” Batali said. “It’s something we wouldn’t find somewhere else.”
Batali’s decision to bring Eataly to Boston wasn’t one the chef took lightly. While temporary, transportable restaurant concepts like pop-ups and food trucks have seen a surge in popularity, Batali prefers the long-term stability of a brick-and-mortar.
“Pop-ups bother me,” Batali said. “There’s no accountability in a pop-up. This is not a pop-up. This is a 50-year investment. Hopefully we’ll become a part of the gastronomic culture that is Boston.”
Beyond establishing Eataly as a foundational Boston business, Batali said he hopes the market will serve as a destination for anyone in New England with a culinary sense of adventure.
“Boston is kind of the centerpiece for all of New England,” Batali said. “People from New Hampshire will drive here all the time. So it’s a great location in that we have access to a lot of people who are used to driving to Boston to do something like that.”
Mario Batali offers a beef short rib crostini to Mayor Marty Walsh.
Rather than spend the night before Eataly Boston’s grand opening at his own restaurant, Batali dined Monday night at Bar Mezzana, a coastal Italian restaurant in the South End. Besides Batali’s own restaurant or those of his Eataly Boston collaborator Barbara Lynch (Menton and No. 9 Park, to name just two), he mentioned local chefs like Jody Adams, Jamie Bissonnette, Ken Oringer, Michael Schlow, and Jasper White as some of his favorites. But he also admits that his tastes have simplified with age, and that anywhere he can get a couple of Nantucket scallops on the shell works for him.
“I’m less interested in technique at this point, in my salty old age, than I am in product,” Batali said. “It’s the truly confident chef that knows to buy a scallop, put a little drop of olive oil on it, and not do anything to it at all. It’s less about the trickiness and more about the confidence.”
Confidence is something Batali possesses in spades. He predicted that customers will “fall to their knees in joy” when they see the products Eataly had to offer, which Batali said will be sold at prices comparable to those at your average grocery store.
“You won’t see any of these pastas in any other store in the country,” Batali said, gesturing to countless pristine white shelves. “We offer a line of products you’ve only dreamed about after you left Italy on your last trip.”
Pasta at Eataly.
Batali said he probably won’t keep up the pace of opening a new place in Boston each year, but that he thinks another project could crop up in a year-and-a-half or two. For now, he’s concerned with making sure Eataly Boston continues to run smoothly after opening day.
“Opening day is the least difficult,” Batali said. “We’re new, and everyone is on the floor making sure everything’s working. How we do on a busy Saturday two weeks from now is how we’ll judge ourselves.”
Perhaps momentarily forgetting where he was, Batali compared Eataly Boston’s long-term goals to a trio of Yankees greats.
“Anybody can hit a home run,” Batali said. “How many people can be Mickey Mantle? We want to be Mickey Mantle, or I guess Joe DiMaggio. Or even Babe Ruth.”
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