Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

by Bill Buford

  I LEARNED many things at the pasta station, but I don’t want to exaggerate my achievement. I never got through an evening without one profoundly humiliating experience. By now, I was in the kitchen five days a week, and each time the service commenced I had the same thought: maybe, tonight, I’ll manage not to fuck up. The narrative I dreamed of involved my mastering the station, of proving Mario wrong, of showing that I could do a task that only twenty-somethings were able to do. I never made it. On the night I was finally on my own I didn’t get through the first hour, although, for most of that first hour, I coped well enough. There were a lot of orders, and I was doing my Stage One prep, stacking my pans on the shelves surrounding the pasta cooker, filling them up, double-stacking them as I had been taught to do when it gets busy, and then triple-stacking them, an emergency efficiency. I was fast, assured, utterly ready, when I turned and heard the sounds of many pans crashing down behind my back and into the pasta cooker (Splash! Splash! Splash!), and the kitchen came to a frightful halt. The fear was that the water—now polluted by gobs of ragù, truffle butter, caramelized mushrooms, toasted guanciale, tomato sauce, shellfish, butter, plus all those aromatic pinches of onion, garlic, and pork fat—was no good. The cooker would have to be drained, refilled, and brought back to the boil. It would take an hour. There were twenty-eight orders pending. The kitchen would die. Tony Liu, in Andy’s spot that night as expediter, walked over and inspected the water, boiling blackly, looked up at the shelf, observed that only many of the pans had fallen in, not all of them, and said it was okay. Was it? For the rest of the night, Mark retrieved random clams off plates at the last second “just as dishes were going out,” and most of the pasta tasted, ineffably, the same. “The kitchen loves it when someone makes a mistake,” Mark told me later. “‘Pssst: check it out! He dropped the pans!’ They talked about you for a week.”

  In the event, Mark bolted, and I ran out of time. He decided it was time to move on. Having coached me at two stations and patiently endured the sort of trials a god would devise, he’d earned himself an Old Testament nickname. (What can I say? It had come to this: I was Kitchen Bitch, and he was Job.) And although he was next in line to be a sous-chef, he wanted a challenge. Mark would be thirty in the spring—Mario had been twenty-nine when he left his job in Santa Barbara—and, like Mario, he wasn’t interested in the next senior position; he wanted to go to Italy. He asked Mario for help, and Mario, again flattered, found what he regarded as the perfect spot, a restaurant with a Michelin star and a reputation for the best handmade pasta in a region famous for its handmade pasta: Il Sole, outside Bologna. Or at least that’s where Mark thought he was going—“Mario talks so fast,” he confessed, “I’m never sure what he’s saying,” which I thought showed a remarkable ease with his fate. Mark didn’t know Italian yet; he’d learn it on the job, where—who knows?—he might remain for two years, maybe more. “I’ll never have this chance again. I want to stay as long as I can.”

  Mark’s going gave me pause. In emulating Mario’s journey, he was going off to learn the real thing: handmade pasta fresca. Hadn’t that been my mission? Instead, I came to understand something I’d once dismissed: that industrial product, pastasciutta. I was grateful for the instruction. But I was also a little jealous of Mark’s adventure. Everyone was.

  Meanwhile, a new person would take over the station and have to be trained, and as the training took weeks (even for grown-up cooks), I gave up my spot. There wasn’t room for two students. With Mark’s going, there was also another hiring: the structure was such that Mark, near the top, was replaced by someone who would start at the bottom, at the pantry station, preparing starters. (The invisible structure also meant that Abby was no longer the rookie.) The new guy was Alex Feldman. I was there the day he started: no small thing, as we’d be spending hours in his company and none of us knew what he was like. In fact, he was no small thing. He was six foot four, or at least that’s what he said, but I didn’t believe him. He seemed taller or, more frightening, might still be growing. (He had a growing boy’s appetite. At the family meal, which featured hot dogs, he ate twelve.) He was twenty-two, excitable, gangly, clumsy, and oblivious. He called to mind a cartoon character—some floppy, long-limbed thing: Goofy with his puppy dog features. Alex’s nose, for instance, was puppy-dog-like, big and not quite finished, as though still being formed. He had very big feet, like paws. He wore his long hair parted in the middle, like an overgrown schoolboy.

