Epic Italian food hall Eataly is finally opening its Bay Area location soon
Troy L. Milliron
2 min read
After years of anticipation, Eataly is finally bringing a 45,000-square-foot, three-story Italian dining haven to the Bay Area.
The massive Italian food hall is gearing up to open its first Northern California location at Westfield Valley Fair in San Jose in the coming months, Eataly has confirmed. This is the first concrete news about the project since it was first announced in 2019.
Construction is nearing completion on the ambitious space, which will feature two restaurants, a wine bar, a coffee bar and stalls selling thousands of imported products. One of the restaurants will be an outpost of Pizza & La Pasta, which serves fresh pasta and Neapolitan pizzas at most Eataly locations. Eataly declined to share further details on other dining options.
The company is recruiting 300 jobs in the new Eataly, including a fishmonger, butchers, chefs and a mozzarella maker. Other locations offer meat, fish, and cheese counters; bakeries; ice cream stalls; and retail shelves stocked with everything from Italian truffles to potted stew sauce from Bologna, Italy. Eataly also plans to sell local products in the Bay Area store, said Raffaele Piarulli, head of Eataly North America.
Eataly spent years searching for the right home for the company’s first Bay Area location, Piarulli said, but once Westfield became “a possibility, there were no other suitors. “.
He hailed the recent $1.1 billion redevelopment of the South Bay mall, which has helped attract top restaurants, from cult burger favorite Shake Shack to Korean barbecue chain Baekjong. In 2020 alone, Westfield opened 42 restaurants and stores.
Eataly will be located in a main dining hall along Stevens Creek Boulevard, close to many of these newcomers, across from Shake Shack and the opulent iChina. Westfield is one of many Bay Area malls that have invested in restaurants as a strategy to attract more traffic.
Eataly, which was born in Turin, Italy, in 2010, today manages 40 points of sale around the world. The first West Coast location opened in Los Angeles in 2017, also in a Westfield mall.
Elena Kadvany is a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected]: @ekadvany
