by Bill Buford
I moved the whisk from my right hand to my left, shook Riccardo’s hand, rapidly transferred the whisk back, and resumed my stirring.
“I call myself Riccardo. From Bologna. I am here eight years.”
So Riccardo was the real thing. Not only from Italy, but from northern Italy, from Emilia-Romagna, right up there in polenta land, adjacent to Lombardy, the homes of Maestro Martino and Alessandro Manzoni. Riccardo was probably a genuine mangiapolenta, with childhood memories of beechwood and a grandmother with a big spoon. But what was a chef from Bologna doing in Tennessee? You don’t meet many people from Bologna. Life there is too good to leave it. I eyed him suspiciously. He was looking at my whisk (and there was no other word to describe his manner) covetously. I turned my back, slightly, thinking: thou shalt not covet my whisk.
He moved closer. I could hear his breathing. If he says “Po-LEN-ta” one more time, I’m going to smack him with my whisk.
Frankie appeared. He had to walk around Riccardo (who, having achieved his spot, wasn’t about to give it up). Frankie squeezed in between us, avoided eye contact with this strange man wearing a soufflé for a hat, did that quick dip-the-finger trick, and tasted the polenta. He added more salt. “Nothing is simple,” he said. “Everything needs to be made with love.”
“Po-LEN-ta!” Riccardo said again, looking expectantly at Frankie, who walked away without pausing to reply. Riccardo then turned back to me. He stood, watching.
I stirred.
Riccardo didn’t move.
I didn’t stop stirring.
“Sooooo,” he said finally. “Tell me a thing. Are you coming from New York?”
Yes, I said, I’m from New York. I looked at him. Why did he drape his towel on his forearm, anyway?
“Ah, New York,” he said.
I stirred.
“How is New York?” he asked.
“New York is fine,” I said.
“Ah, New York,” he said.
The polenta had inched so far up my whisk that I was stirring with the last inch of the handle. I stopped and tasted my knuckles.
“You know,” Riccardo said, “I do not know why I have come here to Nashville. I think but I cannot remember. There must have been a reason. I have wanted to go to New York. But when I have come here, I have met a girl. I did not come here to meet a girl. But I have met a girl. I have fell in love, I have got married, and now I am a chef at Alfresco Pasta,” he said, adding, after a pause, “in Nashville.” He sighed.
I stirred, but, despite myself, I was feeling something—I don’t know what. Sympathy? Pity? How could I feel pity? I’d just met this stranger, wearing a piece of pastry as a headdress, confirming yet again that cooks are some of the weirdest people on the planet, and now he was wanting both my whisk and to tell me his life story.
“Nashville is very nice,” I offered.
“I could have been a New York chef.”
He said nothing for a long time, reflecting, staring at the round pot of polenta being stirred by me. “Instead I am a Nashville chef.” He was very melancholy. “Love,” he said. “Amore.”
“Amore,” I agreed.
MEANWHILE, the polenta was developing a new texture, its third metamorphosis. In the beginning, it had been soupy but thirsty. Then, after an hour, it was shiny and cakey and coming off the sides: for many, an indication the polenta was ready. But by cooking it longer, an hour, even two hours more—stirring it every now and then, adding hot water when needed—you concentrated the flavors. In effect, the polenta was undergoing a modest caramelization by being baked in its own liquid lava—like a self-creating clay oven, drawing out the sweetness in the corn—and its actually being caramelized: along the bottom, a thin crust was forming from the granules browning against the kettle’s hot surface. I scraped it up with my whisk and mixed it in. It was elastic, an elasticity I associate with dough. You also could smell the change. Pasta behaves in a similar way, and you can teach yourself to recognize how it smells when it is ready. Mario describes this as “giving up the gluten” and recalls how, in Italy, walking past open windows at midday, he could register the moment when a lunch was served by the sudden smell of something rich and gluteny, like a perfumed pastry cloud.
I licked some polenta off my knuckles: it tasted good. It was done.
Frankie and I poured the kettle’s contents into metal canisters and put them in a warm bath—a “steam table”—and, just then, Mario appeared. It was six o’clock, and the volunteers, still crushed together on the other side of the invisible boundary, visibly relaxed, except for a now-very-morose Riccardo, who hadn’t budged and managed to be both downcast and erect simultaneously.
