Word: batali
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Like the lesser celebrity chefs we've all seen so much of, Mario Batali has had it pretty good. After creating and running some of the most successful Italian restaurants in the U.S., he has made enough money to buy Sardinia. He's such a big TV star that even his vacations get made into TV shows. Through his cookbooks, his magazine articles and the deathless repetition of his various cooking programs, he has influenced the way America cooks and eats. But like most celebrity chefs, he understands that mere celebrity is a form of fraud, of failure. What most...
...Batali, like Top Chef's Tom Colicchio, is going back to the kitchen. Lately, both men had been restaurateurs more than chefs, leaving the creation and execution of their dishes to talented proxies. But Batali rose to fame for his outrageous, over-the-top Italian cooking, and he has never seemed really happy to oversee an empire. Like Colicchio, who started cooking at Craft on Tuesdays and is now back running Colicchio & Sons in New York City, Batali wants to cook. He's working on the menus for six new restaurants at Eataly, the massive Italian food emporium that...
...These are the first really unadulterated [Batali restaurants] we've opened since Otto, seven years ago," the chef says. "So much has happened since then; the whole terrain has changed. There's the green movement, sustainability, the new world of small-farm sourcing. I'm turned on by that. It's a whole new palette to work from. I'm intimately involved in what the restaurants are going to be." This is not to say that Batali is going to totally neglect his empire in order to be in the kitchen every night. He is up-front about that...
These days so many chefs are losing weight that Brown says even Mario Batali, the cultural signifier of joyous lardo-spread excess, has knocked off some pounds. The methods used by the chefs I talked to are pretty simple and should work for anyone if they've worked for people who spend their long working hours surrounded by amazing food they're forced to keep tasting, people who talk, think and read about flavor all day long, people who--forget about a carton of ice cream in their freezer--have a pastry chef in their office...
Gastón Acurio is a name the foodie cognoscenti will recognize. Though not quite a popular brand name like Mario Batali or Bobby Flay or Alain Ducasse, the Peruvian chef has created destination restaurants in the otherwise gray city of Lima that gourmands flock to whenever they can, eschewing the tourist havens of Machu Picchu and Cuzco. Hailed as the "next superchef" by some magazines, Acurio now has his eyes set on global conquest. His goal: to make Peruvian cuisine as familiar around the world as Mexican, Chinese and Thai...