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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The first glimpse I had of what Mario Batali's friends had described to me as the "myth of Mario" was during a weekend in January last year, when I invited him to dinner with some friends. Batali, the chef and co-owner of Babbo, an Italian restaurant in Manhattan, is such a proficient cook that he is rarely invited to people's homes for a meal, and he went out of his way to be a grateful guest. He arrived with a jar of quince-flavored grappa, which he'd made himself (the fruit renders it almost drinkable); a bottle of nocino, which he'd also made (same principle, but with walnuts); three bottles of wine; and a white, dense slab of lardo--literally, the raw "lardy" back of a very fat pig, which he'd cured with herbs and salt. I was a reasonably comfortable cook, keen but a little chaotic, and I was delighted to have Batali in the kitchen, if only for his pedagogical interventions. He has been cooking for a cable-television audience for more than six years and has an uninhibited way of telling you that only a moron would wrap the meat in foil after cooking it. The evening, by then, had been effectively taken over. Not long into it, Batali had cut very thin slices of the lardo and, with a flourish of intimacy, laid them individually on our tongues, whispering that we needed to let the lardo melt to appreciate what the pig had eaten just before he died. The pig, evidently, had been five hundred and seventy-five pounds, almost three times the size of a normal pig, and, near the end, had lived exclusively on walnuts, apples, and cream. ("It's the best song sung in the key of pig," Batali said.) No one at dinner that evening had knowingly eaten pure fat before ("At the restaurant, I tell the waiters to call it prosciutto bianco, or else people won't touch it"), and by the time he had persuaded us to a third helping my heart was racing and we were all very thirsty.
On trips to Italy made with his Babbo co-owner, Joe Bastianich, Batali has been known to share an entire case of wine during dinner, and, while we didn't drink anything like that, we were all infected by his live-very-hard-for-now approach and had more than was sensible. I don't know. I don't really remember. There was also the grappa and the nocino, and one of my last recollections is of Batali around three in the morning--back arched, eyes closed, an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth, his red Converse high-tops pounding the floor--playing air guitar to Neil Young's "Southern Man." Batali had recently turned forty, and I remember thinking that it was a long time since I'd seen a grown man playing air guitar. He then found the soundtrack for "Buena Vista Social Club," tried to salsa with one of the guests (who promptly fell over a sofa), tried to dance with her boyfriend (who was unresponsive), and then put on a Tom Waits CD and sang along as he went into the kitchen, where, with a machinelike speed, he washed the dishes and mopped the floor. He reminded me that we had an arrangement for the next day--he'd got tickets to a New York Giants game, courtesy of the commissioner of the N.F.L., who had just eaten at
Babbo--and disappeared with three of my friends. They ended up at Marylou's, in the Village--in Batali's description, "a wise-guy joint where you get anything at any time of night, none of it good."
It was nearly daylight when he got home, the doorman of his apartment building told me the next day as the two of us tried to get Batali to wake up: the N.F.L. commissioner's driver was waiting outside. When Batali was roused, forty-five minutes later, he was momentarily perplexed, standing in his doorway in his underwear and wondering why I was there. Batali has a remarkable girth, and it was a little startling to see him so clad, but within minutes he had transformed himself into the famous television chef: shorts, high-tops, sunglasses, his red hair pulled back into a ponytail. He had become Molto Mario--the many-layered name of his cooking program, which, in one of its senses, means, literally, Very Mario (that is, an intensified Mario, an exaggerated Mario, and an utterly over-the-top Mario)--and a figure whose renown I didn't fully appreciate until, as guests of the commissioner, we were allowed on the field before the game. Fans of the New York Giants are happy caricatures (the ethic is old-fashioned blue-collar, even if they're corporate managers), and I was surprised by how many of them recognized the ponytailed chef, who stood on the field facing them, arms crossed over his chest, and beaming. "Hey, Molto!" one of them shouted. "What's cooking, Mario?" "Mario, make me a pasta!" On the East Coast, "Molto Mario" is on twice a day (at eleven-thirty in the morning and five-thirty in the afternoon). I had a complex picture of the metropolitan working male--policeman, Con Ed worker, plumber--rushing home to catch lessons in how to braise his broccoli rabe and get just the right forked texture on his homemade orecchiette. (Batali later told me that when the viewing figures for his show first came in they were so overwhelmingly male that the producers thought they weren't going to be able to carry on.) I stood back, with one of the security people, taking in the spectacle (by now a crowd was chanting "Molto! Molto! Molto!")-- this proudly round man, whose whole manner said, "Dude, where's the party?"
"I love this guy," the security man said. "Just lookin' at him makes me hungry."
