Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

by Bill Buford

  According to Crane, the problems at Pó started after an executive at the nascent Food Network saw Mario running the kitchen and asked him to an audition. Mario the celebrity chef (“How could I run the front when there were lines of people from New Jersey waiting for this guy’s autograph?”) produced strains between the partners. “I’d walk in, and there’d be a photo shoot I didn’t know about, and the photographer would say, ‘Hey, you there, get out of the way,’” Crane recalls. (“What could I do?” Mario asks. “No one was interested in the maître d’.”) In 1999, Mario assigned a price to the restaurant and gave Crane a choice: pay it, it’s yours; take it, it’s mine. Crane paid. When the deal was signed, tears welled up in Mario’s eyes. “Mario is the toughest guy I know—’Hit me with your best punch,’ that’s his attitude. I had never seen him cry.” It was painful, Mario said. “Like someone putting his name on your first baby.” He had never thought that Crane would want the restaurant, let alone pay for it. “He was shocked when I said I’d take it—he didn’t think I could run it without him.” Yet, curiously, Crane isn’t running it without Mario, who lingers in a ghostly fashion—not only on the menu, which continues to feature his La Volta dishes, but also in the minds of the staff.

  “Is Mario here?” I asked a waitress when I ate there one weekend.

  “Not tonight,” she said, distressed by having to answer a question put to her so often.

  7

  IT WAS THE SECOND week of March, the warmest day since summer, and people were wanting a new menu. The rabbit would no longer be served with Brussels sprouts but with spring peas, pea shoots, and a bright orange vinaigrette made from baby carrots. “We’re giving you not only the rabbit but what’s inside his head,” Mario explained. “You get to eat him and what he wants to eat, too!”

  There was a delivery of fava beans. They were to replace the chickpeas in a duck-themed dish called Pyramids in Brodo: a piece of pasta architecture squeezed at the top like an Egyptian monument and stuffed with what was left over from boning the ducks—kidneys, hearts, gnarly bits of meat stewed into a ragù, a risotto cooked in duck stock. “No one has any idea what’s inside!” Mario declared. “It could be Jeffrey Dahmer’s penis, and it costs nothing, and people love it.” But the broth would be made from both turkey and duck bones: duck alone was too gummy, “too faggoty French.”

  Wild nettles had been ordered but hadn’t arrived. “This is so typical,” Gina observed. “The moment it gets warm, everyone wants spring. Fava beans, berries, and English peas, and I worry about what we’ll get. It won’t be local, that’s certain.” In fact, the green market in Union Square was still barren, except for the first batch of ramps, the unequivocally local wild leeks from upstate New York. Ramps were added to spaghetti, wrapped around a pork tenderloin, pickled for the summer, or served on their own with a cow’s-milk cheese from Piemonte crumbled on top. “Oh, when they’re done like that, they give me wood,” Mario said happily. Everyone in the kitchen ate them as well—thrown on the flattop, squirted with oil, turned once, and scooped up with tongs. The ramps were evanescently tender and had an earthy, bright green freshness: a harbinger of warmer weather.

  There were changes in the kitchen. Nick was leaving. Longing to be back in Rome, and inspired by Mario’s stories of Porretta, he’d decided to return to Italy. Mario was flattered—the decision was tantamount to saying “I will follow your example, master”—and openly regarded Nick as a disciple. (“Going to Italy, it’s the only way to learn.”) Mario was now an effervescent source of advice: about what Nick should look for (“If your objective is to run your own restaurant, pick carefully—you want a place that does the cooking you’ll want to do”), about finances (“You’ll need five thousand dollars and a credit card of good standing”), and where he should go (“Great cooking in the south, but no game—you’ll never get laid”). This was the big question—where?—and Mario debated it loudly with himself while Nick watched silently, sitting on a bar stool, until Mario finally settled on a Roman trattoria called Checchino (“Lots of action”). Mario would phone on Monday. In the kitchen, Nick’s going was a big deal, abandoning his job, his country. Everyone recognized that you could only learn so much about cooking Italian food in a country that was not Italy.

