Word: chefs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...began having international days where they were required to have something weird," she recalls. (That may explain her son's fondness for items like duck testicles, an ingredient in one of the dishes at Del Posto, a $12 million Manhattan restaurant he opened in December with Bastianich and PBS chef Lidia Matticchio Bastianich, Joseph's mother...
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...
...relatively inexpensive--its six-course tasting menu was $29--and Batali was soon feeding downtown artists, actors and, crucially, reporters. He became the most charismatic of the young New York City chefs--fun, funny, a little crude. There was something brash about his willingness to serve a just-picked strawberry drizzled with sweet balsamic vinegar rather than do something more complex and chef-ish like extruding a berry-vinegar solution into a foam. Great California chefs like Jeremiah Tower (for whom Batali briefly worked) and Alice Waters launched the American culinary revolution in the 1970s by trumpeting fresh ingredients above...
Their six other restaurants are flourishing; Bastianich estimates that they collectively serve 2,000 people a night. Last year the James Beard Foundation named Batali its Outstanding Chef--the top award a U.S. cook can win. This year the foundation has nominated Molto Italiano, Batali's 2005 book, as best international cookbook and Del Posto as best new restaurant. The winners will be announced at a Manhattan gala on May 8, a few days after Batali returns from cooking chicken thighs and tortilla casserole for scores of NASCAR drivers, crewmen, and their families at Talladega Superspeedway in Talladega...