There was an hour until service, and there were urgencies. Mario wrote out a schedule and taped it to a wall. (“Seven: Plate coppa. Seven-fifteen: Serve. Seven-thirty: Drop first pasta. Seven-forty: Plate and serve.”) Frankie was concerned about the broken flattop: a canister of butter had been put on it but hadn’t melted.
Mario looked: it was in the wrong place. “The flattop is hot,” he insisted, and spat on it to prove it. (Whoa! Did he just spit on the flattop? I looked: his spittle sizzled.) It was a theatrical gesture—his audience gasped audibly—done, no doubt, because Mario, arriving in a rush, unprepared for the cooking class awaiting him, was suddenly conscious of being onstage. Later, when he dressed the watercress salad, he grabbed a bottle of olive oil and, holding it high above his head, made a flamboyantly streaming arc, like some Alpine guide pouring rotgut from a goatskin boda bag, and his rapt audience, not wanting to miss a thing—even volunteers who had been taking notes stopped their scribbling—held its breath. But spitting on the flattop? It’s true, you don’t normally cook food directly on it, although, at Babbo, the ramps, the pancetta—that’s where they were cooked. It was a brassy thing to do. Maybe it was more difficult being a celebrity chef than any of us understood—the expectation that you felt constantly from the people around you, these strangers, your public, to be so much bigger than a normal human being. (I was put in mind of a story Mario had once told me, of the first time he’d been spotted on the street, stopped by two guys who recognized him from television, immediately falling into the “Hey, dude, wow, it’s, like, that guy from the Food thing” routine, and Mario, flattered, had thanked them courteously, and they were so disappointed—“crushed”—that he now travels with a repertoire of quick jokes so as to be, always, in character.) In any case, the volunteers seemed happy: Mario Batali had arrived; he spat; he poured olive oil; he was larger than life.
The butter melted, and the service went smoothly, without histrionics or tantrums. Each course, rushed out at go-go-go speed, involved all the volunteers, now crowded around the longest plating table, assembling dishes in a fury. Mario had asked me to check them before they went out, wiping off the rims with a damp cloth, and I surprised myself. The volunteers were heaping too much on the plates, a natural temptation—too much parsley, too much orange zest, too much parmigiano. Flavorings are meant to serve the food, not compete with it. A Babbo platitude.
“Replate,” I said with great force.
“No,” I said. “Wrong! This is a mess. Redo!”
Another appeared. “Goddammit. Too much stuff. Again. Replate!”
And then another. “For fuck’s sake, how many fucking times do I have to say the same fucking thing?” (Did I just say what I think I said? Was I a latent screamer?)
There were festivities afterwards—too much adrenaline for the evening to end—where much wine was drunk. I have a memory, blurry, like swimming with your eyes open, of Mario’s making scrambled eggs in a rich man’s kitchen. (How did we get here, how are we leaving, and how is anyone going to cook tomorrow night—er, well, tonight, actually?) For most of us, the evening ended at five in the morning—Mario in a Falstaffian snoring funk in the taxi that took us back to the hotel—except for Frankie, who, having befriended one of the folksy, informally blue volunteers, went off on his own and didn’t get back until seven, fifteen
minutes before we left for the airport. “Looking good,” Mario said, already seated on the plane, as Frankie appeared, zigzagging down the aisle. Frankie was not looking good. In fact, he was looking very bad—perspiring, pale, unshaven, his skin damp and clammy, smelling of a long Nashville night, with all the charisma of a collapsed lung, wrapped in an assortment of dark things, a black shell jacket, sunglasses, a wet blue bandanna across his forehead. We landed in Newark and went straight to the kitchen and got through the service, Andy sometimes forgetting to call out an order, Frankie curling up during slow moments on the wet greasy Babbo floor for a nap.