  Stacie Cassarino, one of Gina’s cooks, was returning to being a prep cook during the day. She’d been working the evening service on a trial basis but wasn’t fast enough. “Unfortunately she’s a published poet,” Andy explained in a tone that said, Need I say more? “She thinks too much.” The kitchen had four vacancies—not all at once, but almost all at once—and Mario and Andy had to move fast.

  One position was filled immediately because the perfect candidate walked in the door. Tony Liu would be Gina’s new pastry cook, a gift because Tony was overqualified but desperate to work at Babbo. He was short, with closely cropped dark hair, muscular shoulders, and a serious manner. He was from Hawaii—a surfer in the summer, a snowboarder in the winter, with an appealing athletic bounce in his step—but was often out of place in an urban kitchen staffed with pale, nervous line cooks who hadn’t seen daylight in months. But he was here to learn what Babbo had to teach him—that was his mission—and seemed never to lose his focus. He never smiled, for instance, not once, although he always managed to seem friendly. When he showed up at midday, he greeted the Latin prep workers, one by one, in Spanish—something no one else did. Tony had been a cook at Daniel Boulud’s four-star French restaurant. He’d also lived in Spain, working at Martín Berasategui, a Michelin three-star place outside San Sebastián. In his mind he had mastered two European cuisines. Italian was next. He could talk the talk, walk the walk, and was accepted as a colleague.

  This was not the case with Abby Bodiker. She had been a prep cook in the Food Network kitchen, and, the others were wary: a television studio is not a restaurant, and, in the eyes of Memo and Frankie, Abby was underqualified, inexperienced, and both female and feminine—in short, undeserving of a position on the line. Memo and Frankie could be a menacing duo, like sinister twins with their own private language. They scarcely spoke to each other, but were always communicating—an eyebrow, a small nod—and were then united in whatever they had to do: fixing a dish, tweaking a special, or hazing the newcomer. Frankie, in particular, took exception to Abby’s approach, whatever it was—what did I know?—and the two were locked into a mutual antipathy. Abby was quite girlie. She had blond hair, which she sometimes wore in ponytails, and was petite, with a turned-up nose and small features. Within days of her being in the kitchen—all new cooks start at the pantry station, preparing starters—she’d grown demonstrably harder, her face drained of expression, as though a mask.

  “All women go through this,” Elisa said. “It was worse before, when the Neanderthal was the prep chef.” (Elisa had become the prep chef after the Neanderthal had moved to Pittsburgh to run a restaurant that Joe and Lidia Bastianich had opened there.) Elisa used to complain to Mario about the Neanderthal—” He’s crude, he’s sexist, he’s abusive”—along with other laments: the kitchen shorthand for broccoli rabe (“rape”), the vivid accounts of prostitute visits. But Mario told her there was nothing he could do. “Really, Elisa. This is New York. Get used to it.” In the event, the Neanderthal didn’t last in Pittsburgh and was fired. “He kept squeezing the butts of the waitresses and asking them to perform oral sex,” Lidia told me.

  I then witnessed what might have been a symptomatic exchange involving sweetbreads. Elisa and Memo were trying to settle what should constitute a portion. Elisa had recommended six ounces and using a scale, but Memo disagreed.

  “Let’s call it a B-cup,” he said. “Trust me, Elisa, all the boys know the feel of a B-cup,” and he grabbed his own breasts to illustrate his point. “You want a B-cup portion of sweetbreads.”

  Elisa went deep red—” I-I-I-I really think we should use the scale”—and turned to me as a witness from the outside world. “What is it about these guys? Is it because they have to wear
aprons?”

