Check Out the Menu for the New “Fishmonger’s Kitchen” at Eataly Boston
La Pescheria opens this week, with local seafood tasting menus and the marketplace's first seated bar.
La Pescheria – Fishmonger’s Kitchen serves up multi-course menus of locally sourced, simply prepared seafood. / Photos courtesy of Eataly Boston
Thanks to Boston’s place-making fishing pier and culinary heritage, our location of Eataly has strongly emphasized seafood since it opened in the Back Bay in 2016—and now, the newest full-service restaurant located inside the Italian food hall is diving even deeper into our waters. La Pescheria-Fishmonger’s Kitchen is opening inside Eataly Boston on Friday, April 26, with a tasting menu and other daily-changing dishes meant to highlight local seafood purveyors, in a lively, contemporary bar-like atmosphere.
“We’ve definitely followed that formula this whole time, but with this menu, we are keeping things extremely local and very seasonal, obviously,” says executive chef Sam de los Santos, who is spearheading the new menu. “If it’s not coming off the boats [at the Fish Pier], we’re not buying it.”
De los Santos is working directly with Boston-based fishmongers like John Nagle Co., Red’s Best, and Wulf’s Fish, as well as Duxbury’s Island Creek Oysters, to create two- and three-course tasting menus with daily raw bar selections. La Pescheria partners will also be in the house for events like educational demos and bar takeovers this spring, starting this week.
These purveyors are favored because of their business practices—they are all committed to fishing in-season, not overfishing, and monitoring fish populations, de los Santos says. They are also the vendors Eataly uses to stock its retail fish market. A roving seafood cart will make frequent trips from the marketplace into the restaurant, so guests can see the fresh catch up close—and if they love a dish they ordered at La Pescheria, they know they can buy the exact same seafood to bring home, he adds.
“These awesome products, from awesome purveyors, have been a crucial part of this store and we are building on those relationships,” de los Santos says.
Besides sustainable sourcing, La Pescheria is environmentally-minded in the way the menu is structured. “Everybody wants the center cut of everything; a lot of tail pieces don’t sell,” de los Santos explains. To start this spring, the chef is highlighting the best pieces of fresh black bass crudo-style, for example, then he’s using the rest of the fish to flavor some of the second- and main courses. Spaghetto alla pescatora and a Sunday fish stew are traditional Italian-style dishes that use up less desirable cuts. There are also more contemporary creations on the menu, like whole-grilled bluefish. “We’re looking for new ways to use local products,” de los Santos says. Check out the opening menus below.
Eataly Boston’s beverage director Jessica Brennan is curating a seafood-friendly wine list, and she is also developing a seasonal cocktail program with rotating list of drinks to choose from. While glasses of wine, beer, and spritzes can be ordered at some of Eataly’s other in-house restaurants, La Pescheria is the first retail-floor restaurant with a sit-down bar at the Boston food hall. (Terra, of course, has a bar area with a very cool beer program upstairs.)
La Pescheria is taking over for the seasonal Il Tartufo restaurant, which focused on Italian truffles this past winter. The “fishmonger’s kitchen” is a permanent, new concept for the food hall. The location was formerly Barbara Lynch’s Il Pesce, the seafood restaurant that Eataly Boston first opened with, featuring a menu by the James Beard Award-winning Bostonian chef.
Quick renovations are happening this week to build a 23-seat bar for La Pescheria, which will surround an open kitchen and drink-making stations. Beginning Friday, April 26, the lively seafood bar opens daily for lunch and dinner, from 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. and again from 5-10 p.m.
Eataly Boston, Prudential Center, 800 Boylston St., Back Bay, Boston, 617-236-3100, eataly.com.
The La Pescheria team is sourcing seafood directly from vendors on the Boston Fish Pier. / Photos courtesy of Eataly Boston
Eataly Boston executive chef Sam de los Santos. / Photos courtesy of Eataly Boston
