EATALY – Dubai Mall – The Food Tour

Yea! I finally managed to get a proper tour of this wide italian restaurant Eataly located at Dubai Mall. I’ve visited Eataly before after seeing several of their adverts but always wished to get someone give me a proper tour of this wide all rounded Italian store which is a restaurant, bakery, retail shop and has other stations. So once you get in this store for the first time you should definitely get lost in here as there is too much to interpret at a first glance. One of the speciality of Eataly is that you get to buy ingredients of what you eat at Eataly so if you would like to make the same at home you can. They say all their ingredients are imported from Italy.

Kevin who is the senior Brand Manager of Eataly gave us a complete tour of this restaurant. Starting with their welcome drinks for us which came from their menu in the section of Italian classics. Most of their classic drinks mainly had a composition of a fruit syrup, fruit juice, ginger ale, mint leaves and soda. It’s mainly a play around with these ingredients and taste differs as the fruit changes.

He then took us to the cheese station which cannot be missed if you visit Eataly. They take pride in hanging those cheese. They are freshly made. They showed us how cheese gets converted at different stages and finally ends up hanging dry. Depending on the dish sometimes they might not leave it to dry or might just use it directly. It’s called the in house scamorza. You can buy them to take home which should cost you around AED 19.80 per 100gm.

This one was my favourite. The cream tonnata pomodorini which is callipo tuna, cherry tomatoes, onions mayonnaise and fresh basil in a thin flat bread was my favourite of all that I tried in the tour. Two things that makes it exciting is the flat bread and the tuna in it.

Then we were taken to their pizza station where we got to see them playing with the flour to make some of their finest Italian pizza for us 🙂 When they served me their hot oven-baked pizza, they were just easily a melt in the mouth specially that mozzarella cheese on it. Since we’ve been just shown from their previous station how they make fresh cheese and use them, it makes their cheese topped pizza even more special in our mind.

You could always buy their pasta and make it from home. Pasta pricing starts from approximately Dhs 8.9 per 100 gm. They hand prepare them and you could find the stuffed pasta at the pasta stall. You could even have the same from their restaurant. There is a picture below where you will find a pasta dish made from home using spaghetti of Eataly.

They also showed us how the breads were freshly made at Eataly. They said they use organic yeast for their breads hence they last longer than normal breads. If I remember right organic yeast was also processed from Eataly. They showed us a machine that was used for it. Any dish with cheese was tasting great at Eataly as they made some great in-house cheese like their pomodoro e mozzrella which came with fresh mozarella. They also serve seafood here and we got to try their mixed fried seafood which has a mixture of their seafood collection. If you love veal bacon then you should definitely try their Rolatina Di pollo.

Here we get a little briefing on their olive oil. That’s an original olive tree that you see in the picture. She tells us there are two types of Olive oil. It’s either light or strong. Some dishes require strong and some light. Olive trees produce strong or light olive oil depending on the area it grows. You can also find different quality honey to buy here. You can get honey as cheap as Dhs 19 and as expensive as Dhs 149 for the same size.

We were also shown how their dark chocolate chunks were made. I did get them for home and they were really good except I am not a big fan of hazelnuts :p Their milk is also imported so they are making you fresh ice creams here. They had many flavours like strawberry, chocolate, vanilla, just milk.. but I am not able to recall which was my favourite here.

This was no doubt my favourite part. The pastry shop in here was fantastic. They gave us two types to try one was a Tiramisu which was like a bomb in the mouth. Once it breaks open there is a sudden burst of taste from the secret liquid inside this tiramisu ball which will make you pick up another tiramisu automatically :p This was the same case with almost everyone who tried the tiramisu.

They did have an illy cafe inside eataly. Making it a complete one. So I winded up my Eataly tour with this amazing coffee from illy. I am sure you guyz would have already been through my earlier post of illy cafe. It is a recognized Italian cafe and I am not surprised it’s in here.

I luckily got a goodie bag from Eataly after the tour. It contained some of the stuff that can help us make a pasta dish at home. So you can see she’s made it well and it tasted fantastic. I was really impressed with that Riolfi – capricci. I just couldn’t stop taking from that jar until I finished it. It was delicious. The olive oil, tuna, bell peppers made a great match in that jar.

There official EATALY website would be: http://www.eataly.com/

Click below to enjoy pictures in full screen view.