Eataly has been open 15 months now, and the monstrous Italian food mall is no longer completely packed from open till close. You can pretty much walk in at any point and get a seat at the restaurant of your choice, so it's not surprising that Eataly has made some recent changes that make it a little friendlier to customers. When we reviewed each of the 22 places to eat and drink in Eataly shortly after its opening, we liked many of the options, but our biggest criticism was that with so many single-themed places (meat, vegetable, pasta and pizza, seafood, etc.), it wasn't possible to please a group of people who wanted to eat different things.
Eataly partly changed that recently, when it combined the vegetable restaurant and the seafood restaurant into one space, so you can choose from both vegetarian and seafood appetizers and main courses. It also opened Osteria di Eataly, which is a generalist Italian restaurant, with appetizers, pastas, main courses and desserts, which you could previously only get downstairs at the gelato, Nutella or sweet counters. When I visited Osteria the other night, I started with a grapefruit-pomegranate-kale salad (weirdly tossed with a gloppy creme fraiche dressing), then moved on to a springy pasta special, perfectly made three-cheese quadretti in a lemon butter sauce topped with fennel.
Other changes include:
• Rearranging the space—fruits and veggies are now for sale upstairs and there's a more prominently featured selection of amari in the wine shop.
• Closing Carne, the meat-centric restaurant, which fared well in our initial review of the space, but we did note how it wasn't as busy as the other restaurants. The carne cruda, beef with olive oil and sea salt, was a highlight of our visit, and it's available on the Osteria menu.
• Adding a pizza takeout stand, which makes sense, since the pizza and pasta restaurant is usually the most crowded option at Eataly. The stand is located next to the pizza restaurant.
• Doing more events, like a truffle bar, which serves truffle-laden dishes now through April 5; Easter brunch on April 5; and other tastings and events.