NEW YORK — Eataly, the Turin, Italy-based Italian gourmet food and wine market, opened the doors to its massive facility in the Flatiron District of Manhattan on Aug. 31, and unveiled the unique concept of a vegetable “butcher” stand.
The 50,000-square-foot market was brought to the U.S. when Food Network star chefs and New York Italian restaurateurs, Mario Batali and Joe and Lidia Bastianich, teamed up with the founder of Eataly, Oscar Farinetti. The original Eataly opened in Turin in January 2007.
“It is not just a market, but a food experience,” one sign at Eataly reads.
In accordance with its mission to celebrate and foster understanding of the Italian table — a place where ingredients come from people with names and faces — the multi-million-dollar market and eatery includes a produce section featuring local and seasonal items, in addition to an unheard of concept in supermarkets: a vegetable butcher.
The vegetable butcher, stationed next to the produce section, cuts produce for customers, free of charge. Jennifer Rubell, niece of Studio 54 owner Steve Rubell, is the original head vegetable butcher and created the concept with Batali himself. After attending the Culinary Institute of America, Rubell wrote columns about food and a book about food and entertaining, before becoming an artist who uses food as a medium.
“Mario Batali and I were having dinner late one night at his restaurant, Del Posto,” Rubell told SN about the conception of the idea. “He was telling me about the women at the Campo dei Fiori in Rome who trim baby artichokes all day, and we were talking about how to make vegetables less intimidating to Americans.
“Somewhere in that conversation, on our second bottle of wine, the idea of a vegetable butcher was born.”
Since the store opened over a month ago, Rubell has trained three more full-time vegetable butchers.
“[In addition to being time-starved], New Yorkers are also big communicators, and talking to a vegetable butcher about what you want to cook and how to cook it is every bit as important as getting your vegetables chopped,” Rubell said.
Customers pick out vegetables, get them weighed, then specify how they want them cut. They can then circle back after they've shopped the rest of the store, on their way to checkout.
“We put [the cut produce] in whatever container or bag makes sense,” Rubell said, explaining that the free service involves certain costs, including labor and supplies, that Eataly pays for because it believes that people buying and eating more vegetables is worth it.
“In the beginning, we didn't take tips, but after a lot of insistence from customers, now we do,” she said. “People are incredibly grateful for our services. It's been wildly popular. The typical first response is disbelief — it's the simplest thing, but no one has thought to do it before.”
A vegetable butcher could be “tough to pull off in a supermarket environment in most markets,” said Jim Wisner, president of Wisner Marketing, Libertyville, Ill.
“[I'm] not sure the concept would travel well outside of single locations in a handful of cities,” Wisner said.
However, the connection to fresh, local and seasonal that the vegetable butcher provides is brilliant, according to Melissa Abbott, trends and culinary insights director at the Hartman Group, Bellevue, Wash.
“We have found through years of consumer research that much behind the low consumption of vegetables in the U.S. is often due to issues surrounding prep, including lack of knife skills, time, clean-up and recipe knowledge,” Abbott told SN.
“Provided the produce department is meeting all other cues on fresh, local and seasonal, and said vegetable butcher is [well-educated], vegetable prep at retail may prove to be a well-received, value-added proposition.”
The concept also provides both theater via swift knife skills, and education via cooking tips.
Eataly has far surpassed all expectations with its attention to detail and specialization, Abbott said.
“[It] shows that as a nation, we are moving from armchair Food Network foodies to having an authentic food culture, one that respects the source and producer behind the food.”
In addition to full-service meat, seafood, cheese — featuring mozzarella made before shoppers' eyes — housemade pasta and bakery departments, Eataly features multiple restaurants, including a fine-dining Italian steakhouse called Manzo, a Neapolitan pizzeria and a year-round rooftop beer garden and microbrewery expected to open in November. A cafe offers everything from paninis, to housemade gelato, to pastries and other Italian desserts.
Shelves of Italian specialty items, a housewares section, bookstore, cooking school led by Lidia Bastianich, wine shop and even an in-house travel agency, which organizes trips to visit Italian food and wine producers, complete the picture.
When asked about future plans for Rubell at Eataly, she responded, “I will always do anything for Mario Batali — let's see where it goes.”