Wood-burning pizzas! Freshly made pastas! Steaks and seafood and gelato and Nutella! Eataly has so many things to tempt you with, you start to suspect that once it lures in enough humans stuffing their faces, it’ll seal all its doors and blast back to its home planet with a full shipment of livestock.
Given all its publicity, it seems hard to imagine Eataly has many secrets, but La Verdure, the vegetable counter, comes closest to being overlooked. Specifically, it has a dish that sums up all of Italy’s promise to serve you simple things, fiddled with just enough to blow you away. La Verdure takes French breakfast radishes, those mild little tubular pink-and-white radishes topped with frizzy greens, deep-fries them in olive oil, and drizzles a little sea salt and Miele honey on them. You fork over $12, which makes you feel like a sucker—until you bite into them, crispy and tender, and taste the earth of the midwest and the brine of the sea and all the sweetness of spring.