The trip surprised me with its many lessons—over and above my polenta tutorial and another illustration of the body’s ability to accommodate abusive excess (“Oh, c’mon, guys,” Mario said as we neared Manhattan, trying to cheer up the slumping heaps in the seat, “the human organism is remarkably strong—it always bounces back”). I don’t think I’d understood how rarely cooks get to cook and how much time they put in before they get the chance. Riccardo from Bologna put me in mind of Alex at Babbo—maybe because Riccardo, an Italian in America, was a mirror of Alex, who had been an American in Italy. Alex’s year there had been life-changing, and he still talked about it. What he never mentioned, until I asked, was this: he had never cooked. For a year, he had chopped carrots, onions, and celery. “I was the absolute bottom of the ladder the entire time. It was a humbling experience. I thought if I worked my ass off I’d be promoted. I never was.” Finely chopped carrots (“I really perfected my carrot-chopping technique”), onions, and celery are important: cooked slowly in olive oil, they turned out to be the basis of soffritto, the foundation of Tuscan soups. Alex never made soffritto or soup. Then, when he was hired at Babbo, he was again told he wouldn’t be cooking: he’d begin, as everyone did, with cold foods, making starters. After some months, if there was a vacancy and Andy approved, he’d be allowed to cook on a trial basis at the sauté station. At the time, I was in my obsessive pasta-making phase and working mornings with Alejandro. That is, in Alex’s eyes, I was “one of the Latins”—low on the proverbial totem pole. After a couple of weeks, I returned to the grill, as Frankie had recommended.
“Do you mind telling me why you’re at the grill?” Alex had had three years of cooking school, a year in Italy, and a job at a three-star restaurant, and he still wasn’t cooking. “Would you mind telling me how you were able to jump ahead of me?”
“Alex,” I whispered. “I’m not a cook. Sssssh. I’m a spy.”
THE NASHVILLE TRIP had also showed me how much I knew, and I was surprised by how much that was. I’d had no measure. Like everyone else, I’d been locked inside a hot windowless kitchen, working alongside the same people for more than a year. That weirdo life? It was my life, too. Later in the spring, I joined Mario when he was a guest chef at a James Beard House event. One of his chefs didn’t show, and I ended up cooking a number of things, including the pasta, enough for forty people. But I’d done this before, and the pressure wasn’t more than what you experienced at the height of service. The next day I got an e-mail from Mario: “Thanks for the help yesterday. You are actually quite helpful.” I’d been working with him for nearly a year and a half. He’d never thanked me. Implicit in my role, a pupil whose presence the kitchen tolerated, was that I was to be the one expressing gratitude. To be thanked—this, for me, was a big deal.
15
OTTO WAS NO LONGER One Fifth Avenue, but, even with a name change, the curse of the place seemed to persist. When the restaurant opened in January 2003, the curse resurfaced and had its way with the item at the heart of the whole enterprise: the pizza. The early experiments had mystified everyone in the Babbo kitchen; they then mystified diners at Otto. (“We don’t have the Otto-speak sorted out on the pizzas,” the headwaiter said, addressing the members of his staff during the second week. “If anyone asks you to explain them, call over a manager.”) Mario continued to think of them as griddle pizzas, heated from underneath on a flattop rather than in a wood-burning oven. “No, they’re not Italian, they’re my take on Italian. They’re what I cook for my boys”—Mario’s two sons, Benno and Leo—“and they love them.” The implication was that if Mario’s children loved them, so would the world. The world wasn’t so sure.
“I’m nervous,” Joe said. “I find the pizzas inedible. My mother finds the pizzas inedible. They sit on my stomach like a rock.”
There were complaints. They were too spongy. They were undercooked. They weren’t crispy. You couldn’t cut them with a knife. Joe wasn’t sleeping: “Everyone is suddenly a fucking pizza expert.”
“I got it!” Mario said one afternoon. “We shouldn’t heat the plates they’re served on. They should be cold.” But the plates weren’t the solution.
“I got it!” Mario said the following week. “I’m making too much gluten. The secret is twenty percent more yeast and only three minutes of kneading.” But the result tasted of raw bread—Joe, eating one at the bar, made a face of unequivocal revulsion—and the complaints continued.
“I got it!” Mario said, two weeks later. “It’s cake flour. Good old-fashioned all-purpose cake flour. Why didn’t I think of that before?” But it wasn’t cake flour. In fact, a few days later, Mario abandoned cake flour and was using “00” instead, the refined pasta flour from Italy.