  “Why would Mario hire someone so big?” Elisa asked under her breath. “He knows there’s no room.” But Mario had made up his mind before he’d met him, because, once again, Alex had Italian kitchen experience. He’d worked in Florence for a year at Cibreo, a restaurant known for its uncompromisingly Tuscan cooking. I hadn’t heard of Cibreo. Actually, apart from Mario, no one had. But after a month or so, everyone knew a great deal: about the freshness of Cibreo’s olive oil and how it arrived immediately after it was made—“not days or weeks but hours.” (Alex tasted the Babbo oil and squished up his nose in a reflex of disapproval.) Or the importance of Cibreo’s soffritto, the mystery of Tuscan soups, and how, at Cibreo, the preparation took all morning. (No one in the kitchen had heard of soffritto, but when Alex said the word his voice got whispery and reverential, and you understood that soffritto, whatever it was, was very important.) Alex shared his knowledge of the Italian language as well and corrected the pronunciation of anyone who got a word wrong. In fact, Alex tended to speak principally in Italian.

  “Maybe,” Abby said quietly, “what we have here is an acquired taste.”

  13

  NEW YORK, 1995. On May 15th, an office assistant at a cable television start-up called the Food Network came across an article in The New York Observer that she felt might be of interest to the head of development, Jonathan Lynne. It was about a cabal of chefs hanging out at a downtown restaurant called Blue Ribbon. The restaurant was open late (last orders were between four and five in the morning) and took no reservations, except for a round table near the door which could accommodate between five and ten people. Batali had discovered Blue Ribbon shortly after Pó opened and often claimed the table for himself and several chef friends at the end of a Saturday-night service. “Just as the Algonquin Round Table of the 1920s and 30s gathered to commiserate about their literary careers and their love lives, and to zing wisecracks at each other,” wrote Frank DiGiacomo, the author of the Observer piece, “so the Blue Ribbon round table gathers to share horror stories about customers from hell, culinary techniques, business gossip, and, of course, the trials of making a romantic relationship work on a chef’s insane work schedule.” In New York mythology, in which darkly creative things happen in wee morning hours, there are two archetypal settings: the round table that Dorothy Parker and her friends frequented at that famous Midtown hotel and the downtown artists’ hangout, and people are always on the lookout for where one of the two archetypes will manifest itself again. Blue Ribbon, downtown and with a round table, had both.

  Mario, then thirty-four, wearing clogs bought from a surgical supply company and dressed in “California jams,” was described as the antic funnyman holding the group together (he may act like a clown, one chef told the reporter, but you’d be surprised—he’s actually very smart), and his I-get-along-with-everyone attitude was illustrated by a story he told of being in San Francisco and having to charm a policeman who had wanted to arrest Batali’s drinking buddy, the fortuitously met writer Hunter S. Thompson, who had pulled a gun on a cable car operator who refused to take Thompson to his front door: the evening ended with Batali’s waking up in the Fairmont Hotel (he hadn’t been a guest) wearing wet swimming trunks (the hotel doesn’t have a pool). Other chefs at the round table—” a group of high-testosterone dudes,” Batali said, to explain the enthusiasm with which the talent of the room was commented upon—included Tom Valenti and “the street-toughened, baby-faced” Bobby Flay. Flay had already published a book, won an award as “Rising Star Chef of the Year,”
and employed a publicist. “Where’s Bobby tonight?” someone asked. “He couldn’t make it today because the roof here wasn’t able to support his helicopter.”

  I got a sense of what those evenings might have been like when, seven years later, I joined Mario at the same round table along with a few friends. The occasion was a visit to town by the novelist Jim Harrison, a self-described “food lunatic.” Between Batali and Harrison, there was considerable admiration, and the exchanges between them constituted the table’s entertainment. For Mario, Harrison was the Homer, the Michelangelo, the Lamborghini, the Willie Mays, the Secretariat, the Jimi Hendrix of food intellectuals: “an expert, a hunter, an eater, a stalker, a rabid mongrel and a drinker, not afraid to get excited about the kind of nuts a particular partridge must have eaten this morning to taste so damned good for lunch.” Harrison, more modestly, described Batali as spiritual kin of some kind. “Probably from another life,” he said, in his gruff, barely audible, I’ve-lived-through-so-much-I’m-surprised-I’m-alive voice. Mario clarified: “From the other life of pigs.” They’re both big men. Together, they occupied a lot of the round table—a semicircle, in fact, so much larger than normal people that they could have been walk-on parts in a medieval play about the deadly sins (all seven).

  The first magnum of white wine arrived, and Mario reminded Harrison that they’d drunk twenty-eight bottles when they’d last met.

