This month, Eataly, the titan of Italian cuisine, is putting a Tuscan bent on the menu at its in-house restaurants. The famed region will be the focus of the entire enterprise for the month of March, including a special Tuscan-inspired restaurant debut called Ristorante Toscano.
Each of the restaurants will be featuring Tuscan-inspired dishes that coincide with the theme of each unique eatery. At the carb-embracing La Pizza & La Pasta, they’re offering a Pizza Cariofina with buffalo mozzarella, artichoke, cherry tomatoes, zucchini, onion, basil and olive oil from Tuscany; at the convivial standing restaurant La Piazza, they’re offering a Crostini de Fegatini, topped with sauteed chicken liver, red onion, anchovy and capers with a finish of olive oil and sea salt; and so on.
To understand a bit more about what makes Tuscan cuisine special, we chatted with Eataly New York’s Executive Chef Fitz Tallon, who championed Tuscany’s straightforward celebration of ingredients, identified hallmarks of Tuscan dishes and discussed Eataly’s place in New York City’s saturated Italian dining scene.
Tallon (courtesy Eataly)
How would you characterize Tuscan cuisine in comparison to other regions in Italy? It is a cuisine that is robust in tradition and stubborn in its devotion to ingredients. It is known for dishes such as bistecca alla fiorentina, chicken liver crostini and ribollita. All wonderfully rich dishes that are also associated with eating well. For this reason and others, it is probably Italy’s most well-known cuisine.
Tuscan food seems like a celebration of ingredients rather than an opportunity for culinary wizardry. Is that a sentiment you agree with? And do you find it easier or more challenging to cook food in that way? I do agree with that. However I find it interesting to work in the confines of regional Italian food. There is so much to offer and it is exciting to learn about new dishes. In another restaurant, il pesce, we are featuring a Tuscan Inspired dish that is based on mussels stuffed with sweet sausage. It is a great dish that is not something that one generally thinks of when thinking of classic Tuscan cuisine.
I like to keep an open mind and always learn as much as possible both from the people I work with and by researching regional Italian food. It is somewhat challenging to cook in this way because ingredient driven cuisine tends to be “simpler” and not as busy. By that I mean a simple dish of grilled bread with butter and anchovies is simple, but difficult to make well because there are only three pieces. All need to be excellent and perfectly executed.
What flavors and ingredients did you want to explore with the Tuscan takeover at Eataly? We love Tuscan olive oils, wines, chicken liver, great beef, cannellini beans, wild boar, and so on.
Tuscan-inspired Bistecca alla Fiorentina at Manzo (Nell Casey/Gothamist)
Do you try to use ingredients specific to the area when making regionally-minded dishes? We do. This is doable with pantry items such as olive oils and olive oil poached tuna, but not realistic with fresh ingredients like wild boar and chicken liver. In general that is how we build our menus—we support our neighbors as much as possible because we want and need to source locally to produce good food but we also have a serious love affair with Italian ingredients. Cheeses and cured meats that are sourced from small towns in Tuscany, Abruzzo and Piemonte (to name a few) are outrageously delicious and we do our best to bring as many of them to our store and restaurants.
Italy’s culinary traditions are so strong and yet they can sometimes seem distilled when lots of restaurants serve the same “Italian” dishes without acknowledging the wide-ranging styles and flavors of each region. How do you think Eataly helps to cut through that white noise? It is something that drives us, it is something that we strive to do more every day. It is our goal to tell a story with our food. The goal is to create an environment, in a market, that brings back memories of the first time that you traveled to Firenze or Siena, or when you went on your honeymoon to Sicily, etc.
Conversely, we are a home base for Italians traveling to NY and other Eataly’s around the world where they are happily surprised to find something they love and miss. By constantly promoting regional Italian cuisine we feel that we are bringing the wide-ranging styles and flavors of each region to the table. An example of this if our hugely popular rooftop pop-up restaurant Baita. A restaurant conceptualized on the idea of skiing in the Italian Alps. It was, and is, a fun project that definitely transports you to Trentino. Overall we do our best to give the customer simple, great Italian food.
Dining and Cooking