  There were two other positions to fill, and Mario was anxious, because both he and Andy happened to be going away at the same time. Andy was making a much-anticipated trip to Spain, one that couldn’t be postponed. Andy, Mario’s number two for eight years, had watched Babbo chefs go off and, with Mario and Joe’s backing, open their own places. Now it was Andy’s turn. “Ultimately,” he confided to me, “I only want to be a chef in order to have my own place. I pretend Babbo is mine but it’s not, and what’s the fun of doing this if the money isn’t in my bank?” Like Mario, Andy had lived in Spain, and his restaurant, when the space was found, was going to be Iberian. This trip was for inspiration; he’d eat at forty-eight restaurants in three days.

  One spot was filled by Holly Burling, twenty-eight, tall, lanky, tomboyish, with red hair and pale skin. I witnessed Mario’s pretending to interview her, but I knew his mind had been made up beforehand: Holly had worked in Italy. What else did he need to know? She hadn’t been there long (a few weeks at an agriturismo, a farmhouse with guest beds, learning how to make gnocchi and handmade pasta), but the point was she’d learned Italian and found a kitchen. “She did it. She gets it.” There was also, I felt, watching the two of them talk (and seeing in Mario a determination to see Holly as a kindred spirit), evidence of his conviction that women make better cooks. Mario believed that Elisa was Babbo’s best chef, “not just because she’s the most experienced but because she’s a woman. I know it doesn’t make sense, and I don’t understand it. But it is consistently the case: women are better cooks. They approach food differently.” The assumption would seem to resist scientific scrutiny but was one Joe shared as well. The day after Elisa had started running the prep kitchen, Joe tasted the Bolognese sauce and nodded sagely, finding in it a confirmation of what he was looking for. “It’s true,” he said, “a woman cooks differently. This is much better than what the last guy used to do.” The last guy had been the Neanderthal, and, in fact, he hadn’t prepared the Bolognese. It had been made by the kitchen’s principal prep whiz at the time, Miguel Gonzalez.

  Holly was offered a job. It paid five hundred dollars a week, with five days’ vacation starting in her second year. There was no mention of sick pay because it was understood you didn’t get sick, which I’d already discovered in the chilly silence that had greeted me when I’d come down with the flu and phoned Elisa to say that I wasn’t coming in that day because obviously she didn’t want an ill person in the kitchen. Nothing of the sort was obvious. Memo explained this to me later, after he refused to go home when he had a fever and was sneezing and wiping his nose on his sleeve. “When I made the decision to be a chef, I accepted I would never claim a sick day for the rest of my life. It’s one of the sacrifices of my calling.”

  The trouble was the final hiring. There wasn’t the budget to hire the experienced cook Andy wanted. He then wondered if he could use Marcello, “one of the Latins,” who worked mornings, making the pasta. But Andy wasn’t sure he wanted a Latin working service.

  “I don’t know if it’s appropriate. We had them at Pó. But Babbo is different.”

  People talked about “the Latins” in this way (in quotes because, after all, Latin America is a big place). Even so the remark was curious. Because three-star restaurants don’t like Mexicans making their food?

  “No, no, no. It’s just a bigger kitchen, and I don’t want to stop and translate.” It’s true, Marcello’s English was rudimentary, and when Mario interviewed him he spoke Spanish.

  Are you ready to work evenings? Mario asked him. You know you’ll be the only Latin? Can you take the pressure?

  Marcello—his forearm wrapped in thick gauze (he’d slid it across a chef’s knife that had been sitting blade out)—listened carefully and answered, Yes, he can do this. Marcello was like a miniversion of his boss: short and compact, with red hair gathered into a ponytail, a thick neck (in American football, you could imagine his playing center on a junior varsity team), and a round, warm face. His manner was deferential, polite, attentive. He confessed to me afterwards that the interview had made him very anxious. The anxiety had been wholly observed by Mario, who had a salesman’s gift for registering the physiological symptoms of discomfort: “I love it when they’re nervous. It makes me feel so gooooood.”

  Mario asked Marcello if he was working elsewhere. Many “Latins” had two jobs.

  “Yes,” Marcello said. He mentioned the hours, the pay.

