Philip Berroll

By P.H.I.Berroll

Say you’re a New Yorker whose friends or relatives from outside the U.S. are planning to visit. You’d love to put them up in your Manhattan apartment, but unfortunately, like many Manhattanites you barely have enough space for your own family.

So you try to think of other options for your guests. A hotel?  Manhattan has some of the most expensive hotels in Western civilization, with nightly rates of four figures not uncommon.  Even cheaper hotel rooms (and “hotel” in this case could mean a converted town house or apartment building) can go for as much as $300/night. A motel? Those are often located near the city’s three airports – where the sounds of airline takeoffs and landings have disrupted many a traveler’s sleep – and in other less-than-desirable locations where getting to Manhattan involves  a lengthy and often crowded commute.

In the past few years, however, some innovative entrepreneurs – combining the DIY esthetic with the growing “frugal traveler” movement – have introduced new lodging options to put the traveler near the heart of the city without busting his budget.

The most well-established of these is San Francisco-based Airbnb, which enables “hosts” – apartment owners or renters – to offer their homes as low-cost tourist accommodations. Travelers can browse listings (which include photos as well as “reviews” from previous guests) in over 19,000 cities in 190 countries, and contact hosts with any questions before booking a space…   for as little as a day, or as much as a month. It’s a new twist on the bed-and-breakfast concept, though unlike traditional b&bs, the host may not be on the premises and guests often have to provide their own food. But on the upside, the traveler gets a clean, safe, conveniently located place to stay, at nightly rates ranging from the low $80’s to less than $150.

Airbnb is the brainchild of three young entrepreneurs, Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk and Joe Gebbia. Chesky and Gebbia, who met as students at the Rhode Island School of Design, were sharing an apartment in San Francisco in 2007 when they had their “aha” moment: Hearing that many attendees at an upcoming design conference had no place to stay – all the local hotels were completely booked – they offered their apartment as an informal bed-and-breakfast.

The experience worked out so well that after taking on Blecharczyk as a partner, they decided to expand their one-time act of kindness into an ongoing business operation – both to make money and in Chesky’s words, “to disrupt the [hospitality] industry” with their new approach. (Chesky, the CEO, is so dedicated to the concept that he gave up his apartment last year and has since been staying in renters’ homes “to grasp the full impact and experience of Airbnb.”)

Not surprisingly, the success of Airbnb has inspired several imitators, including iStopOver, which is based in Canada, and Italy-based Wimdu. There are also other sites offering different alternatives to traditional hotel booking: HostelWorld enables users to book stays at hostels in New York and 112 other U.S. cities as well as in 180 different countries, while CouchSurfing is a kind of exchange program where members can stay in the homes of locals in other countries and open their own homes to visitors from abroad.

But Airbnb has the greatest number of listings for New York City – more than 6,000 as of this writing – and Chesky professes to be unfazed by the competition: “They may borrow our concept or copy our designs, but the keystone of Airbnb is the community behind it – and the relationships our community fosters can’t be replicated.”

There is one drawback to the Airbnb system for New York City hosts:  officially, the business is operating in a legal limbo.

In 2010, the New York State Legislature passed a law (which went into effect in May of this year) entitled “Clarifies Provisions Relating to Occupancy of Class A Multiple Dwellings.” In plain English, the law makes it illegal for a paying guest to stay in another person’s apartment for less than 30 consecutive days if their host is not also living in the apartment. The law was passed in response to complaints from apartment dwellers and coop and condo boards about “absentee owners” who bought or rented multiple apartments not for their own use, but as tourist lodging – a violation of the rules in many NYC apartment buildings.

The problem is that there is no way for law enforcement to distinguish between those multiple-unit owners and the single-apartment hosts of Airbnb. Hosts who stay in an apartment at the same time as their guests are not affected, but those who take in guests while living elsewhere are at least technically breaking the law.

To date, however, there have been no arrests or prosecutions under the law, and local Airbnb hosts aren’t worried. As Rachel, a renter in Chelsea – for personal reasons she prefers not to use her last name – observes, “It’s not like the city or the state has the money to hire ‘real estate cops.’”

