Word: batali
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Buford portrays Batali in other earthy moments--spitting on a cooktop at a Nashville, Tenn., benefit dinner (apparently to prove the cooktop was hot); asking Babbo's wine director for "two more bottles, along with your two best Mexican prostitutes"; snoring his way through a 5 a.m. taxi ride after a night out. But Heat is also a portrait of a talent who worked his way from a dishwasher in college to a small-time Greenwich Village cook to America's impresario of all foods Italian. On that Nashville trip, 32 local chefs showed up to volunteer to cook with...
Mario Francesco Batali was born Mario Francis Batali in 1960. He Italianized the middle name in college--"I hated Francis," he says--but he's only half Italian. Batali's mother Marilyn is of Canadian and English heritage. His father Armandino, a former Boeing executive who has his own bustling restaurant in Seattle, is the Italian one. Batali grew up in Washington State and then, after Boeing transferred his father, in Spain. Batali has two siblings, Dana and Gina, and Marilyn Batali says she requested that each child prepare one meal a week. "At some point, we also began having...
Although a great peddler of excess, Batali first became famous for his restraint in the kitchen, his veneration of simple Italian traditions. After graduating from Rutgers University, where he majored in economics and Spanish theater, Batali worked in kitchens in Britain, California and Turkey, where he was a yacht chef. ("Very good gig. Paid well. Virtually no responsibility. You get some rich yuppie group of six from Chicago paying $60,000 for a week on a boat. They would tip you a thousand bucks at the end of the week if they were happy. Which was enough to live...
...Volta, which is now defunct, Batali learned the basics--handmade pastas; slowly cooked Bolognese sauce; wild mushrooms, greens and berries foraged from the forest floor and served nearly unadorned the same day. In 1993, when Batali helped launch his first restaurant, Pò, he brought that unaffected Italian sensibility to downtown Manhattan. (He also needlessly added an accent mark to the name of Italy's Po River.) "He was doing some things so simple--things like affogato, which is gelato [Italian ice cream] with a shot of espresso in it. It's a classic in Italian restaurants, but I had never...
...Drawn to Batali's downtown image, the Food Network came calling two years after Pò opened. TV gave Batali a bully pulpit for the new-old Italian cooking--less spaghetti buried in red sauce, more pumpkin ravioli--which has spread across the U.S. in the last few years. "There has been a revolutionary improvement in Italian food," says Tim Zagat, a co-founder of the restaurant guides that bear his name. Zagat doesn't credit Batali entirely for that improvement--in fact a much earlier pioneer was Lidia Bastianich, who was cooking in the authentic Italian vernacular...