Just because Eataly’s New York City flagship closes to customers at 11 p.m. doesn’t mean the store shuts down: Its massive bakery oven burns bright 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The wood-burning oven—imported in pieces from Spain and painstakingly reassembled brick-by-brick by Spanish technicians—produces thousands of loaves of fresh bread each day, handcrafted according to Italian tradition with key ingredients like natural yeast and organic stone-ground flour.
The flour doesn’t come from Italy, however. It originates two hours north of Manhattan in the hamlet of Clinton Corners, N.Y., the site of Wild Hive Farm. The Wild Hive Community Grain Project, founded by Don Lewis to promote sustainable agriculture across the Hudson Valley region, is home to stone milling with granite grinding stones capable of producing flour that perfectly replicates the nutrient-dense, high-quality product indigenous to Eataly’s native Turin. This enables Eataly NYC to offer breads and baked goods that are virtually identical to those sold in the company’s 10 Italian locations.
“When Eataly came to New York City, they looked all over the Northeast trying to find the right flour,” Lewis says. “Our flour is much different from commercial flours. Eataly’s focaccia has to have a certain crunch, then melt away in your mouth. Just any old flour doesn’t do that.”
Wild Hive Farm is one of hundreds of small, independent New York-area vendors and artisans essential to Eataly NYC’s growth. While each Eataly location worldwide offers Italian products like dry pastas, canned goods and olive oils imported directly from the motherland, all stores additionally source a variety of perishable goods and restaurant ingredients directly from local partners. “Something like 70 percent of our revenue in the New York store comes from U.S.-based products,” says Adam Saper, Eataly USA’s CFO and managing partner.
Eataly USA is amenable to virtually any product that adheres to its core philosophy of buono, pulito e giusto (good, clean and fair). “You send to us a sample, and we do a blind taste test,” says Dino Borri, Eataly’s international brand ambassador. “We want to meet you first, and you have to tell us the story of where the food is coming from, and all the stuff about you and your company. It has to be related a little bit to Italian—not ‘Italian-sounding.’ We don’t want to sell ‘Italian-sounding.’”
Eataly NYC’s explosive growth has carried over to its producer partners. Cascun Farm in Greene, N.Y., has tripled its annual volume in the year since it began selling packaged chicken and whole birds to the store.