Word: italianity
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Drawn to Batali's downtown image, the Food Network came calling two years after Pò opened. TV gave Batali a bully pulpit for the new-old Italian cooking--less spaghetti buried in red sauce, more pumpkin ravioli--which has spread across the U.S. in the last few years. "There has been a revolutionary improvement in Italian food," says Tim Zagat, a co-founder of the restaurant guides that bear his name. Zagat doesn't credit Batali entirely for that improvement--in fact a much earlier pioneer was Lidia Bastianich, who was cooking in the authentic Italian vernacular...
...Batali briefly worked) and Alice Waters launched the American culinary revolution in the 1970s by trumpeting fresh ingredients above all. Twenty years later, Batali performed a neat trick. He made the revolution feel young and hip again--he was just 32 when Pò opened--and his respect for traditional Italian cuisine also lent his food a sense of history uncommon to American restaurant fare; Batali has always said most of his dishes are mere reinventions of old--in some cases ancient--Italian recipes...
...commencement address last year at Rutgers, he urged the graduates to "get a brand," which he defined as "your own truth, expressed consistently." "For better or worse, I've got a brand," he said in the speech. "The orange clogs, the ponytail, the attitude, my seeming fluency in Italian--it's instantly recognizable. But what matters to me is, it's not fake." O.K., but the challenge he now faces is not to misjudge how far you can stretch your brand without cheapening it. In the '90s, because of his Manhattan restaurants, Batali vaulted into the small coterie of cooks...
Batali and I were talking at a bar in Chicago. He was in town for the housewares show, where his display featured a garish, full-scale plastic replica of an Italian farmhouse. As we spoke, a hefty guy, beer in hand, walked over to our table. He introduced himself as a "firefighter here in Chicago" and said he wanted to shake Batali's hand. The firefighter's wife then came over--the first of an endless stream of fans who would approach Batali over the weekend. Cards were pressed into his hand; pictures were taken; autographs were requested on books...
...Vespa scooter to them each night, a quality-control measure he uses in Manhattan. Still, Batali won't run out of culinary ideas any time soon. On his Mac he keeps a database of 20,000 recipes collected over the years on his travels to out-of-the-way Italian towns like the one where he apprenticed. So how big can Batali Inc. grow? The chef insists that he won't open a restaurant in an airport or push his cookware on a shopping network like QVC. Yet when I first met him six years ago, Batali said he didn...