The other space looks even more out of use, with generic Eataly promotional posters covering its signage and a wall of pallets blocking off part of the counter. Then again, there are still stacks of plates of plates in the corner of the kitchen, so who knows! I'm guessing that this was some sort of fast food/counter-service type of place to go along with the fancier sit-down restaurants, but there isn't much to go off to tell what type of food they served. I'm not sure why I didn't take a picture of the giant circular window, which is completely open to the salesfloor area as you can see on the left side of this picture!
This kind of reminds me of the cafes at Fry's Electronics down towards the end. They were never open when I visited and nobody I knew who also visited Fry's could tell if those cafes were still open at times. Everything was set up such that they could have still been operating at times, but I'm guessing they weren't operational or else someone would have seen them open.
ReplyDeleteThis also reminds me of one of the closed eateries at Mall of the Mainland. There was a smoothies type place that had closed, but for a couple of years, all the signage was left up and they even continued to run a ceiling fan they had above the food preparation area. It really could have fooled someone into thinking the place was still open, but just closed at the time. I wonder if the mall left things like that intentionally, but if not, I wonder why didn't turn the ceiling fan off if nothing else! Granted, the mall was only lightly air conditioned in the last days before the whole mall closed, but it is not like one ceiling fan was going to make any portion of a large mall feel any noticeably cooler.
Yeah, those zombie cafes at Fry's were certainly odd. Of course, the whole store was a bit of a zombie that barely looked operational towards the end!
DeleteI'm really not sure what the deal is here. Maybe (like a lot of stuff in Italy) these are only open during peak tourist season, but Eataly doesn't seem like a place that would rely that heavily on tourists. Or maybe they never came back after COVID, which created a lot of zombie places. There's a food court sort of space that I often cut through on the way to my office, and there was a place in there that I hadn't been able to tell if it was vacant post-COVID or just open limited hours (since I hardly ever walk by during lunch time); something new opened there a few weeks ago, so I guess the former place probably had been closed this whole time without being blocked off or having any of its equipment removed!