Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

by Bill Buford

  Dominic apologized. His tone was ironic; it said, Of course I bumped you. You’re a big guy and you were in my way.

  But Mario was not appeased. “Dom, don’t ever do that again.”

  Dom was unsure how to respond. Was it a joke?

  “I do not want to be bumped by you,” Mario continued. “You see this counter? I own it. You see this floor? I own it. Everything here I own. I don’t want you to bump me.”

  I discovered Dominic in the walk-in. “I’ve got Mario at my station. I’m cleaning up after him, and he’s bumping me. I’m staying here.”

  (In the event, thirty-four cioppini were sold that night. “The waiters came through,” Mario told me when I showed up the next morning and found him reclining on a banquette, drinking a whiskey. “I’m very happy.”)

  Once Mario left the kitchen, you never knew when he was coming back. Elisa recalled the trepidation that had surrounded his departures in the early days, especially during a Chinatown phase, when he’d return with purchases he felt should be served as specials. Duck feet, say, or duck tongues. “Very, very small, with a tiny bone in the back which was almost impossible to get out.” Or jellyfish, which, in the tradition of preparing local ingredients in an Italian way, were cut up into strips, marinated with olive oil, lemon, and basil, and served raw as a salad. “It was disgusting,” Elisa said. It was equally unnerving when Mario returned with nothing, because then, with no distractions, he started rooting around in the trash. The first time I witnessed the moment—a peculiar sight, this large man, bent over and up to his elbows in a black plastic sack of discarded foodstuffs—I was the unwitting object of his investigation. I had been cutting celery into a fine dice and was tossing away the leafy floret heads (after all, how do you cube the leaves?). The florets have the most concentrated flavor, and I knew it couldn’t be right to be throwing them away, but that’s what I was doing: I had a lot of celery to dice.

  “What the hell is this?” Mario asked, when he appeared, holding up a handful of my celery leaves, before plunging back into the plastic bag to see what else was there to discover—which was, of course, more celery florets, hundreds of them. He pulled them out, shaking off whatever greasy thing was adhering to their leaves (they’d be served that night with steak). “What have you done?” he asked me in astonishment. “You’re throwing away the best part of the celery! Writer guy—busted! Remember our rule: we make money by buying food, fixing it up, and getting other people to pay for it. We do not make money by buying food and throwing it away.” I witnessed the garbage routine several more times, involving kidneys (“Elisa, we don’t throw away lamb kidneys”), the green stems of fresh garlic (“Frankie, what are you doing? These are perfect in soup”), and the rough dirty tops from wild leeks (“Somebody talk to the vegetable guy—he’s killing me”). Anything vaguely edible was thrown out only if it was confirmed that Mario wasn’t in….

  IN THE EVENINGS, I started plating pasta.

  “Like this,” Mario said. He took my tongs before I could plate a spaghetti and dropped it slowly from up high. “You want to make a mound of pasta and give it as much air as possible.” And, later, with the tortelloni: “You want only a splash of sauce. It’s about the pasta, not the sauce”—a maxim I would hear over and over again, distinguishing the restaurant’s preparation from an Italian-American one. (In red sauce joints, the dish is less about the pasta and more about the sauce, as well as the ground beef in the sauce, plus the meatballs or the sausages or both the meatballs and the sausages as well as the peppers, the pickled onions, and the chili flakes.) Mario took my spoon—the tortelloni break up if you use tongs—and told me how to hold it. “You’re not a housewife. Don’t use the handle. Seize the spoon, here, at the base of the stem. You’ll have more control. It’s only heat.” (Foolish me, I thought, and had a sudden fantasy, occasioned by my embarrassment, of a futurist cutlery, including a post-modern spoon, all spoon and no handle, except, possibly, a half-inch spur on the side for the wusses who needed one.) Later, Mario explained the components of the tortelloni. The tortelloni was a soft, pillowy pasta, stuffed with goat cheese and served with dried orange zest and a dusting of fennel pollen, which was like an exaggerated version of fennel. Fennel pollen was a discovery of food writer Faith Willinger, an American living in Florence who had some secret source there: on trips to the States, she stashed the fennel pollen in her suitcase, shrink-wrapped in a smuggler’s hundred-gram plastic bag. And the orange peel? Because orange and fennel are a classic combination. They also give some bite to a soft, unacidic dish.

