by Jane Kramer
The truckers left, too, once Bottura had replaced the electrician’s menu with wild-arugula salads, soft-boiled egg yolks on oysters splashed with vinegar, and wine that actually came in bottles. The crowd got younger. “It was like having a big family dinner every night,” Lidia said. “But once the service ended, it was a bordello, because Max kept a little apartment above the restaurant, and everyone went upstairs. One New Year’s Eve, we were a hundred and fifteen people. Max suddenly disappeared. Everyone was asking, ‘Where’s Max?’ I covered for him. He was at my mother’s house. He had walked over with a big dish of her favorite panna cotta—the kind with a base of caramel and fruit. She was ninety-two and still making tortellini, but she couldn’t do panna cotta anymore. He was the one who thought of her, alone on New Year’s Eve.”
Giorgio de Mitri once described Bottura to me as “like a sponge, because he has that rare ability to absorb influence and at the same time to stay absolutely himself, absolutely original.” With Lidia, the influence was traditional Modena cuisine. Next came the basics of French cuisine, adapted to Emilia-Romagna’s bounty, and Bottura’s teacher was a French chef named Georges Cogny, who had married a woman from Piacenza and eventually moved his pots and pans to Farini, a peaceful village in the Apennines, where he opened a restaurant called Locanda Cantoniera. Bottura ate there a few months after he bought Campazzo, tasted Cogny’s demi-soufflé of chocolate, and asked if he could watch him cook. For the next two years, he spent every Sunday and Monday, when Campazzo was closed, driving two hours into the mountains to learn.
“I was starting to feel like a real chef,” he told me toward the end of a sweltering day in late July. We were in Farini, at a chefs’ ceremony in memory of Cogny, who died there in 2006. “That was the gift Georges gave me. I remember the day it happened. He was doing oysters, wrapped in pancetta and sautéed, and asked me to taste them. ‘Too salty,’ I said. He wanted to know what I would do. I told him, ‘Crunchy pancetta, but keep the oysters raw.’ He said, ‘Massimo, your palate is going to take you far.’”
In 1989, a year after his lessons with Cogny ended, Bottura opened the Harley Club—named in honor of his new purple Springer—for the after parties that had quickly become much too big for an apartment above a trattoria. The club was next to his motorcycle mechanic’s shop in Modena, a few blocks from the city’s historic center. The neighbors complained, but it was otherwise a wild success. The best DJs and rock groups in Emilia-Romagna heard the buzz about this improbably cool place in fusty Modena and booked their nights. On Thursdays, well-known comedians came to hone their stand-up routines. Bottura himself was on a killing schedule, cooking lunch and dinner at Campazzo and then, as soon as the last dinner guest was gone, heading to the Harley to cook again. He says he had never been so happy.
Bottura met Lara Gilmore in New York, in the spring of 1993, on the day they both started working the two-to-midnight shift at Caffè di Nonna, a hitherto uninspired Italian restaurant in SoHo, with Gilbert behind the bar, dispensing wine and cappuccino, and Bottura in the kitchen, cooking. Bottura had fallen in love with America, despite (or possibly because of) an “amazingly weird” trip in 1991 to Arkansas, where he and a friend from home encountered a biker by the name of Ed at a Domino’s Pizza, endured a session at Ed’s favorite tattoo parlor (Bottura chose a winged buffalo head, which by now looks like a bunny with serrated ears), drank like “Harley men” (beer and Jack Daniel’s), and were stiffed on an order of custom bikes (made from parts of a 1968 white-and-yellow Harley classic), which were nowhere in evidence six months later when they flew from Italy to Ed’s mechanic in Daytona Beach to claim them. The experience did not discourage Bottura—not, at any rate, enough to keep him from moving to New York for six months to “taste its food, look at its art, listen to its music, and reignite my passion.” He was turning thirty-one, and had decided to close the club, put Campazzo on the market, and use the money to open a different kind of restaurant. He was “looking for energy and inspiration to tell me what that restaurant would be.” His one problem in New York was coffee. “I was desperate for good coffee” is how he describes the odyssey that took him from the middle reaches of Columbus Avenue, where he had rented a one-room walk-up, to SoHo, where, on his search for the perfect espresso, he noticed an illy coffee sign in the window of a restaurant at Grand and Mercer, walked in, ordered a double, and the next morning had a job.