Mario Batali arrived in New York in 1992, when he was thirty-one. He had two hundred dollars, a duffelbag, and a guitar. Since then, he has become the city's most widely recognized chef and, almost single-handedly, has changed the way people think about Italian cooking in America. The food he prepares at Babbo, which was given three stars by the Times when the restaurant opened, in 1998, is characterized by intensity--of ingredients, of flavor--and when people talk of it they use words like "heat" and "vibrancy," "exaggeration" and "surprise." Batali is not thought of as a conventional cook, in the business of serving food for profit; he's in the much murkier enterprise of stimulating outrageous appetites and satisfying them aggressively. (In Batali's language, appetites blur: a pasta made with butter "swells like the lips of a woman aroused," roasted lotus roots are like "sucking the toes of the Shah's mistress," and just about anything powerfully flavored--the first cherries of the season, the first ramps, a cheese from Piedmont--"gives me wood.") Chefs are regular visitors and are subjected to extreme versions of what is already an extreme experience. "We're going to kill him," Batali said to me with maniacal glee as he prepared a meal for Wylie Dufresne, the former chef of 71 Clinton, who had ordered a seven-course tasting menu, to which Batali then added a lethal-seeming number of impossible-to-resist extra courses. The starters (variations, again, in the key of pig) included a plate of lonza (the cured backstrap from one of Batali's cream-apple-and-walnut-fattened pigs); a plate of coppa (made from the same creamy pig's shoulder); a fried pig foot; a porcini mushroom, stuffed with garlic and thyme, and roasted with a piece of Batali's own pancetta (cured pig belly) wrapped around its stem; plus ("just for the hell of it") tagliatelle topped with guanciale (cured pig jowls), parsnips, and black truffle. A publisher who was fed by Batali while talking to him about booking a party came away vowing to eat only soft fruit and water until he'd recovered: "This guy knows no middle ground. It's just excess on a level I've never known before--it's food and drink, food and drink, food and drink, until you start to feel as though you're on drugs." This spring, Mario was trying out a new motto, borrowed from the writer Shirley O. Corriher: "Wretched excess is just barely enough."
Batali grew up outside Seattle. His mother, Marilyn, is half French Canadian, half English (it's from her line that Batali gets the flaming-red hair and the fair complexion), and his father, Armandino, a former Boeing executive, is Italian. In 1975, Armandino was posted to Europe, to supervise the procurement of airplane parts made overseas, and moved his family to Spain. Already, Mario was, in the words of his sister Gina, "pushing the limits." For Batali, Madrid, in the years after Franco's death, was a place of exhilarating license: bars with no minimum age, hash hangouts, and flirtations with members of the world's oldest profession. He was caught growing marijuana on the roof of the Madrid apartment building where the family lived, the first incident of what became a theme: Batali was later expelled from his dorm in college, suspected of dealing, and, later still, there was some trouble outside Tijuana, which landed him in jail. (The time in Madrid evokes a memory of one of the first dishes Batali remembers preparing, a late-night panino with caramelized onions, cow's-milk cheese, and paper-thin slices of chorizo: "The best stoner munch you can imagine. Me and my brother Dana were just classic stoner kids, we were so happy.")
When Batali returned to the United States, in 1978, to attend Rutgers University, in New Jersey, he believed that his future was in Iberian finance ("I wanted to be a Spanish banker--I loved the idea of making a lot of money and living a luxurious life in Madrid"), and his improbable double major was business management and Spanish theatre. After being expelled from his dorm, he got work as a dishwasher, at a popular student restaurant called Stuff Yer Face; one can't help feeling that, in the name alone, destiny was calling. Gina Batali agrees--"This is when Mario became Mario"--although the evidence, a photograph of the young chef with an unrecognizably narrow waist, suggests that Mario didn't become Mario for another few inches. Batali was rapidly promoted--to prep cook (preparing the food for the evening chefs), then line cook (working at one "station" in a "line" of stations, making one thing)--and still claims the record for most pizzas made in an hour. The life at Stuff Yer Face was fast, sexy ("The most booooootiful waitresses in town"), and happily recreational. ("I don't want to come off as a big druggie, but a guy would bring a pizza pan turned upside down with lines of crank on it.") And when, in his junior year, he went to a career conference, attended by representatives from major corporations, Batali realized that he would never be a banker. He was going to be a chef.
"I had a natural affinity for the kitchen, and my mother and grandmother had always told me that I should be a cook. In fact, when I was preparing my college applications my mother suggested cooking school, but I said, 'Ma, that's too gay. I don't want to go to cooking school--that's for fags.' " But five years later Batali showed up for his first day at the Cordon Bleu in London.
His father, still working with Boeing, was now based in England. Gina Batali was there, too, and recalls seeing her brother in the early mornings, when he returned after being out all night, having attended classes during the day and then worked at a pub. The pub was the Six Bells, on the King's Road, in Chelsea. Mario was bartending at the "American bar" ("I had no idea what I was doing"), when a high-priced dining room opened in the back, and a chef was hired to run it, a Yorkshireman named Marco Pierre White. Mario quit cooking school, already bored by the pace, and was hired to be the new chef's slave.
Today, Marco Pierre White is regarded as one of the most influential chefs in Britain, and it's an extraordinary fortuity that these two men found themselves working together, both in their early twenties, in a tiny pub kitchen. Batali didn't understand what he was witnessing: his professional experience had been making strombolis in New Brunswick. "I assumed I was seeing what everyone else knew already; I didn't feel like someone on the cusp of a revolution. And yet I could see that this was a guy who really looked at preparing food from outside the box. He was a genius on the plate. I'd never worked on presentation. I just put shit on the plate." He described White making a deep-green basil puree, and a white butter sauce, and swirling the green sauce in one direction and the white sauce in the other, and drawing a swerving line down the middle of the plate. "I had never seen anyone draw fucking lines with two sauces." White would order Batali to follow him to market ("I was his whipping boy. 'Yes, master,' I'd answer. 'Whatever you say' "), and they would return with game birds or ingredients for some of the most improbable dishes ever to be served in an...
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