Eataly Downtown: Touring the second NYC location of the Italian food hall

• The theme of Eataly Downtown is bread. Adam Saper and Joe Bastianich explained why.

  “Bread is the center of the table,” said Saper. “The diversity — every country has their bread.”

  Bastianich agreed bread brings people together. When brainstorming Eataly Downtown, he said, they asked themselves what they wanted to “communicate about [their location] at Ground Zero.”

  “You get into some pretty heavy things. Peace, cultural differences, ethnicity … Then we thought, well, what is the one — without having to be so didactic and talk about things like world peace — the concept of bread and the commonality of bread as a global food item was like the most natural thing,” he said. “Every culture in the world shares bread, or some form of bread. Symbolically it says so much about what this place is really about.”

  All breads are hand-rolled in house and the baking program is led by Fulvio Marino, who leads bakery operations at Eataly locations across the globe. The house bread is the pane Mediterraneo, made with a 35-year-old mother yeast brought to NYC from Italy in 2010 for the opening of Eataly Flatiron. It is made with two types of whole grain flour and seven different seeds. They are: sunflower, flax, millet, sesame, poppy, pumpkin and spelt.

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• Eataly is devoted to Italian food, but at Eataly Downtown, the partners are embracing the breads of the world.

  “We want to use bread as an excuse to talk about other people’s cultures,” said Nicola Farinetti, CEO of Eataly USA in a statement.

  To that end, Eataly will partner with a special New York City bakery each month to showcase some of its authentic breads. Eataly will first partner with Kossar’s; in September, the iconic New York company will bring its bagels to the World Trade Center.

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The Italian food marketplace and eatery Eataly opened its second New York City location. Located in World Trade Center 4, Eataly Downtown is a 40,000-square-foot place to shop, eat, drink and learn about Italian food and culture.

Eataly Flatiron was one of the first food halls to open in New York City. While the term food hall may not fully encompass what makes Eataly Eataly, it is flattering when other food halls refer to Eataly as an inspiration, partner Adam Saper said.

“Eataly Flatiron was groundbreaking because it was one of those things that changed how New Yorkers behaved. Eataly New York became a piazza in New York in the true Italian sense of the word because it’s all walks of life coming together,” said partner Joe Bastianich. “I think that that kind of egalitarianism that Eataly has, that’s the essence of what everyone is trying to recreate … Different walks of people, different cultures, different socio-economic backgrounds, come together and share an experience.”

Eataly Downtown opened on Aug. 11. Let’s take a look around.