Gilmore was twenty-four and living with a drummer in a sublet on the Lower East Side. Her parents lived in Bedford, in Westchester, where her father, Kenneth Gilmore, had just retired as the editor in chief of Reader’s Digest. She had gone to Andover, studied art and theater at Hampshire College, with a year off, painting at the New York Studio School—after which she had interned at the Kitchen and then at Aperture, the photography-book publisher. When she met Bottura, she was at the Actors Studio and auditioning for parts. “Lara was my dream of America,” Bottura says. She was smart, beautiful—with dark eyes and light-brown hair—and to his surprise, knew Italian, having spent summers studying art in Florence. Bottura, in his New York incarnation, was sporting a goatee, a pair of round blue John Lennon glasses, and a Kangol hat. Gilmore thought he looked “very cool,” and a few months later invited him to a Wooster Group play. “I didn’t understand a thing happening on that stage,” he told me. “I slept through most of it. But Lara took over my education. She opened the world of the avant-garde to me.” His Modena girlfriend, who had been living with him in New York, left him. Gilmore and her drummer parted. The party had moved to Bedford.
“They would arrive at my house late Saturday night, after the Nonna closed,” Lara’s mother, Janet Gilmore, told me. “My husband and I would wake up Sunday mornings and find all these wonderful young people sprawled out on the sofas, the chairs, the floors, the beds. In the summer, we always rented a big family house on Block Island. Later, when Max came, he took over the kitchen there. If we were out of wine, he would marinate the fish he’d caught in white tea. If there was nothing for lunch, he’d improvise and make everybody’s children pizza. He was so full of energy, like an active volcano, flowing ideas.”
Late that summer, Bottura flew home to sell Campazzo and start looking for the right place in Modena for a new restaurant. Gilmore surprised him there on his birthday, moved in with his old girlfriend—they had become friends—and the two women opened an American vintage-clothing store. “Max was happy,” Gilmore says, “but I was thinking, Isn’t it time we had a conversation?” Two weeks later, the French chef Alain Ducasse, who was in Modena tasting balsamic vinegars, sat down to lunch at Campazzo. When the service ended, he walked into the kitchen and invited Bottura to cook with him at the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo. Bottura went, and Ducasse became his new mentor, the one with the exemplary kitchen battery and the scrupulous mise en place. Gilmore visited once. She and Max had their conversation. “I asked him what to expect,” she told me. “He said something appalling like ‘Gee, I don’t know, there are so many beautiful women out there I haven’t met.’” She left without saying another word.
Bottura couldn’t believe she was gone. He left Monaco to find her. Two weeks later, he tracked her down in Bedford. They flew back to Modena together, and in October of 1994 Bottura rented a small building on a quiet cobblestoned street that had once been an inn named Osteria Francescana, after San Francesco, the neighborhood’s thirteenth-century parish church. He restored it, opened in March, and in July, he and Gilmore married. The groom cooked dinner for two hundred guests. The bride did the flowers and the tables. Bottura was thrown into the swimming pool (the bad boys again). “And I had my revenge for that awful Ducasse moment,” Gilmore said when she showed me a picture in which she digs into the wedding cake with both hands, scoops out a large chunk, and rubs it into her husband’s face. “It felt great.”
For the next three years, Gilmore and Bottura led fairly separate lives, with Lara at di Mitri’s company, Sartoria, putting out an arts magazine called CUBE, and Max at
the restaurant, cooking. “The first year, we were full,” Bottura says. “Everyone I knew came, especially my friends who had helped paint it—they ate free.” The second year, we were empty. I was ready to close.” Bottura’s father was not forthcoming, and in any event, Bottura wouldn’t have asked for help. (By the time his father died, he had sold his business and transferred nearly all his property to his mistress; Bottura didn’t receive a cent.) It was the Gilmores who saved Francescana. “Well, we believed in Max,” Janet Gilmore told me. “We saw that he had a vision. It was a very modest sum we advanced, and we knew it wouldn’t be used for a Ferrari.”
