Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

by Bill Buford

  In time, Mario and Quintiglio fell into a habit of having breakfast together: a glass of red wine and an egg baked in olive oil with a slice of fontina cheese. For Christmas lunch, Quintiglio showed Mario how to make a classic brodo, the holiday broth served with tortellini. It required an old chicken (one no longer producing eggs), some beef bones, a bone left over from a prosciutto, an onion, and a carrot—the vegetables left whole to keep the broth clear. In the spring, they ate from Quintiglio’s garden, planted according to a lunar schedule (lettuce during a waxing moon; beets and parsnips during a waning one). Quintiglio took Mario to the Reno River for a “weird little watercress that grew there,” wild onions, and a bitter wild dandelion, which he boiled for forty-five minutes and served with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Today, Mario’s greens are cooked in the way Quintiglio taught him. (“Much better to boil the shit out of them and then sauté them in olive oil and garlic—you can then actually chew the fuckers.”) For Mario, Quintiglio was the first proponent of finding what is made by the land and feasting on it, of recognizing that you are eating something that you can enjoy only now, here, during this day in this season, grown in this dirt.

  But the first months were not easy. Dana Batali recalls them as a time when Mario was forced to learn humility and “the things he wanted to cook were scoffed at,” although, from what I can tell, the dishes Mario prepared (raw scampi, a leek soufflé, grappa-cured salmon) were done to establish his credentials and remind his hosts that he had been, until recently, highly regarded as a chef. But Mario’s father picked up an uneasiness in his son’s letters as well. “The experience shook him up a bit.” For his part, Mario remembers it as the last lonely time in his life, a sustained pleasurable period of melancholy, “a happy sadness.” At the end of dinner, he’d go up to his room, light a candle, put on headphones, playing mainly Tom Waits during his ballady, self-pitying, hey-buddy-can-I-have-another-drink phase, read (working his way through the novels of Faulkner), looking up to take in the view—the mountains, the Reno River—and longing for company but recognizing he was better off without it. “It was a great rush. I knew, that first week, once I saw the food, that I’d made the right move. This wasn’t a food I knew. It was traditional. Simple. No sauces, no steam tables, no pans of veal stock, none of the things I had learned to do.”

  Italy changed Mario, his father said. “When he arrived, he was still a wild guy. He drank a lot, smoked, chased girls. He had no idea what he was going to do with the rest of his life. Italy focused him. It gave him his culture.”

  Jim Clenenden, the owner of Au Bon Climat vineyards in Santa Barbara and one of Mario’s former late-night friends, described the change more prosaically. Clenenden visited Mario at La Volta five months after his arrival. “What happened? When I saw him last, he was a West Coast guy with a New Jersey accent. Look at him: that red hair, that pale complexion. Does he look Italian to you? He could have been Mark Battle. Suddenly he was Mario Batali! The change was stupefying.” Clenenden’s visit was stupefying in other ways: eleven dishes, eleven bottles of wine, a meal that finished at four in the morning, a brutal hangover, and all the time “Mario speaking in Italian—although still American enough, just, to tolerate a visitor from California.” Batali hadn’t mastered the menu yet, Clenenden recalled, but was in the middle of a tremendous transformation. “He wasn’t even close to reaching a plateau. Any moment he was going to discover the next big thing—you could tell.” This was April. By the summer, the metamorphosis was complete.

  ON THE LAST NIGHT of my visit, I had dinner with Gianni and Roberto, prepared by Betta—a doll-like woman in her forties with jet black hair and very pale skin—and served by her two children, Emiliano, twenty-eight, and Mila, now sixteen and remembered by Mario as an infant in a straw basket on the kitchen floor. I was joined by Joe Bastianich, who happened to be in the country on business. Mario’s time in and around Porretta has figured so large in the story he tells of himself that Joe, too, wanted to see the place firsthand. I didn’t know Joe well. At Babbo, he worked the front of the house—the service, the wine—and you rarely saw him in the kitchen. You also didn’t see him much during the day, because he found the Babbo office intolerable. Compared with Mario, Joe was quiet in manner, with a guardedness that might be mistaken for shyness. But he wasn’t shy, just less outgoing than his often outrageous partner, with whom he had the good sense never to compete for attention or recognition. (“Joe needs me,” Mario confessed one night. “He couldn’t do any of this without me.” “Mario is the cook,” Joe explained to me on another night. “I’m the waiter.”)

