Word: manhattanization
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...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 character. In one scene--a dinner at Batali's restaurant Lupa--Buford, his wife and Batali share at least 10 bottles of wine and a prodigious amount of food. "By the time the pastas appeared (I hadn't realized that...
...prepare one meal a week. "At some point, we also 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...
...which is now defunct, Batali learned the basics--handmade pastas; slowly cooked Bolognese sauce; wild mushrooms, greens and berries foraged from the forest floor and served nearly unadorned the same day. In 1993, when Batali helped launch his first restaurant, Pò, he brought that unaffected Italian sensibility to downtown Manhattan. (He also needlessly added an accent mark to the name of Italy's Po River.) "He was doing some things so simple--things like affogato, which is gelato [Italian ice cream] with a shot of espresso in it. It's a classic in Italian restaurants, but I had never seen...
...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...
...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 who were seen as fine artists rather than mere craftsmen. His brand seemed to be quality, a refined ristorante simplicity. But as he hawks his line of pork sausages to NASCAR fans, one already senses the distress of his original aficionados...