Francescana survived. Bottura began to experiment more. “I was making ‘foam’ with a blender,” he says. “It was more foamy than it was foam, but it was different. I thought my cuisine was very interesting.” It must have been, because Francescana was getting a reputation abroad. It wasn’t at the cutting edge of molecular gastronomy—Bottura didn’t have money for that kind of equipment anyway—but he was creating small miracles of taste with the equipment he had. In 1999, Ferran Adrià came to Modena. He tasted Bottura’s food—with the result that Bottura spent the next summer in Spain, working at elBulli. Gilmore, who at the time was pregnant with their second child, says, “Max didn’t bring the fireworks back from Spain, just one siphon”—the secret of which turned out to be nothing more alchemical than two small cartridges—“but what he did bring back was a new way of thinking about Italian ingredients, at every station of the kitchen.”
Bottura says the experience changed his life. “Right away, I realized that it wasn’t just about technique. Before, I had made my foam in a blender, and the only difference now, with the siphon, was that I could make foam airier and better. What changed me was the message of freedom that Ferran gave me, the freedom to feel my own fire, to look inside myself and make my thoughts edible. There were three of us interning with him that summer. René Redzepi was there from Copenhagen—that’s how we met—and there was this older hairy guy from Rome, who had a bar near the Trevi Fountain. René and I were moving from one station to another, doing cold savory, doing pastry with Ferran’s brother, Albert, learning so much, and trading reflections on how to eat. But the guy from Rome, all he wanted to learn was how to make Parmesan ice cream. Ferran was pissed. He put him to work, hard labor: sixteen hours a day with his hands in ice water cleaning sardines, or peeling pine nuts. Late one night the three of us were standing looking at the sea. It was one o’clock, and we had been working nonstop since eight forty-five in the morning. We were so tired that we were almost asleep on our feet. The next morning, the Roman came in, strangely happy. He said, ‘Guys, I’m back to Rome. Fuck you!’ An hour later, he was gone.”
Adrià was Bottura’s last mentor, and Bottura thanked him in a new recipe for pasta e fagioli. The dish is layered. The bottom layer is a crème royale of foie gras, cooked with pork rind, in honor of Ducasse. The next three layers are for his grandmother, his mother, and Lidia; he calls them “compressed tradition.” Lidia’s layer is radicchio and pancetta; Luisa’s is a cream of borlotti beans; and la nonna’s, “where the pasta should be,” is Parmesan rind cooked with more beans and sliced to a chewy crunch. The top layer is for Adrià, an air of rosemary so delicate and light that it’s almost invisible; you know it’s there by the burst of flavor on your tongue. When I asked Bottura how he did that, he said, “Water is truth”—distilled and vaporized.
I ate at Francescana three times (four, if you count the night I was waiting for Bottura—reading a book and having a glass of wine in one of its three small dining rooms—and a feast materialized at my table). The first time Bottura served me Sensations (thirteen dishes that take you on a trip through Italy, from the Alps to the boot and across the Strait of Messina to Sicily), along with a couple of dishes from his Classics tasting menu (recipes so popular that he can’t retire them), which he thought I should try. Three hours later, I got up feeling as light as if I’d eaten no more than a simple pasta and a plain green salad—the reason, as Bottura put it, being that “my mediums are holy water, a little olive oil, and basta!” His crèmes royales have no cream. The foam in his Memory of a Mortadella Sandwich (which is not a sandwich) is whipped with distilled mortadella “water,” concentrated in a Rotavapor. The cotechino in his ravioli loses its fat in the process of being steamed and chilled.
I learned some interesting things from Bottura. I learned that he made risotto broth the way his grandmother had made it, with Parmesan crusts, simmered in water until their flavor leached. The night I came home to Umbria, where I was spending the summer, I sliced the crust from some Parmesan in the fridge, tossed it into a pot of water, and served my husband the best risotto Milanese either of us had ever eaten. A week later, I made Bottura’s home version of a splendid tagliatelle ragù that had appeared the night I was waiting for him at Francescana (its meat softened, as I’d suspected, in the restaurant’s thermal circulator). I didn’t have a circulator. I didn’t even have any veal cheeks or veal tongue or beef tail or marrow, nor could I possibly have hoped to find them at my country co-op.
I was comforted by the fact that Bottura had said to relax, to use whatever was in the house, because the important thing was “no tomato” and the secret was not to grind the meat: wait until the ragù is cooked, and then do what the grandmothers did—chop it or tear it apart. Taking him at his word, I defrosted a couple of veal scallopini and a chunk of beef fillet, dusted them with a little flour, browned them in olive oil, and cooked them in leftover wine for the minute it took the liquid to evaporate; crisped some bits of fresh sausage and pancetta in a hot pan; made the soffrito—onion, carrot, and celery stalk—and for marrow, chopped and browned a handful of lardo; put everything in a big pot with rosemary and bay leaves from the garden and left my ragù to simmer in beef broth for two hours, over heat so low that the flame on my burner kept going out. I ignored the homemade-tagliatelle part, opened a box of fettuccine, and while the pasta cooked, tore the meat with my fingers. Bottura was right. It made all the difference.