Airbnb has also had to deal with the fallout from an incident in June, in which a San Francisco host returned from an out-of-town trip to find that her guests had ransacked and looted her apartment. It was the first such occurrence in the company’s history, and while Airbnb worked with the police to catch the offenders, it was a wake-up call to Chesky and his partners. “For two million nights, we’d seen this as a case study demonstrating that people are fundamentally good,” says Chesky. “We were devastated.”

But the company took steps to tighten security, including designing enhanced tools to verify user profiles and creating an “education center” to provide hosts with safety tips. They also began offering a guarantee of $50,000 to reimburse hosts in cases of theft or vandalism.

According to Chesky, their business has not suffered – “In fact,” he says, “we have received thousands of e-mails from users who told me that they still believed in our service” – and he anticipates continued growth for Airbnb in the foreseeable future.

Indeed, Airbnb consistently gets high marks from users, not only for the low prices but also for something more intangible: the chance for visitors to immerse themselves in the life of the city. Airbnb guests often speak of how staying in an apartment enabled them to experience the “real” New York, as opposed to the isolation of a typical hotel. “I love being able to feel like I’m living in a neighborhood,” says Sara, a traveler from Vancouver, “rather than dropping into a tourist zone.”

It’s an experience that Airbnb hosts are happy to provide. “I don’t think we’re cutting into the large mass of people who want maid service every day and don’t care if they have a kitchen,” says Rachel. “But if you want a kitchen and don’t need a maid, then why would you reserve for $375 per night at the Times Square Residence Inn instead of $125 at my apartment?”

Here are the websites for the lodging services mentioned in this article:

Airbnb                                      www.airbnb.com

iStopOver                                 www.istopover.com

Wimdu                                      www.wimdu.com

HostelWorld                             www.hostelworld.com

CouchSurfing                           www.couchsurfing.org

Originally published in New York International magazine, 2011.

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By P.H.I.Berroll

It’s easy to feel a bit disoriented when entering Eataly for the first time. Not just because of the crowds, which are plentiful at most hours of the day, or the noise, which is on the level of a Times Square subway station at rush hour. It’s the fact that Eataly is not a place that can be easily categorized. Part market, part tourist attraction, part festival – it really doesn’t resemble any venue typically found in New York, or for that matter in the U.S.

And that, as it turns out, is part of the plan. Eataly’s creators are attempting nothing less than the establishment of a high-class Italian culinary emporium in the heart of New York City. Located in Manhattan’s Flatiron District at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 23^rd Street, Eataly is based on another marketplace of the same name which entrepreneur Oscar Farinetti opened in the Italian city of Turin in 2007. For his New York venture, Farinetti took on a trio of culinary heavy hitters as partners: celebrated chefs and food-TV personalities Mario Batali and Lidia and Joe Bastianich. The group opened Eataly in August 2010, with the stated goal of making it “the ultimate culinary mecca for New Yorkers, visitors, gourmands and Italophiles alike.”

This explains why every aspect of Eataly is designed to appeal to three primary audiences: sophisticated Americans, Italians and people who wish they were Italian. Starting with the “Welcome/Benvenuto” banner that greets visitors at the entrance, all of Eataly’s signs are in both Italian and English – “We consider this to be a quintessential element of Eataly,” says managing partner Alex Saper. Helpful hints are posted for non-American customers (“In the U.S., leaving a tip is customary. Typically, 15 to 20 percent is sufficient”). Ask for “salami” and you’ll get a blank stare – what’s offered here is salumi. Walls are decorated with maps and other displays about the history and culture of Italy’s numerous regions.

But above all, there’s the food, a cornucopia of Italian national and regional specialties with an emphasis on artisanal (i.e. hand-made rather than mass-produced) products. Eataly includes seven full-service eateries, each specializing in a different food group: Le Verdure (vegetables), Il Manzo (meat), Il Pesce (fish), I Salumi e I Formaggi (salumi and cheese), Il Crudo (a raw bar), and of course, La Pizza and La Pasta.