  I stepped back to take in the kitchen and how different it was at night. White tablecloths had been taped over the counters, where Andy was checking dishes before they were run out into the dining room. The long work area in the middle had changed as well. During the day, this was where I had put my cutting board, as had two of the Mexican prep cooks, Cesar Gonzalez and Abelardo Arredondo. Now it had become “the pass.” Andy, the man running the kitchen, was on one side, calling out the orders and receiving dishes that the line cooks “passed” to him. Behind them was the “line,” a wall of cooking contraptions. In one corner was the ornery pasta monster, a bubbling hot-water machine, obscured by steam. In the other corner was a grill, a steel square of yellow-blue flames. In between were three cookers in a row, each with an oven, turned up to five hundred degrees Fahrenheit. It was a lot of heat. I was standing next to Andy and could feel it. When I stepped closer, as when I peeked over to see how a dish was being put together, I felt the heat with much more intensity—a hit of heat, like a cloud, both a physical fact (it was in the roots of my neck hair) and an abstraction. But it was real enough: a hot wall, even if invisible, and I was happy to be on the other side.

  Nick was working over the pasta cooker—his face in the steam, sweat pouring off it—and was heating sauces in pans on a flattop. This was the pasta station. Dominic was at the stove and reheating things in the oven below. This was the sauté station. Between sauté and the grill was the swinger, the person who swings between the station on his left and the one on his right, helping out each cook, plating their dishes, on call in case of a meltdown. Mark Barrett was at the grill. He’d only just started. He was tall, bespectacled, watchful, unshaven, and, with rumpled wavy hair, looking like a very late sleeper who hadn’t been awake long.

  He was different from the others; so was Nick. They both came from affluent, professional families. They didn’t have to be cooks. I sometimes thought of them as middle-class interlopers, always having to explain their careers to concerned parents who regarded a job in a kitchen as tantamount to joining a circus. Nick had studied art history at Columbia University, where his father was a professor of Japanese literature. He had learned Italian, because mastering it was a requirement of his degree, and had spent a year in Europe, mainly in Rome. When he returned, he was no longer interested in the foundations of classic architecture or Renaissance painting or whatever it was he was supposed to have studied during his expensive, paid-for-by-his-parents year abroad. He had discovered pasta; he wanted to be a chef. Mark also has an accomplished father (a dermatologist), a liberal arts degree (English literature), and an analogous career epiphany disrupting an intellectual itinerary—in his case, a trip to Dublin, where he’d gone to see streets once walked by Joyce, Yeats, and Beckett and found instead the intense flavors of small-dairy-farm milk, cream, butter, and eggs, having subsidized his stay with a job in a café kitchen. When Mark returned, he abandoned Irish literature and went to cooking school. Mark had grown up in Ohio and had a small-town aw-shucks wonder of the world. Today, his face was covered with bandages and gauze. On his day off, he’d attended a rock concert and broken his nose when he threw himself into a mosh pit. This, too, seemed in character—of course that’s what a college-educated son of a dermatologist would do on his weekends.

  Until now, I had thought I was acquainted with the Babbo menu; I could recommend dishes: the pappardelle—to die for; or the so-called Two Minute Calamar
i, Sicilian Lifeguard Style—spicy, don’t miss it. I knew nothing. In the blue Babbo bible, I counted fifty pastas. I’d had no idea there were so many. There were sixty entrées. There were forty starters. I stared at the menu. It was pasted in front of Andy, above the pass and just below a shelf crowded with Italian clutter—a double magnum of vino rosso da tavola, a bottle of olive oil, some balsamic vinegars: a still life of an Italian kitchen, as though depicted in a travel magazine, and the only thing customers saw when they peered through the portal windows of the swinging kitchen doors on their way to a toilet. (Ah, the romance of Italy, the still life said to anyone peering through the windows, even though the wine had gone brown from the heat, the olive oil was rancid, and the real kitchen, which didn’t seem either Italian or romantic, was out of view.) The menu was four pages long—” Humungous,” Andy conceded. The line cooks were moving so fast I couldn’t follow what they were doing. Orders were coming in on a ticker-tape machine, a long paper stream, one after another, Andy calling them out, and, without my knowing when or how, I became aware that everyone had simultaneously increased the speed of their preparations. There was a new quickness in their movements, an urgency. At the end of the evening, I wouldn’t be able to say what it was I had seen: a blur and food being tossed in the air and radically different ways of being—an aggressive forthrightness as cooks dealt with the heat and fire, long flames flaring out of their pans; and then an artistic-seeming delicacy, as they assembled each plate by hand, moving leaves of herbs and vegetables around with their fingers and finishing it by squirting the plate with colored lines of liquid from a plastic bottle, as though signing a painting. It amounted to what? Something I didn’t understand. I could have been on Mars.

