Mario Batali: What you need is a staff of about 700 people, 690 of whom are geniuses. And the remaining ten are going to be geniuses.
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I don’t think we’re going to change people’s lives, but what I think we may do at best is enhance them. I think when people have their ‘holy jeez!’ moment while traveling in Italy, what they often realize at that very second is that simpler can actually be better. And when you have a simple dish of pasta with just cacio e pepe [cheese and pepper], you’re like, ‘Wow, they didn’t do a lot of work on this dish, but it’s the most satisfying dish I’ll have.’
When we opened in New York it was worrisome to many of the owners and purveyors of Italian food, whether it was in a specialty salami shop or a submarine shop or even in an Italian restaurant. And I think that what we bring is a kind of heightened awareness of the greatness of the Italian culture, and the Italian-American culture. And they should not be worried. We are here in their support. What people are going to do, they’ll come here and they’ll eat here, and then they’ll go back to their favorite Italian joint and think, look at what they do a little different there, but I still love you guys. No one’s going to walk away from all the stuff they’ve been enjoying. It just adds an augmented potential to their experience, and that’s what we’re here to do. We’re not here to take customers from a single person. We’re here to share in the joy of the Italian facility with deliciousness, and make it part of the Chicago landscape. We want to be here.
So how has being a part-time midwesterner informed a midwestern Eataly, versus the New York one?
I think that when you talk to an Italian about what’s delicious, and they’re from, say, the Veneto, they would never say to buy something from Puglia. Because they’re so proudly identified with their region. And for them the best smell is the way it smells when you walk through the closest apple orchard, or the closest dairy that’s making ricotta, or even cottage cheese, for that matter. And what we’re going to do is to take that Italian sensibility, and we’re going to use as much of the domestic product from this region right here, and we’re going to do it like the Italians do it.
You’ll shop around in the vegetable area, you’ll see that there’s a vegetable butcher there, and you’ve always been a little worried about artichokes, but our vegetable butcher will prepare them for you, and all you have to do is take them home. We’ll trim, we’ll chop, we’ll do all of that.