“At night, I’m studying my McGee,” he said, alluding to Harold McGee’s book on the science of cooking. Otto was in its second month. It seemed inconceivable that he could still be experimenting with the recipe. “I know everything there is to know about gluten. The solution is fifty pounds of flour—half all-purpose flour and half Italian 00—and only a tablespoon of olive oil, three tablespoons of sugar, and then you let it sit for three hours.” I was impressed by the detail Mario was sharing with me—that the crucial ingredient was a single tablespoon of olive oil in fifty pounds of flour, for instance—and his belief that I would understand what he was talking about. I didn’t, but it didn’t matter, because this recipe wasn’t the solution either.
“Finally, I really do have it,” he said, when I found him one morning sitting at the bar. “It’s flour plus sweat equals dough.” He was exhausted. “Yesterday I swallowed thirty pounds of flour. I had a steam shower this morning and coughed up a loaf of bread. I’ve got to step away from this. I’m making five hundred pizzas a day. Are they good? Are they bad? How can I tell? I’m listening to too many people. I’m overthinking this. I can’t start doubting myself now. I’ve got to go with my gut.”
But even though the pizza recipe wasn’t settled, the place was very popular. Tom Adamson, a Babbo bartender, got end-of-the-night reports from a colleague at the Otto bar, and he passed these on when he brought pitchers of beer to us in the kitchen at eleven: 800 covers one evening, 923 the next. “These are not restaurant numbers,” he said. “These could be for a sporting event.” Otto was getting almost four times the number of Babbo’s customers. In the kitchen, these accounts were unsettling. Was it that Babbo was no longer the star? For Andy they were also demoralizing.
“Otto,” Elisa observed, “is quietly driving Andy crazy.”
“WHAT ARE WE going to do about Andy?” Joe asked Mario when I joined them for lunch one day in early March. By now no one had any idea what went into the pizzas, but it didn’t matter. People were eating them, Otto was a success, and Mario and Joe could think about other things. Joe was at Babbo in the evenings; Mario hadn’t been; he’d been filming Food Network episodes about stromboli. Joe knew they had a problem.
“Have you talked to him about being more proprietary?” Mario asked. Andy was openly angry and foul-tempered and had just fired a runner on a whim.
“How can I talk to him about being more proprietary when he’s not a proprietor?” Joe was alluding to the elusive Spanish restaurant. The arrangement had always been that Joe, Mario, and Andy would be joint owners. But the reality was that no such arrangement existed because there was no restaurant. There was Otto.
> “He’s become very difficult,” Joe continued.
“This surprises me. Frankie told me Andy was much better—that his moods were under control.”
“Well, Frankie’s wrong. Andy is not better. He’s worse.”
Andy was different from the others. He was well read and articulate. On his days off, he went to movies, gallery openings, plays. I thought of him as the only grown-up in the kitchen. He wasn’t a screamer and didn’t gossip. He had a quick mind. As an expediter, he had a picture in his head of every table, how long each one would take to finish its course, and the time the kitchen would need to prepare the next one so that it arrived the moment after the plates were cleared. He was responsible for tens of thousands of dollars of extra business, because he’d figured out how to squeeze it in. “I act like I’m an owner,” Andy confessed. “What’s wrong with me?”
But there was something you weren’t seeing. Andy spoke fast, sometimes very fast, and his speedo speech could seem like crazy speech, a glimpse of a psyche running down a hill at full tilt. He could be shrill. “Oh, how I hated that voice,” Elisa said, recalling when she worked service. “It was always on the verge of losing it, just like Andy.”
“Andy’s in a bad mood,” Frankie whispered, going from person to person, just as we were about to start the service on New Year’s Eve. How could Frankie tell? I looked at Andy. It was true. Something was wrong: a seethingness, a self-imploding stress. It then came out, but never directly and always on the job. For instance, you’d be very busy, and Andy would tell you to fire six more orders.
Hang on there, guy, you’d think. You can see I can’t do more.
But as you took in the instruction, scurried to pick up the stuff, season it, get it going, Andy would tell you to fire another four orders. This time, you would say something (even if nothing more than a heavily intoned “What?”), whereupon Andy would add two more orders and (“Why not?”) another two, and then (“What the hell?”) four tasting menus. Why? Because he could. Because he was in a silent rage: at his plight, at what he had to do every night—no letups, no easy evenings, every day for five years—at Mario and the fact that he didn’t have to be there because he had Andy. Then, as though obeying the dictates of some self-destructive impulse, he’d go home and stay up until three reading about Spanish cooking, devising menus for a restaurant that didn’t exist.