P8| PURSUITS OTHEGLOBEANDMAIL | SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2019S
eventeen years ago, Oscar
Farinetti sketched out an
idea for a grocery store on a
piece of paper. Along the
periphery of the simple rectangle
were counters for meat, fish,
cheese, wine and bread, and stra-
tegically peppered through the
centre were stations serving
freshly made pizzas, seafood and
traditional Italian fare. “Eat Italy”
was scrawled along the bottom of
the page. Farinetti, who made his
fortune with a chain of Italian big-
box electronics stores, is passion-
ate about food and wine, and as
he surveyed the global offerings
of popular chains such as Star-
bucks and Pizza Hut, he noticed
that something important was
missing.
“In every part of the world,
people want to eat Italian food,”
Farinetti says. “I asked myself,
‘Why doesn’t there exist an Italian
chain of restaurants and markets
that sells real Italian food?’ It was
necessary!” Five years later, in
2007, in a renovated vermouth
factory in Turin, Italy, Eataly was
born.
To consider what Farinetti’s
simple idea has since become,
with locations from Tokyo to
Moscow, Las Vegas to – as of Nov.
13 – Toronto, is to gain an appre-
ciation for the appeal of pasta,
Parmigiano Reggiano and olive
oil. It also reveals the changing
nature of how people in cities
around the world want to shop
and eat.
“The advantage of the Italian
kitchen is that it’s replicable,” says
Farinetti, who is in Toronto a few
weeks before doors open to over-
see the final phase of construction
of Eataly’s 40th location, a spraw-
ling 50,000-square-foot, three-
storey space in Toronto’s Manulife
Centre. Wearing a hard hat and or-ange safety vest, Farinetti strolls
among the construction debris,
cheerfully pointing out empty
shelves that will soon be filled
with all of his favourite ingre-
dients for Italian home cooking:
dried porcini mushrooms from
Umbria, balsamic vinegar from
Modena, organic canned toma-
toes from Campania. “Our cuisine
was invented at home by our
great-great-grandmothers,” he
says. “It’s very simple.”
As with every other location of
Eataly’s growing empire, Toron-
to’s outpost will combine the best
attributes of a high-end Italian
grocery store with a piazza’s
worth of bars, restaurants and ca-
fés. Customers can buy a glass of
prosecco from a walk-up bar, sip it
while they peruse the grocery
shelves and then have a nice piece
of branzino grilled to order from
the seafood counter and served to
them tableside. They can browse
the three stations making three
different regional styles of pizza
or simply order from the menu at
one of Eataly’s four full-service
restaurants. For dessert, gelato is
made in-house daily using sea-
sonal ingredients, hazelnut
creme is made from scratch and
cannoli are filled to order.
Eataly’s grocery offerings,
meanwhile, come largely from
small artisanal suppliers chosen
for their attention to quality and
regional culinary tradition – a dis-
tinction the company takes every
opportunity to promote. Afeltra
pasta, one of Eataly’s most pop-
ular products, is made by a 170-
year-old company in Gragnano
using traditional bronze dies and
spring water from the Lattari
Mountains, and is air dried for up
to two days. Customer education
continues at La Scuola di Eataly,
an in-house cooking schoolwhere customers can learn how
to make fresh pasta and gnocchi,
and learn to appreciate the differ-
ence between a barolo and a bar-
baresco. There are even “Eatalian
Walking Tours,” which educate
customers on the makings of
fresh mozzarella and focaccia
during a guided walk through the
store, samples included. Just as
you might book a foodie walking
tour on your vacation in Rome,
so, too, can you stroll the aisles at
your local Eataly.
All of this seems tailor-made
for a certain kind of over-sched-
uled, culturally savvy urban pro-
fessional, a customer who will
happily spend a little more on
groceries in exchange for being
able to drink wine while they
shop. “One thing they do very
well is make the store experience
fun,” says Claire Tsai, associate
professor of marketing at the Uni-
versity of Toronto’s Rotman
School of Management. Tsai com-
pares shopping for food at Eataly
with shopping for furniture at
IKEA, a tiresome chore trans-
formed into a fun family outing
because of clever merchandising
and, of course, food. “When peo-
ple go to IKEA, they can spend a
day there,” she says. “And Eataly is
similar, with their displays, with
sampling, it’s all very nicely done.
It’s not like going into Loblaws or
other stores where the shopping
experience is more utilitarian.”
The IKEA comparison is one
that Farinetti welcomes; the two
brands actually share adjoining
retail spaces at Eataly Rome.
“Why do so many people all over
the world like to go to IKEA?” he
asks rhetorically. “It’s a big store
where it’s possible to buy good
products with not many high
prices. It’s possible to go with your
family, to eat, to play, to learn andto solve a problem. At IKEA it’s for
the house, at Eataly it’s for the
body.”
While Eataly began as a place to
shop for ingredients and maybe
have a light meal, Farinetti’s origi-
nal concept has evolved in recent
years to cater to the growing num-
ber of customers who’d rather
skip cooking altogether. Accord-
ing to a 2017 study conducted by
Dalhousie University, 42 per cent
of Canadians say they don’t have
time to cook during the week, a
trend that has accompanied the
rise of both takeout apps and up-
scale food halls. “All grocers now
realize that this is not about sell-
ing a product any longer, it’s
about capturing share-of-stom-
ach from Uber Eats and Skip the
Dishes,” says Myles Gooding, na-
tional retail and consumer lead at
PricewaterhouseCoopers Cana-
da. “Eataly speaks to the busy
consumer who wants a high-
quality product and service, but is
time-starved.”
To meet this need, Toronto’s
Eataly will offer the largest selec-
tion of grab-and-go meals of any
location so far and eventually the
option to order via third-party de-
livery app. It’s something of a sore
point to Farinetti, whose vision
remains to spread the gospel of
Italian home-cooking to the four
corners of the earth. “We want to
convince families that it will be
good to spend some time around
the table, to speak about the day,
to have some spaghetti and pros-
ciutto,” he says. “I want to teach
people how, in 10 minutes, it’s
possible to prepare one dish of
spaghetti pomodoro – fantastic –
in 10 minutes!” Someday, per-
haps. In the meantime, it can be
delivered to your door.SpecialtoTheGlobeandMailPomodorotothepeople
EatalyTorontoopensonNov.13.JeremyFreedreportsonhow,intheageoffooddeliveryappsandmeal-prep
subscriptionboxes,Eatalyoffersagrocerystore,restaurantandculturalexperienceinone“Wewantto
convincefamilies
thatitwillbegood
tospendsometime
aroundthetable,to
speakaboutthe
day,tohavesome
spaghettiand
prosciutto.OSCAR FARINETTI
FOUNDEROFEATALYClockwise from top: A rendering of Eataly’s
Toronto location, opening Nov. 13; from left,
Nicola Farinetti, CEO of Eataly North America,
Tony Grossi, president of Wittington
Properties, and Oscar Farinetti, founder of
Eataly; exploring Toronto’s Eataly
mid-construction.
HANDOUT(RENDERING),
PHOTOSBYFREDLUM/THEGLOBEANDMAIL.