Since no Italian meal would be complete without wine and dessert, there’s also Lavazza Café (named for Italy’s premier coffee company) and Eataly Wine. Lavazza offers gelato, pastries, chocolates and bite-sized dolci al cucchiaio (“spoon desserts”), along with espresso and cappuccino. At the wine shop, customers can choose from among nearly 1,000 bottles of vino from the major winemaking regions of Italy.

And for people who think “Italian beer” is an oxymoron, Eataly recently opened La Birreria, a 4,500 square-foot open-air rooftop beer garden, which offers a wide variety of both Italian and American craft beers.

Each section of Eataly has been staffed and stocked to appeal to consumers looking for something more than “typical” Italian fare. Le Verdure, for example, features a resident “vegetable butcher” who cleans, peels, chops and cuts the customer’s order – saving discarded peels and trimmings to be used as compost. Much of the pasta on sale is made fresh, by hand, every day. So is the mozzarella at the cheese department, charmingly named Il Laboratorio della Mozzarella.

Having a “laboratory” on the premises is in line with the overall mission of Eataly. Much of its agenda focuses on discovery, on education, on expanding the knowledge of the visitor. This is the idea behind Eataly’s on-premises scuola in which instructors – including Batali and the Bastianiches – offer regular classes in cooking and food and wine appreciation as well as nutritional, sociological and scientific topics relating to food.

Finally, there are the retail items – rows upon rows of shelves stocked with cured and fresh meats, cheeses, fruits and vegetables, fish, handmade pastas, desserts, baked and canned goods, sauces, olive oils, and coffees and teas, not to mention cooking utensils and cookbooks.  Customers can haul their bounty to the checkout line using lightweight shopping carts made from recycled plastic water bottles.

There’s no denying that the unique qualities of Eataly can be jarring to the uninitiated. It’s not the aforementioned crowds, which won’t shock anyone who has experienced lunch hour at Zabar’s or Whole Foods, or the prices (described as “fair” and “reasonable” by Eataly’s founders – which is another way of saying not cheap, but not excessively pricey by New York standards). It has more to do with the very nature of the Eataly experience.

Like most Americans, New Yorkers are used to buying pre-prepared food at salad or hot food bars and eating their meals at readily available restaurant tables. At Eataly, the first option doesn’t exist and the second only in truncated form. At each restaurant, it’s not uncommon for the customer to wait on line to order, wait again while the food is made, then wait again for one of the sparse number of tables to become available.  (There is the option of ordering to go, then finding a seat on a bench at nearby Madison Square Park.)  Nor is it easy to combine food categories; if you want a meat dish with your rigatoni, it will mean separate trips to Il Manzo and La Pasta. It’s appropriate that Eataly employs an international environmental organization called Slow Food as a consultant.

But customers who are willing to take a bit more time than usual will find the experience well worth the wait. (First-timers are advised to use Eataly’s main entrance on 23^rd Street, where an information booth is staffed by helpful employees who answer questions and hand out detailed floor plans.)

If Eataly proves to be a success, the partners are poised to expand into other major U.S. cities. “They have been scouting locations,” says Alex Saper. “Right now they’re considering L.A., San Francisco, D.C. or Boston.”

Though it’s too early to gauge how well Eataly has been received by the general public, it has made a positive impression on one particularly tough group of critics: the online “foodie” community. While describing Eataly’s layout as “daunting,” “a madhouse” and “a trip,” food bloggers have been nearly unanimous in praising the quality and variety of its offerings.

“I can’t say that it’s built for browsing, unless you come in right after it opens,” says Ann Newman, a New York food writer. “But the food is really high class, and a lot of it is different from the usual gourmet choices. That makes it a special place.”

Eataly is located at 200 Fifth Avenue, with entrances on both Fifth Avenue and 23 Street. It is open seven days a week from 9:00am to 11:00pm, though the hours of individual departments may vary.  For more information visit www.eataly.com or call 646-398-5100.

Originally published in NewYorkInternational magazine, 2011.

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