Eataly pinches Little Italy

Mario Batali is eating Little Italy’s lunch.

Since the super chef opened Eataly last August, the Italian supermarket and mangia mecca has been giving Mulberry Street the pointy end of the boot, restaurant owners and shopkeepers in the storied neighborhood told The Post.

“It’s the new thing in town, but we’ve been here [120] years,” complained Adeline Lepore Sessa, owner of Ferrara Bakery & Café.

“Eataly is a beautiful place, and I don’t blame anyone for going there — I even went there for my birthday — but there’s no sense of our history. It’s more of a mall, whereas we will make you feel like you’re actually in Italy.”

The long-established shops and eateries said they have nothing against Batali — who they hope will someday open a restaurant on Mulberry Street — but wish that New Yorkers would show the old neighborhood some love rather than give all their money to the 50,000-square-foot superstore.

“We get visits mostly from millions of tourists, but the real people who live in Manhattan don’t come here anymore,” said Marcello Assante, owner of Mambo Italiano, a relative newcomer.

The prices in Little Italy are much better than at Eataly, Assante added.

“Eataly is for the kind of people who’d rather spend $700 on a pair of shoes than $70,” he said.

The Little Italy Merchants Association is now working to get the word out on everything happening in the neighborhood, said President Ralph Tramontana, owner of Sambuca’s Café. Eataly is like Macy’s, while Little Italy offers the “mom-and-pop shops of the past,” he said.

In Little Italy there’s a tradition of buying different goods in different shops, said Anette Sabatino, owner of Da Nico, Novella and SPQR.

“You’d get your pasta at Piemonte, your cheese at Avella, your salami at Di Palo,” she said. “We try to keep that tradition. Even though it is a few blocks, we want you to feel like you are in a piazza going from place to place — and we want to do it with moderate prices.”

Neither Batali nor the superstore would comment on the businesses’ complaints, but shoppers at Eataly said they felt little need to go back to Mulberry Street.

“I just feel like it’s not Italian anymore,” said Jim Tornetta. “The stuff is definitely presented better here. And it’s a better atmosphere. When I think of Little Italy, I think it’s a little dirty, grimy, it’s hot and smelly.”

Michele Tornetta agreed.

“When I was a kid, we had the big Italian family in North Jersey and we used to go to Little Italy all the time. It’s very diluted now,” she said. “My mother is very Sicilian, and now she can’t stop talking about Eataly.”

Additional reporting by Danny Gold