  I was at a go-forward-or-backward moment. If I went backward, I’d be saying, Thanks for the visit, very interesting, that’s sure not me. But how to go forward? There was no place for me. These people were at a higher level of labor. They didn’t think. Their skills were so deeply inculcated they were available to them as instincts. I didn’t have skills of that kind and couldn’t imagine how you’d learn them. I was aware of being poised on the verge of something: a long, arduous, confidence-bashing, profoundly humiliating experience.

  MARIO, MEANWHILE, was examining the plates going out. It was one of his surprise visits.

  He eyed a skirt steak and addressed Mark. “Grill guy, your salsa verde is breaking up. You’ve got too much oil in it, and the plate is too hot. Replate.” Mark replated the dish, his movement miraculously accelerated, like a video on fast forward. “I’m counting. Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven…If I can hear you talking, you are talking too loud.” The kitchen was like a library. Mario studied a dish from the sauté station, the duck, stuck his finger into it, and tasted. “Dom, take down your sauce.” It was too salty, needed diluting. “And the duck,” he said, picking up a slice of the breast. “You want to give the fatty side an extra minute. The meat is fine.” It was verging on rare. “But render more of the fat.” For fifteen minutes, I’d been watching Dominic’s cooking the breast over a low heat, the fatty-skin-side down. This was what Mario was asking Dominic to do a little longer, so that the skin would be especially crispy.

  Then, flustered by the attention, Dominic let a plate slip, and it fell into his sauces and dropped to the floor and broke. There were sweetbreads in the tomato sauce, and tomato sauce in the chicken stock, and broken glass on the floor. Dominic tried to scoop out the sweetbreads, but in his haste he fumbled them, and they fell into another sauce. Mario said nothing but squared up in front of Dominic, spread his legs, and crossed his arms and openly stared. “Dom takes criticism very personally,” he said to me. Dominic was sweating. The open stare, I would learn, was Mario’s way of expressing concern—in other places, you’d hear shouting. (Memo, coming from a French kitchen, recalled a practice called “plating”—when the chef takes a plate from your hands and throws it onto the floor, usually during the busy service, and you’re meant to clean it up and prepare a new plate. It was, Memo said, “the most humiliating moment in my life, and it didn’t happen again.”)

  An orecchiette was returned from the dining room, half eaten, the plate borne into the kitchen by the maître d’, John Mainieri, who explained, “There are not enough florets on the broccoli.” Five people gathered around the plate and started eating from it. “He says that the last time he ate here the broccoli had more florets.” Everyone picked out a floret and stared at it closely.

  “It’s true,” Mario said. “We’ve had larger florets, but nature isn’t making big florets at the moment.” A new pasta was prepared, and Mario handed it to one of the runners. “When you give this to him, please pistol-whip him with your penis.”

  Half an hour later, another return from the same table—this time, from a woman. A steak. It was chewy. “She doesn’t want a new dish. She wants steak, properly prepared.” The cooks assaulted the meat, indignantly tearing off pieces with their hands, and turned to one another, saying, “Chewy?”

  The steak came back. Now, evidently, it had been overcooked. And there was also a chop. It, too, was not satisfactory.

  “For fuck’s sake. Find out their names. They’re not coming back.” Mario paused. “What are they drinking?”

  “A Solaia 1997.” A bottle was $475.

  “Forget it,” Mario said and ordered another round of entrées.

  6

  NEW YORK, 1992. The dishes Mario prepared at the new Rocco read like episodes in an autobiography; each one is so intimately associated with a specific moment in his life that the menu is almost more literary than culinary—cooking as memoir. Ravioli stuffed with brains and Swiss chard is his grandmother’s recipe. A review in New York magazine singled out an “old-fashioned tagliatelle in a ragù Bolognese”—the very ragù Mario had prepared at La Volta. A stricchetti with porcini and cremini mushrooms is a variation on what Betta made on Mario’s first day in her kitchen. The leek soufflé (with grappa-cured salmon) was the dish he had cooked for his first Christmas lunch in Italy. Mario had finally arrived in New York City and had a lifetime of cooking to express.