  Gianni and Roberto were intrigued by Joe. Gianni is a soft man. He has thick wrists, big hands, and an elastic middle that betrays a life lived without the slightest expense of exercise. But he eats with joy, and since he eats abundantly and without inhibition he seems almost always happy. He has a handsome face with thick expressive eyebrows that are always coming together in a quizzical look, like that of a confused forest animal.

  Roberto, his brother, seems more grounded. He is stocky and has a square head, a square body, and a solid manner. Unlike Gianni, who is bald, Roberto has plenty of hair, which is stiff and straw-like and sits squarely on his head, not unlike a helmet. You could imagine Roberto in a suit and tie, although tonight (befitting the enduringly wintry weather of the Appennines) he was wearing a dark wool sweater with a cotton shirt underneath.

  Both brothers are dedicated food romantics. Mario had told me about long trips the three of them routinely took in quest of some meal of indisputable regional authenticity—a four-hour drive to Mantova, say, for the perfect ravioli filled with autumn squash—only to have one bite, realize that the pasta had been made by a machine rather than by hand, and walk out in protest, their hunger dealt with by emergency panini grabbed in a bar on the drive back home. To this day, Roberto is still indignant that a spaghetti alla carbonara, prepared by Mario, had been served with the eggs on top rather than mixed in the pasta. “I saw it with my own eyes! They were on top! It was scandalous!”

  Joe Bastianich was not a romantic. He grew up in immigrant restaurants in Queens and has a nitty-gritty matter-of-factness about money. He was impatient with Gianni and Roberto. His manner said, “Mountains schmountains, restaurants are a business: Why are you guys such fuckups?” Joe is the son of Felice and Lidia Bastianich, both immigrants, who were running their own restaurant, a thirty-seater called La Buonavia, the year Joe was born, in 1968. (Lidia now has a television show, cookbooks, and her own restaurant in midtown.) Joe’s childhood memories are dominated by “the not-so-pleasant realities of preparing food for a living”—cleaning the grease traps, sweeping up the insects after the exterminator visits, the pervasive smell of shoe polish, and the stink of a changing room crowded with “sweaty, fat Italians and Croats reading the racing forms,” where Joe did his schoolwork and slept on tomato cases until he was carried home. To this day, he can’t stand bay leaves. “Three times I’ve pulled a leaf out of the throat of someone choking on it, including my grandmother when I was nine years old, and for what? Do you think the flavor is so important?” Chicken makes him shudder, the result of accompanying his father in the car to the wholesale market to pick up cheap poultry, “the cheapest poultry,” piled high with ice to keep it from spoiling, and when the ice melted it became a pink “chicken water” that slopped down Joe’s back. Joe never wanted a restaurant; he wanted money and became a Wall Street trader, only to discover he hated it. He recalls waiting for his first bonus, counting the minutes, cashing it, and returning to the office to resign on the spot: then he went straight to JFK and bought a ticket to Trieste. He remained there a year, living out of a Volkswagen bus, working for chefs and winemakers, needing to understand this thing that, he now appreciated, was going to be his life.

  Joe is eight years younger than Mario but has the gravitas of someone twelve years older. His head is shaved. He is big, although not portly, and his bigness conveys power. He has a boxer’s waddle—legs
apart, hands to his side, at the ready—which, when I attended a Bastianich family christening, I noticed his four-year old son was already imitating. Over the course of a dinner prepared by Betta—a white pizza, followed by green pappardelle with a quail ragù, then tortellini in thick cream—Gianni and Roberto speculated on how Joe worked with Mario.

  “You must be the salt,” Roberto suggested, “and Mario would be the pepper.”

  “You’re the money man,” Giovanni clarified. The idea was that Joe must have brought Mario under control and tamed him.

  Joe shrugged and turned to me. “How do you say ‘whatever’ in Italian?”

