Word: chefs
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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...
...chef is in rapture describing everything from his new dishes ("There's going to be peppery calves' tongue, two meat pastas with meat sauces - actually meat juices! - plus two rib-eye steaks") to his plan for compliance with HACCP, which every N.Y.C. restaurant is required to follow, for food safety. The man is cranked up. Even the concept of failure seems to be a tonic for him. "There are five ways for everything to go wrong, and I'm a little nervous, but that's exciting," he says. (Watch 10 Questions for Mario Batali...
...with stylists wearing bold red-and-black shirts emblazoned with JAWED HABIB PRO TEAM, the salon calls to mind less the chaos of a fish market than the disciplined efficiency of a well-run kitchen. His golden quiff defying gravity, the 46-year-old Habib serves as both head chef and maître d', helping a matron into her chair, judging the angle of a junior stylist's cut, checking the helmet of sludgy green henna drying on an elderly gentleman's hair and mustache...