Eataly, a new, 42,500-square-foot Italian food and wine marketplace in New York's Flatiron district (at 200 Fifth Ave. at 23rd Street, Manhattan) will overwhelm and over stimulate you with the look and smells of Everything Italian. 

I should not have been allowed inside Eataly. At least not without checking my credit cards at the door.

Describing it as a new, 42,500-square-foot Italian food and wine marketplace in New York's Flatiron district does no justice to the intense overstimulation anyone even remotely interested in food will feel upon entering.

A butcher counter filled with Piedmontese steaks! Live langoustines (at $34.80 a pound)! Authentic cured meats! Fresh pasta and one of the city's biggest selections of dried pasta! Multiple varieties of canned San Marzano tomatoes!

Limoncello babas! Neapolitan pizzas! Gelato! Chocolates! Italian wines!

Creamy mozzarella made right in front of you! A produce counter stocked with beautiful Concord grapes, mini brussels sprouts and a "vegetable butcher" who will do all of your chopping and trimming at no additional charge!

Oh, and if I had shown up a few minutes earlier, I would have seen celebrity chef Lidia Bastianich stirring risotto. She's one of the owners, along with her son, restaurateur and wine authority Joe, and fellow superstar chef Mario Batali.

"It's a place that makes you hungry," said Joseph Bastianich, in a slight understatement.

But here's the fine print. Eataly is a lot like eating in Italy. It's based on a marketplace that opened in Turin in 2007, and the food in its restaurants and market is the real deal.

But we are not Italians. We are Americans, and we are in a hurry. We have meetings to run to and overdue columns to finish (ahem). We are hungry and we want food now.     And this is why Eataly is simultaneously wondrous and frustrating.

It's a temple to slow food, made the right way. There is no refrigerated grab-and-go case of sandwiches and salads. There is no serve-yourself hot food bar.

To eat here, you can get sit-down service at one of the restaurants ? meat, vegetable, fish, pasta and pizza, salumi and cheese and raw bar. Most of these will involve a wait for a seat, particularly at peak hours, and then a wait while your food is made. And if you want to eat pizza and you came with someone who wants to eat fish, well, you can't eat together.

You can also order to go. But then there is no place to sit down. You must take it back to your office or go find a spot in nearby Madison Square Park.

And P.S. ? you can get dessert and coffee served to you only if you eat at the meat restaurant, called Manzo. Eataly is designed so that you go have a meal, then you get up and go to a separate bar and have a dessert, gelato or a coffee (yes, three separate lines).

Needless to say, this has prompted some confusion among those accustomed to food courts.

"This is something new, something different. This isn't a salad bar where you pay by the pound," said Eataly's director of communications, Brooke Adams, after being grilled by an exasperated customer who just wanted to buy some food and eat it at a table.

If you're going on your lunch hour ? well, you might want to allow more than an hour. Eataly has been a madhouse since it opened Aug. 31. I thought things were slightly chaotic when I was there in midafternoon on a recent weekday, but Adams told me this was probably the quietest time of day.

In fact, there occasionally have been lines to even get in the door. That's before you wait in any of the lines to get food.   "People who appreciate good food are willing to accept that," Adams said.

It is certainly a haven for home cooking. After glimpsing beautiful rock shrimp at the seafood counter and then passing piles of freshly made pasta flavored with squid ink, I recalled a recipe from Batali's Babbo restaurant combining the two with diced cured soppressata and jalape?o pesto.

Of course, this involved a lot of wading through crowds and waiting. First to the produce section, where the vegetable butcher deseeded and chopped my jalape?o and sliced my scallions. Any time I saved from that service was soon lost in the crazy line for salumi and then at the seafood counter.

By the time I got to the fresh pasta counter and waited in the same spot for 10 minutes, I finally picked up one of the prepackaged boxes ? more than I needed ? just to get to checkout.       Yes, my dinner was worth it.

(And along the way I managed to be seduced by some apricot gelato flecked with amaretti cookies, a pound of chopped beef from celebrity butcher Pat LaFrieda, a wedge of aged Parmigiano-Reggiano and some fresh butter from Ronnybrook Farm Dairy.)

Jennifer Rubell, the performance artist who conceived the "vegetable butcher" concept during a midnight dinner with Batali, said Eataly is ultimately encouraging more patrons to cook. It might be because those curious about what to do with an artichoke, for example, can now get instant instruction on how to trim and cook it.

Or it might just be from ravenous people wanting to skip the long panini line.     "People will come to us and buy bread, buy prosciutto, buy a tomato and have us slice it, buy mozzarella, take it to the park and eat it," Rubell said. "And that is cooking."

Eataly; 200 Fifth Ave. at 23rd Street, Manhattan; 646-398-5100; www.eataly.com 

Open seven days. Market open 10 a.m. to 11 p.m., Lavazza Gran Bar  open from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Restaurants open 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.

See a Slideshow at : 
http://www.northjersey.com/food_dining/103772824_
A_huge_new_Italian_marketplace_in_Manhattan_is_
the_real_deal.html?page=all
 

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