Eataly, West Palm Beach
A gorgeous, high-energy Italian marketplace set in the heart of West Palm Beach, Florida.
“Eataly, West Palm Beach: Big Hype, Bigger Appetite”
West Palm Beach has a new obsession, and it’s sitting right in the middle of CityPlace. Eataly opened its doors and instantly turned a normal downtown stroll into a full sensory situation: espresso, cured meats, clinking glasses, people shopping like they’re on a mission. And eating like they’re on vacation.
This isn’t just a restaurant. It’s a marketplace with a pulse. A place built for grazing, lingering, and spending a little more than you planned… because everything looks like it belongs in your kitchen.
Harriet Himmel Hall: Old Bones, New Appetite
Eataly has landed in the historic Harriet Himmel Hall, and suddenly your casual stroll past Rosemary Avenue turns into a full-contact sport involving strollers, shopping bags, and someone filming a burrata pull for the internet. It didn’t just open a store. It moved into a landmark, an old building with the bones of a church, the ego of a performance venue, and now the appetite of an Italian marketplace the size of a small airport terminal.
From Holy Ground to Italian Wonderland
Before it was an Italian food hall, the building was the First United Methodist Church, built in 1926 at Hibiscus and Rosemary. It was one of those ambitious land-boom-era structures that went up right as Florida’s optimism started to wobble.
By the time CityPlace was being developed around it, the building was treated like the last remaining piece of old West Palm that had to stay, a preserved anchor in the middle of a glossy, Mediterranean-revival retail universe.
The Eataly conversion wasn’t a quick coat of paint and a few imported olive oils on shelves. This was a real redevelopment, roughly spring 2024 to December 2025, or about 20-ish months of turning an aging cultural landmark into a 23,000-square-foot food-and-retail experience.
The reported investment was $20 million, with work that included a new roof, windows, exterior lighting, and interior upgrades to meet modern codes, while (at least officially) keeping the historic façade intact.
And yes, there was drama. If you followed the local chatter, you heard about the staircase: historic purists mourning its demolition, developers insisting it was necessary, and a whole civic argument about what “preservation” really means when rent is due. Plans connected to the stair rework involved architectural filings and heated public attention, the kind of thing that turns a set of steps into a philosophical crisis.
who built it
Related Ross / Related Companies are the developers behind the building’s rework and the broader CityPlace evolution.
Who Designed It
Renovation plans submitted to the city included Leo A Daly as the design team shown on documents reported in local coverage.
Who Preserved it
Reporting points to Eataly working with preservation teams and the City of West Palm Beach to keep the historic shell intact.
The Restaurants: Two Main Anchors, Two Very Different Vibes
Eataly West Palm Beach runs on two main dining engines: La Pizza & La Pasta, the big, bustling anchor serving Neapolitan pizza, regional pastas, and a full bar in a room built to handle a post–happy hour rush, and Il Pastaio, the smaller, pasta-first spot where the craft is part of the show and the patio plays a major role. Naturally, we booked Il Pastaio the Sunday after opening. We were ready to see if the most intimate corner of this brand-new Italian playground could deliver.
Our Opening-Week Reality Check
We made reservations for the Sunday after opening day, the kind of move that feels responsible right up until you realize you’ve booked a table inside a brand-new hype factory still learning how to breathe.
We arrived on time for our inside table for two, and the hostess looked like someone trying to land a plane in a thunderstorm with a flashlight. Our table “wasn’t ready.” Fine. It’s opening week. Nobody expects perfection, just competence and maybe a little dignity.
After a few minutes, we were escorted outside and right into the chaos of the patio where the CityPlace kids were doing what CityPlace kids do: running circles in soap bubbles like they’d been paid in sugar and freedom. It was loud. It was frantic.
Then we were told we could be seated inside after all. Which meant: more waiting.
When we finally got an inside table, we watched a parade of people in workout clothes drifting in from outside and cutting through the dining area like the restaurant was just a hallway to the store. The crowd was a perfect West Palm blend: dressed-up parties celebrating something, quick-biters in tracksuits treating it like a pit stop, tourists, locals, and people who looked like they came for “just one thing” and ended up in a full sensory ambush.
That’s when it hit me: this is not fine dining. It’s a marketplace with a restaurant inside it: alive, porous, and constantly in motion. Next time? We’ll sit at the bar, the circular counter planted right in the center of the dining room, looking like the command deck of an Italian spaceship. That bar understood the assignment.
Service was… okay. Our waiter got confused a couple of times, but he was genuinely helpful, specially guiding us through gluten-free options, which mattered.
We shared a salad and ordered a truffle pizza, which was gluten-free and delicious, but with the debatable price-to-wow ratio. Maybe it’s not “overpriced.” Maybe we’re just spoiled living in a town with a deep bench of Italian restaurants that can deliver excellence without the pageantry.
Eataly is an experience. Il Pastaio is a piece of that experience. But don’t come here looking for quiet romance and precision choreography. Come for the spectacle. Come for the ingredients. Come for the hit of Italy in the middle of downtown West Palm, and accept that you’re dining inside the machine.
Bottom Line
Eataly West Palm Beach is a bold move: a historic building reborn into a food cathedral with a stage, a market, a cooking school, and enough pasta to make you question your life choices. It’s the newest downtown obsession, and it’s going to stay busy, because it’s not just dinner. It’s dinner + shopping + entertainment + the feeling that you’ve stepped into something bigger than a reservation.
If you go, go with the right expectations: eat the pasta, browse the market, linger at the bar, and don’t confuse “hyped” with “fine dining.”
That’s not a knock. That’s just the truth.
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