  “There were other people,” Harrison protested unconvincingly.

  “They weren’t drinking,” Mario corrected.

  He ordered starters off the top of his head, eighteen of them, including two dozen oysters, which Harrison couldn’t touch, having just returned from Normandy, where he’d tested a view of the nineteenth-century food writer Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin that grand meals had once begun by guests’ eating a gross of oysters each (a gross is a hundred and forty-four oysters). Brillat-Savarin had confirmed the plausibility of the practice by weighing an oyster’s meat, plus juices, which came out to less than ten grams. A gross, therefore, would be about a kilo and a half, or around three pounds. Three pounds of raw mollusks minus the shells seems like a lot, but Harrison was persuaded, and one evening he started dinner with a hundred and forty-four oysters.

  He sighed. He could not recommend the practice.

  A second magnum arrived, along with the first dishes. Fried oysters (to contrast with the raw ones); some salty sweetbreads, a Proustian trigger for Harrison involving a first girlfriend, aged fourteen; fried scampi; giant prawns grilled in their shells; barbecued spare ribs; and a sawed-up beef bone, roasted until the marrow was crispy and served with an oxtail marmalade.

  A third magnum arrived. Harrison checked Mario’s pulse (“Aah, you’re still living”) and made a toast. “Here’s to us, Mario.”

  “And fuck the rest of the world,” Mario answered.

  Around midnight and our fifth magnum, the restaurant got busy, and because there was no other place to go, most of the crowd gathered round the bar, which was adjacent to our table. Soon strangers—but jolly friendly strangers—joined us (our sixth magnum), warmly, drunkenly welcomed, finding chairs to squeeze in with, including a Russian prostitute with very blond hair and an impenetrable accent. More magnums followed. Eventually, Mario led Harrison to a party celebrating the filming of something, the Russian prostitute inviting much of bleached Central Europe along with her, the evening coming to an early-morning close with a spot of improvised karaoke at the Half King bar, which had been recently opened by the writer Sebastian Junger. (I have the end of the evening on report. I had an office job then, still got up in the mornings, and went home early at one-thirty.)

  When Jonathan Lynne read the Observer article, he thought: Wow! This is what the Food Network needs. “It was like bands hanging out late on a Saturday night in Seattle. Or artists in a bar downtown. A closely knit relationship of creative beings: that’s what I wanted the Food Network to foster, that’s what I wanted to see on television.” Lynne views chefs as “artists, like painters,” and talks energetically about their “original vision,” their “personal aesthetic.” He is by no means the first non-chef to see chefs in this way, and ever since Apicius’s De re coquinaria was translated as L’arte culinaria, both Italians and French have described what great chefs do with a metaphysical sense of hyperbole: no mean bunch of skills but a Da Vinci–like achievement.

  Lynne phoned Batali, asked him if he wanted to be a TV star, and was invited to lunch: tortelloni with sage and butter, served with wilted endives, Lynne remembers precisely. (Batali remembers only the breathless enthusiasm of a stranger, interrupting his morning prep.) Six months later, on January 8, 1996, the Food Network launched Molto Mario, and three weeks after that the line of people waiting to get a table at Pó stretched to Bleecker Street, half a block away.

  THE EARLY SHOWS, done on the cheap (face front to a camera, cooking on an electric oven because there was no gas), were crude but dominated by a remarkably familiar core repertoire, as though everything Mario subsequently did had been in place from the start: Swiss chard ravioli (grandmother’s recipe again); cioppino, the cheap-o soup made with nothin’-o; orecchiette—Mario pretending to roll them out, when most had been made by a clueless prep kitchen, the orecchiette so large and deformed that they ballooned like bath toys when dropped into boiling water (“Oh, dear,” Mario whispered, “this ear looks like it might have been Doctor Spock’s”). But amid the predictable awkwardnesses, what is mainly conveyed is a passionate sense of mission. Mario, having just returned from Italy, has learned something few people knew: that traditional Italian cooking is different from what you think—simpler than you supposed—but its simplicity still has to be learned, and he is going to show you how.