  In his second month at Rocco, Mario met Susi Cahn, his future wife, who sold organic vegetables and goat cheese to downtown restaurants. (The cheese was made by her parents; the vegetables were grown by Susi on their land in upstate New York.) Two weeks later, she took her parents to Rocco for dinner: it was her birthday, and the restaurant seemed the right place to celebrate. Mario’s family happened to be in town, also to celebrate a birthday, his mother’s. The dinner didn’t finish until three. For Susi, it was a drunken, energetic blur of festivities, Mario’s rushing back and forth from the kitchen, returning each time with a surprise—another course, another bottle of wine, another grappa, and, finally, an accordion, which his father played, leading everyone in Italian drinking songs. Cahn, who is so many things Mario isn’t—petite, dark-haired, East Coast, Jewish to his lapsed Catholic, early-to-bed to his out-until-early, reserved and deliberate to his outgoing and impulsive—illustrates the kind of person Mario probably gets on best with. “I’m very, very different,” she said, when we met to talk, as though to say “Get real. Mario could not live with another version of himself.” Arturo, his new business partner, was, it seems, not so different, and nine months into the enterprise, their partnership collapsed.

  They weren’t getting customers. Even Dana Batali was perplexed. “The food was good. I don’t know why no one came.” Whatever it was, it confused the regulars. “I asked Mario to start slowly,” Arturo told me on the phone after I tracked him down in Miami, where he is now a bartender. “I’ve been to Italy. I know what’s good. I didn’t like the old style of food, either. But no, for Mario it was his way or the highway. This was my father’s restaurant. I’d known the customers for twenty-five years. They looked at the menu and said, ‘What’s this shit?’ and walked out.” There were squabbles about money. Mario was always giving people extra dishes, even whole meals, and not charging for them. “Most of
the grappa he drank himself.”

  The parting was acrimonious. “I can’t watch the Food Network because I don’t know if he’s going to be on,” Arturo told me. “Last night, I had people over for dinner, and they mentioned Molto Mario. How could they do that to me? And you,” he said, suddenly quite angry, “how could you phone me out of the blue and mention this guy’s name. You’ve ruined my evening.”

  Mario was now unemployed and homeless. Armandino invited him to Seattle to open a restaurant together—a longing born out of the enduring regret Armandino felt for having lost his family’s store. Mario didn’t take up the invitation because, finally, he’d found a venue, an abandoned Indian restaurant, with an especially low rent because the tenants had left in the middle of the night and the landlord was distraught. Batali had no money but borrowed some from Cahn (“There was never a moment’s doubt that he was going to succeed,” she told me) and invited Steve Crane, his friend from San Francisco, to be his partner. Pó opened six weeks later, at the end of May 1993, quietly, because they were short on cash (and therefore on many ingredients), had no liquor license, and couldn’t afford air-conditioning during what turned out to be the second hottest summer in the history of the city. But they were in business, and at the end of August a New York Times food critic, Eric Asimov, wandered in and was overwhelmed by the food’s unapologetic Italianness. It was, Mario recalls, heartening to find, at last, that “what I wanted to make in New York City was what New York City wanted to eat.” (In the aftermath, Armandino, inspired by Mario, quit his executive job at Boeing and, at the age of sixty-one, went to Italy to be an unpaid apprentice to Dario Cecchini, one of the country’s most famous butchers—like son, like father.)

  Pó is like a teenage Babbo—thirteen tables, plus another two on the sidewalk, and a menu that borrows heavily from La Volta. For Steve Crane, the first two years were the best. He was in the front, Mario in the kitchen (“like an athlete”), and in no time the place was a late-night haunt of chefs, the result, Crane recalls, of Mario’s pressing his card into the hands of the people he met, building up a business by word of mouth, consolidating it by treating invited customers as VIPs. (The practice has been refined at Babbo, and the only times I’ve seen Batali red-faced with anger involved the neglect of VIPs. He rarely shouts, but when the maître d’ failed to spot a record producer who had appeared at the bar, he exploded—“You fucking moron! You fucking motherfucking moron!”—and chased him out of the kitchen with such menace that I thought he was going to throw something. “If it’s a VIP table, you prepare the order now,” he then hissed at the kitchen staff, reinforcing his rule that VIPs get served first and fast. “You don’t prepare the food when you’re good and ready. You don’t make a VIP wait because you’re a fucking great talent and you know better. You are not some fucking artist. I am counting. Ten seconds. They must have their starters in ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven.” And, with hysterical speed, the starters appear, the pale look on the pantry chefs preparing them being one of unmitigated fear.)