  Roberto and Gianni continued to press their point. For them, it was inconceivable that the man in pantaloons whom they’d picked up at the train station in 1989 would have left them to become a famous chef, without the help of someone much more worldly. Mario had been the clown of the town—or at least its most sybaritic spokesman. He had appeared in an annual Porretta talent show (“The other contestants were fourteen-year-old girls,” Roberto said) with a three-piece band, the barber on drums, the headstone carver on sax, and Mario on electric guitar, playing a long, loud version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey, Joe.” He had been the wild dancer at the disco, returning home with Bruno, the postmaster, to sing harvest songs until dawn. Mario had drunk more than anyone had ever seen before.

  “Fifteen whiskies in one sitting,” Roberto said. “Can you imagine?”

  “It was twenty,” Gianni said. “I used to count.”

  He was the fat man with a dozen girlfriends who all seemed to be named Jennifer. “Even the Italian ones were Jennifer,” Roberto said.

  “Why is a fat man so attractive to women?” Gianni asked.

  “Is he fatter now or then?” Roberto asked by way of reply.

  “You know,” Joe whispered to me across the table, “I don’t think I can take any more of this.” He hummed an opera aria.

  After three years, Mario left Italy, and things became difficult for Gianni and Roberto. It was as though Mario’s leaving and the decline in the Valdiserris’ fortunes were connected. Mario returned to America to make money, just as Gianni and Roberto started losing it.

  The restaurant had always been expensive, they said. Then, in a matter of months, there was less money in town. The year, 1992, marked the beginning of a Europe-wide recession, although neither Gianni nor Roberto had any understanding of what was going on elsewhere; they knew only that one month they’d been busy, the next month they weren’t. Orders at the factory where Roberto worked had fallen, and executives from abroad visited less often. Fewer families came from Bologna, and their vacation homes were not being rented: Who wants to go to the mountains and eat the spaghetti you can eat at home, when, for the same price, you can be on a beach in the South Pacific? There were deaths: Gianni’s mother, Betta’s father. There were gambling debts—casinos were Gianni’s secret affliction. La Volta was sold. Today there is a restaurant in the same place, but it has a French name and serves fish, and the two times I visited it was closed. It took Gianni nine years to come up with funds to open a new place, La Capannina, a pizzeria, located in a park by the river, where you could eat outside on a hot summer night. But the summer had been harsh, and business was poor. This was where we had our dinner, but it was too cold to sit outside, and the other customers—five of them, all workmen—were eating pizza and drinking beer. You could see unease in the mournful crinkles around Gianni’s eyes. Borgo Capanne, the little village on the hill, was now dead, his daughter Mila said, giving me a tour of it the next day. Più bestie che persone. There were more pets than people.

  Mario left before the decline, with the help of his best friend from Rutgers, Arturo Sighinolfi. Arturo had visited Mario in Porretta. The two shared an understanding about Italian cooking. Arturo’s father was about to retire; for twenty-five years, he’d run Rocco, an Italian-American restaurant off Bleecker Street, in the “red sauce zone.” Arturo invited Mario to run the restaurant with him as a fifty-fifty partner—Arturo in the front, Mario in the kitchen. There was an apartment upstairs where Mario could live. The new Rocco, inspired by La Volta, would have a powerful Italian menu.

  5

  THE BABBO KITCHEN was actually several kitchens. In the morning, this small space—the work area is about twenty-five feet by ten—was the prep kitchen and run by Elisa. In the evenings, the same space became the service kitchen and was run by Andy. But between the hours of one and four-thirty, the different kitchens (more metaphors than places) overlapped.

  Andy was the first to show up, calculatedly a minute or two after noon, respectfully not wanting to disturb the a.m. authority structure. Memo, the senior sous-chef, arrived an hour later. Frankie, the junior sous-chef, was next. And then the others, one after another, late risers all, buzzing with their first coffee, smelling of soap, their hair still wet. The last was Nick Anderer, the “pasta guy.” Nick was tall, lean, a tennis player’s build, a blue bandanna always tied round his forehead, with the dark-haired, brown-eyed features of a Eurasian. Nick’s father was of German ancestry, and his mother was Japanese-American, and so he was called “Chino” (even though, in a better world, he would have been neither a Chino nor a Jappo, but just plain Nick). His station was the easiest to set up but the most demanding to run. Just about everyone orders pasta. By the time Nick arrived, between two and three, the kitchen got very busy.

