Italy has been exporting two things to the rest of the world with particular success for the last several centuries: its cuisine and the conviction that the way Italians eat is worth understanding. Oscar Farinetti built an entire retail concept around that second point when he opened the first Eataly in Turin in 2007 — a marketplace where the food and the knowledge of the food exist in the same room, where the person buying the flour can watch someone make the pasta and sit down to eat it within thirty feet. The idea spread. There are now more than fifty locations worldwide.
Dallas got one on December 9, 2020, and it occupies 48,000 square feet inside NorthPark Center between Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom, which is either a deeply ironic location or a perfectly appropriate one, depending on how you feel about Italy’s relationship with luxury.
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