Bottura and Gilmore work together now. She is his house skeptic, his sounding board and critic, his editor, and often his ghostwriter, the one who translates those loud, bardic bursts of creativity into something focused and coherent, strips the stories he tells so well of any traces of what could be called the local operatic style, and shapes them for publication. He never neglects to say how much of the magic surrounding Francescana is hers. “She introduced me to a deep conceptual world, she gave me a critical point of view, a way of seeing,” he says. “She told me, ‘We are contemporary people. We don’t have to cook in a nostalgic way.’”
Gilmore is rarely at the restaurant. If you see her there, it’s usually in the afternoon, arranging fresh flowers, or at a table with friends, eating—never at the door, greeting customers, or notepad in hand, taking orders like the traditional Italian chef’s wife. When we met, last summer, she was polishing Bottura’s eponymous third book, which has the working title Never Trust a Skinny Italian Chef. The book, which comes out next year, is one of new gastronomy’s art-of-the-chef tomes—photography, autobiography, history, food philosophy, and, usually reluctantly, recipes—that rarely make it from the coffee table to anybody’s kitchen, the photographs being too beautiful to subject to stains and oil splotches, and the recipes too complex for anyone without, as in Bottura’s case, a hanging eel skinner and deboner or the right syringe for injecting aged balsamic vinegar into a bar of almond-and-hazelnut-lacquered foie gras on a Popsicle stick. Gilmore was organizing its chapters, which have names like “Working-Class Heroes” (Bottura’s tribute to the foods of Italy’s traditional peasant larders) and “Image and Likeness” (for the transformative effect of art, music, literature, and travel on his cooking). She was also choosing the photographs of plated food from a stack that had just arrived from the Milan artist Carlo Benvenuto, whose picture White Tablecloth and Glasses was one of the first pieces that Bottura bought for what is now an impressive
collection of contemporary art, much of it American, and is the first thing you see when you walk into Francescana. (Benvenuto describes himself as “the guy Max calls in the middle of the night, throws out some clue as to what he’s thinking, and asks how an artist would interpret that, what kind of food would an artist eat, walking around with that thought.”)
Gilmore enjoyed the work. The hard part was transcribing the recipes that Bottura dictated, on his feet and thinking rapidly out loud, without much patience for specifics. They were trying to adapt a few of his recipes for home kitchens, and the closest they came to arguing while I was with them involved a simple kitchen utensil. “Beat everything together,” Bottura said toward the end of one recipe. “Beat with what?” Gilmore asked him. “Just say ‘Beat,’” Bottura told her. “But with what? A spoon? A whisk? A mixer?” She needed to know that. “Will you just say ‘Beat’!” Bottura shouted and left the room. A few minutes later, he was back, looking contrite. “A whisk,” he whispered. Gilmore opened her laptop and wrote it down, trying not to smile.
Today most of Modena wants to eat at Francescana. The problem is getting a reservation. Bottura has brought the world there, and the world books tables in advance. He is now the city’s most famous citizen, like Pavarotti before him. The mayor loves him. Strangers hail him on the street. The cook at his local pizzeria named a pizza for him. Bottura, for his part, has become the very visible face of Emilia-Romagna’s foods. He blends and sells a line of aged balsamic vinegars. He appears at nearly every event having to do with agriculture, from the culatello celebration we went to at a villa near Parma (complete with haystack seats and a pen of sleek black piglets) to meetings at the two agriculture schools that he has persuaded the government to revive by adding cooking courses, “to give young farmers a sense of belonging to the community, a sense of the connection between what they do and what the rest of us eat.” He works with dairy farmers to renew their herds of the area’s vanishing Bianca Modenese cows, and with chicken farmers to switch their production to its heritage Romagnola hens. He makes videos about old eel fishermen on the Po who have lost their livelihood to riverine neglect, and, because of his fame, and the charm of the stories he tells (they’re like Italian folktales), he has shamed the regional politicos into allocating large grants to restore fishing to the river.