  “How much are we paying you?” Mario asked. He looked at Andy. Andy didn’t know.

  “Three hundred and seventy-five a week,” Marcello said.

  “From now on, you work nowhere else. Your salary will be five hundred and fifty dollars a week.”

  This was a tremendous change. Implicit in it was a new designation: now, Marcello was being told, you are one of us. He returned to the kitchen. He looked solemn but had a distinctly lighter gait. He could have been walking on water balloons.

  I HAD WITNESSED a privileged moment and, in the little history of a little restaurant, a modest milestone. The “Latins” are in every New York kitchen. They bring food to your table and clean up the plates afterwards. The unspoken assumption is they’re America’s gästarbeiter, here to do the dirty work: the dishwasher routine. But they also make most of the food, while the elite positions, on the line, are reserved for white guys. Two of the most productive cooks in Elisa’s prep kitchen were Cesar, twenty, and Abelardo, who was twenty-one: both “Latins.” Every morning, Elisa gave them a list—sometimes thirty different tasks—and by late afternoon they’d made most of what the restaurant served in the evening. To most people, they were invisible—even to their employers (they are “Latins,” like a race, rather than Mexicans, Uruguayans, or Peruvians), a pool of interchangeable laborers, few of them English speakers, living on the fringes of the city’s boroughs, piled into one-bedroom apartments that no one wants to know about. Of course Mario and Andy hadn’t known Marcello’s salary; until this moment they hadn’t been entirely aware of his existence.

  “We’re going to need a dishwasher,” Mario told Marcello when their interview was finished. “Do you know anyone?” Mario wouldn’t know where to find the next one. In this, there was a Latin chain: the current dishwasher, Alejandro, would now make the pasta, duties that had been Marcello’s. “Cousins? Someone else in the family?”

  I spent a Friday afternoon, paycheck day, with Jesus Salgado. Jesus, who had worked at Babbo since its second day, was the cousin of Miguel, the cook who’d prepared the feminine Bolognese. Miguel was dead. May 19th was the first anniversary of his death, and people were talking about the date with dread. I had never met Miguel but knew about him from Elisa—his knife skills, his understanding of food, his flashy dressing, his charisma: qualities that also characterized Cesar, Miguel’s successor (and cousin), although Elisa insisted that Miguel had been “much sexier.” It was Jesus who had proposed that the restaurant hire Cesar after Miguel died. Jesus had proposed Miguel, too. (Jesus and Miguel “had been like brothers” and shared a business card, both their names on it, which was, eerily, the same card that Jesus handed out now.) Jesus had also proposed his brother, Umberto, who cleaned the restaurant during the day, and Marco, a cousin, who worked in the prep kitchen. Jesus, having recommended them all, felt responsible for them: if they were late or didn’t show, Jesus had to answer for them. For an employer, the informal system was pretty reliable, although it reinforced the distance between the “Latins” and everyone else. The only thing an employer asked for was a worker’s Social Security card (no card, no job), and even after September 11th it is still possible to buy a card cheaply.

  Jesus was a natural patriarch. On payday, he gathered the members of his extended family around him—Umberto was wearing a leather jacket and leather shoes; the younger Cesar and Marco were in baggy hip-hop jeans and bright red running shoes, each wearing headphones, swaying to a muffled rappy sound. Jesus had been down to the Babbo basement to pick up their weekly checks and was n
ow leading everyone to a place on 8th Street to cash them (none of them had a bank account), Cesar and Marco following loosely behind, bobbing happily. Afterwards we found a bench in Washington Square Park. I wanted Jesus to tell me about Miguel.

  Jesus came from Puebla, in Mexico, about two hours from Mexico City. So, too, did his many cousins. At Babbo, there’s a view that the best pasta makers come from Puebla. The observation was first made by Joe on his realizing that the restaurant had employed three exceptional prep cooks in a row who all came from the same place. I asked Jesus: Do the best pasta cooks come from Puebla?