An Answer to the Eataly Location Puzzle Coming Soon?

• December 14, 2011

by UrbanTurf Staff

Eataly in New York City. By Jeffrey Tastes.

Back in July, UrbanTurf (with the help of some commercial real estate professionals) speculated as to where the gargantuan Eataly concept would land when it came to DC. The Washington Post’s Jonathan O’Connell is now reporting that the locations have been narrowed down.

From the Capital Business blog:

Michael R. Zacharia, senior vice president of retail services for CBRE, who is leading the search for Eataly in Washington, said he has been looking for 60,000 square feet for Eataly and has narrowed the search to “three or four locations.” All the sites are in the District.

The 60,000 square-foot number is almost twice the size of the space that the folks behind Eataly were originally looking for when news broke that the New York “food temple” was going to come to DC. The New York location takes up the entire ground floor and rooftop of a building in the Flatiron district, one of Manhattan’s busiest and most central neighborhoods.

The minds behind Eataly want the DC site to be in a location with heavy foot traffic and a lot of tourists, something that Tom Papadopoulos of Papadopoulos Properties pointed out to UrbanTurf this past summer.

“So you’re talking Georgetown, 7th Street, maybe Connecticut Avenue and K Street, or downtown, like 14th and F,” Papadopoulos said.

When 35,000 square feet was the approximate square footage that the restaurant was looking for, possible locations included the empty Borders downtown at 18th and L Streets NW (map) and the old ESPN Zone at 555 12th Street NW (map). One ambitious commenter suggested that the labyrinthine Dupont Underground would be a cool venue for Eataly.

Of course, with the larger space requirements, those three are probably all too small, which only heightens speculation about where the much-anticipated food concept will go.

This article originally published at http://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/an_answer_to_the_eataly_location_puzzle/4767