  By now, there were eighteen to twenty people in the kitchen. During this time, the prep people were frantically completing their tasks, while the line cooks were getting their stations ready, terrified that they wouldn’t finish before the first orders. In many ways, these afternoons were exaggerated expressions of something that was characteristic of both New York (where, with so many people concentrated onto a little island, space is precious and its value inflated) and the restaurant business (in which the size of the kitchen and the dining room are financial calculations, and a small kitchen meant more tables). The space concern was extreme. There was no lunch service because the metaphoric prep kitchen was still working at lunchtime. There was also no lunch service because so much of the restaurant’s equipment—tablecloths, cutlery, plates, glasses—was stored underneath the banquettes where a lunch crowd would sit: every morning, the restaurant was taken apart; every afternoon, it was put back together. The so-called Babbo office was two chairs and a computer in whatever basement cranny presented itself at the time. It seemed like an extension of the plumbing, jerry-built. When a hot-water tank exploded—for several days, the water for the dishes was boiled—the “office” was removed to get to the tank. The desk of Mario’s assistant was underneath a slop sink, gurgling with the foodstuffs swirling into it. The smell was pervasive.

  In the afternoon, there was a hierarchy about space. Mario had warned me of this after I mentioned that I must have been sticking my butt out because I kept getting bumped. “They bump you because they can—they’re putting you in your place.” The next day, I counted: I was bumped forty times. Space was Andy’s first concern; when he arrived, he went straight to the walk-in to see if he could shift things from large containers to smaller ones. If he couldn’t, the work being done by the prep kitchen would have no place to be stored. Once, I helped him prepare a herb salad by destemming the herbs to concentrate their flavors. We started in the dining room, because there was no space in the kitchen. We moved to the dark coffee station in front of the kitchen doors, when tables were being set up, until finally we were backed up against the ladies’ room.

  In the afternoon, if you can get a perch in the kitchen, you don’t leave it. You don’t answer the phone, run an errand, make a cup of coffee, have a pee, because if you do you’ll lose your space. Around two o’clock, trays of braised meat came out of the oven, but there was no place to put them, so they sat on top of the trash cans. Trays were stacked on top of those trays. And sometimes there were trays stacked on top of those.

  Mario flits between the shifts, unpredictably. He no longer runs th
e kitchen—he sneaks up on it to see that it’s functioning properly or simply visits it when the spirit moves him—but the public expectation is that he’s there every night, preparing every dish, an idea that he reinforces, flamboyantly rushing out plates from the kitchen to special customers. The year after Babbo opened, he had a brain aneurysm, alarming his family. “I thought, Oh my God, here it comes,” his brother Dana recalls. “Mario’s Marilyn Monroe moment, having burned up both ends of the candle.” It also alarmed Babbo customers, who canceled their reservations. “The only time anyone could walk in and get a table,” Elisa remembers.

  One afternoon, Mario showed up to make a special called a cioppino. He’d prepared the dish the night before but had got only four orders. “This time, the waiters are going to push it, and if they don’t sell out I’ll fire them,” he said cheerfully. Cioppino is a contraction of “C’è un po’?”—is there a little something?—an Italian-immigrant soup made from leftovers and whatever “little thing” a member of the household was able to beg from fishermen at the end of the day. On this occasion, the “little thing” would be crabmeat, and, true to the ideology of the dish, Mario roamed the kitchen, collecting whatever was on hand—tomato pulp and liquid, left over from tomatoes that had been roasted, carrot tops, a bowl of onion skins, anything. He would charge twenty-nine dollars.

  Mario took over a position normally occupied by Dominic Cipollone, the sauté chef. Dominic had been at Babbo for two years; it was his first restaurant job. (“Whatever he is,” Mario said, “we made him.”) He has a heavy, saturnine manner and a Fred-Flintstone-in-need-of-a-shave look, and, at one point, in his lugubrious way, he turned and ran into Mario.

  “Dom, you just bumped me,” Mario said.