Holy Cow – Eataly to Open a DC Location in 2012!

I’ve long professed that I’m a huge fan of all things Italian so this news makes me weep with joy. For those not familiar, Eataly is a gigantic (their NYC location is 40,000 square feet) market place and restaurants featuring all the Italian food you could possible imagine. A taste of the market from their Web site:

SALUMI & CHEESE

There are over 400 diverse varieties of regional cheeses produced in Italy. Behind each cheese is a story complete with people and places. Discover them all today.

Eataly’s prosciutto is made with strictly Italian pigs raised on an all-natural diet. The end result? Fresh, sweet and lightly salted prosciutto. Try our Mortadella from Bologna or indulge in Smoked Speck, Bresaola, Cotechino, Porchetta and Arrosti from Trentino today.

DRY PASTA

Eataly only sells the best Dry Pasta made in Italy. From the ancient Afeltra pastamaking facility in Gragnano, Campania, we offer 4 unique brands of pasta, all made in the artisanal Italian tradition with the finest grains: Gragnano, Afeltra Pastaio, Rigorosa & Garofolo. We specially import Barilla’s Italian line of products to bring the highest quality to New York City. Tastemaker Lidia Bastianich also shares her pasta manufactured in Italy using only the finest durum wheat milled in an award winning facility and dried slowly to obtain the best quality and flavor.

FRESH PASTA

Every corner of Eataly New York shares a commitment to community, environment and local food traditions, the principals of Slow Food. For Italians, making fresh pasta by hand is an art that follows this philosophy. It is a tradition that is centuries old and each province has its own identity: something as simple as flour and water has so many different shapes and techniques that take you as as far as your imagination can go.

Head Chef Pastaio, Felipe Saint-Martin, trained in Mondovi, a small village in Piedmont, with three generations of Pastaios in the Michelis Family. All our selections at his Fresh Pasta Counter are made in house every day. As Chef Felipe says, the qualities to being a good pastamaker are “Talent, endurance and passion.” Explore the talent of Eataly Fresh Pasta today.

BREAD

Four essential ingredients make Eataly’s bread the best: Organic stone-ground flour from Don Lewis’ Wild Hive Farm in Clinton Corner, NY, Natural yeast made using Italian techniques, an imported wood-burning oven and handmade everything in the age-old Italian tradition.

Huffington Post reports (h/t City Paper):

Eataly is big. The 40,000-square-foot Italian food-and-drink emporium already comprises a wine store, a beer garden, a bakery, a grocery store and six restaurants, all on 23rd Street in Manhattan. Eataly is so big that Little Italy’s merchants have been complaining that it’s stealing business from Mulberry Street. But by the end of 2012, if all goes according to plan, it will get bigger.

That’s when Joe Bastianich says he and Eataly’s co-owners (who include superstar chef Mario Batali) hope to have opened their second of three American branches of Eataly they currently have planned—in Los Angeles and Washington, DC.

So the question is – where do you think they can find such a big space in DC?