Word: chicago
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Mario Batali grabs a brawny handful of parsley leaves and tosses them into the pot without looking. Onstage before a crowd of 400 at the International Home and Housewares Show in Chicago, Batali is demonstrating how to make fregula soup with clams. It's a simple recipe--fregula is just a kind of pasta--but the soup looks a mess. An intemperate amount of chili flakes has gone in, as has what seemed unadvisedly large pinches of saffron, which has a neat but metallic flavor that can overwhelm. As Batali stumbles over a loose cord onstage, it occurs...
...Burly Chicago guy: "Did you party with the Irish last night, Mario...
...girth is so magisterial that the inevitable Falstaff comparison seems inadequate. All that saffron in the soup--that's where he's showing weakness, I decided. So busy being a star that he's sloppy in the kitchen. To test the theory, back in Chicago I had sneaked into the prep area after Batali had left the crowd standing in applause. I found a cook named Kirsten West who had prepped the ingredients for the demo. "How's the soup?" I asked...
...that comes after a string of New York City restaurant successes--he has helped open eight Manhattan eateries in the past 13 years--that few chefs can emulate. Many are trying. "Mario does things first, and then two, three years down the line you see it in Cleveland and Chicago," says Patrick Martins, a co-founder of Heritage Foods USA, which sells meat, fish and other goods to high-end restaurants around the U.S. "Mario starts playing with pig bellies and tripe and intestines and even the bladder, and then a lot of people have followed and placed orders...
...word not only to the nation?s estimated 11 million illegal immigrants but to the legions who count them as friends, relatives and neighbors. But none imagined they'd help generate the huge attendance the demos drew: 500,000 to 1 million in Los Angeles, 300,000 in Chicago, 50,000 in Detroit, among other places...