Word: batali
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...Batali the mogul is an emerging figure, but Batali the chef is captured in an incisive, cracklingly funny book scheduled for release May 30. Actually, as you can guess from the title--Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher (Alfred A. Knopf; 325 pages)--the book is mostly about the author, Bill Buford, a former New Yorker editor and freakishly dedicated foodie. Buford went to work as a cook at Babbo, one of seven Batali-Bastianich restaurants in Manhattan. But Batali is the book's most memorable, entertaining...
...those who know Batali only as the host of how-to cooking shows where he prepares uncommon Italian dishes--Paduan gnocchi, quail with peas, something called lamb squazetto and literally thousands of others--the NASCAR partnership will come as a surprise. (As will some of the dishes in the new cookbook, which include mudslide pie made with Oreos and graham crackers.) But Batali's visits to NASCAR events to research the book revealed--not least to him--that his appeal transcends foodies or Italophiles. Last June, just before he threw the green flag at the NASCAR event at Pocono Raceway...
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...