  I sat in on several “flights”—episode tapings—of a later version of the show. It was now presented in front of three friends on stools, being cooked for—a privilege, obviously, although a problematic one owing to a number of factors, including the hour. Guests were picked up before seven a.m. and had their first plate of food an hour later, while they were longing for another cup of coffee. One morning, it was gnocchi with braised cuttlefish. (“After making a little slit with our knife, the bone slides out like a guitar pick, and then you pull out the guts—oh, look,” Mario says, his fingers enveloped in inky intestines, “this is exactly what the little guy had for lunch yesterday.”) Two more meals follow, one after another, with a fourth just after lunch (who needs lunch?). When the shows air, you can tell where the guests are on the schedule, according to the expressions on their faces—zeal or a satiated glaze. “C’mon, guys, buon appetito,” Mario says, urging them at least to pretend to eat, strands of pasta coagulating on their plates, the gluten cooling to a waxy sheen, this being the twelfth helping one guest has had that morning.

  The expectation is that the guests will put a question to their host when his fast-forward speech allows: this is the short, quick song they’re expected to sing for their breakfast-supper. It isn’t easy—each show is only twenty-five minutes long, organized around the three acts of an Italian meal, antipasto, pasta, and secondo—and both the explanatory patter and the cooking are done at sprint speed. It’s really a theatrical kitchen monologue, delivered with such dispatch and such an unpredictable miscellany of references that few guests are confident enough to interrupt, not least because they’re not always following what’s being said in the first place. And besides, what are you going to ask that’s so interesting?

  For instance, in passing, Mario mentions that sardines, owing to their thin skin, should be covered with bread crumbs if cooked over a high heat (and you think, Hey, he’s right, the skin is pretty thin); when, with no logic you’ve noticed, he tells you that celery is the unsung hero of Roman cooking (and you take that in, trying to recall the last time a stalk performed a heroic role); and then he hands everyone a ball of potato-and-flour dough and tells them to roll it out like a broomstick to make gnocchi, adding that, in preparing this at home, you’ll want t
o use a starchy, not a waxy, potato (“Like an Idaho?” a guy on the last stool manages to get in). “Like an Idaho,” Mario replies instantaneously, and continues, “And you’ll want to mix it with just so much flour” (“How much flour?” the same guy asks, clearly on a roll), “Well, as much as it takes,” Mario replies, citing his grandmother (being, in this, wholly genuine but wholly unhelpful), and sweeps up the lumpy examples of everyone’s efforts, drops them into a pot of water that was boiling without your knowing it was there, and tells you that the lumpies will be fully cooked not when they float to the top, as most people incorrectly believe (have you held such a belief?), but only when “they’re aggressively trying to get out of the pot” (whereupon everyone lifts up slightly from their stools, hoping to get a glimpse of what gnocchi look like when they’re behaving like lobsters thrashing for their survival), when inexplicably Mario’s voice goes all baritone and, like the master-of-ceremonies at a boxing match (“Ladies and Gentlemen!”), he introduces a piece of parmigiano as “the undisputed king of cheeses!” (And you think of that, too—can he possibly be right, that parmigiano deserves such a regal distinction?) In fact, it wouldn’t hurt to ask him about the parmigiano because fourteen minutes have passed and you haven’t said a word. When? What? Mario is plating the gnocchi, when he interrupts himself to assume yet another persona. (Go on, your brain is saying, this is your chance!) “In Italian cooking,” he intones, inexplicably behaving like Socrates, “your dish should look as though it has fallen from the wings of a poet” (Whoa! Do you ask him about that—what food looks like when it’s dropped from such a height?) “and not as though it had been made by nine French guys who were all beaten when they were children.”

  Finally, there’s a break (Whew!), and you can relax, except that Mario, pent up by the effort to present a wholesome version of himself, lets loose with everything he’s kept contained, an anarchic spilling out of naughtiness, involving whatever food item is to hand: like an artichoke (“Because it gives me so much wood”) or cobra meat (“because it gives me even more wood than an artichoke, big wood, strong-like-a-tree wood,” whereupon he embraces two female prep cooks bearishly and invites them to imagine they’re in a post-cobra-eating circle, “deeply satisfied”). There’s dancing, butt slapping, kissing, and extra meaning found in ponytails (“At least I know what to do with mine, baby”) or Mario’s shirt (which an assistant makes the mistake of observing is too stiff) or tomatoes, which a set manager refreshes with a water gun (“You, my lovely,” Mario says, in his deep bedroom voice, “can spray my tomatoes anytime”). “Why am I not offended?” the set manager asks. “Why is that not a lawsuit?” retorts a guest. “Why can’t we show this on television?” asks another—when the show’s jaunty sing-songy theme song starts and, as though splashed with cold water, Mario assumes his television persona, never deviating from it until the next break, by which time you still haven’t said a word.