Heat (2 page)

Batali was born in 1960 and grew up outside Seattle: a suburban kid with a solid
Leave It to Beaver
upbringing. His mother, Marilyn, is English and French Canadian—from her comes her son’s flaming red hair and a fair, un-Italian complexion. The Italian is from his father, Armandino, the grandson of immigrants who arrived in the 1890s. When Mario was growing up, his father was a well-paid Boeing executive in charge of procuring airplane parts made overseas, and in 1975, after being posted to Europe, to supervise the manufacturing close-up, he moved his family to Spain. That, according to Gina, Mario’s youngest sibling, was when Mario changed. (“He was already pushing the limits.”) Madrid, in the post-Franco years (bars with no minimum age, hash hangouts, the world’s oldest profession suddenly legalized), was a place of exhilarating license, and Mario seems to have experienced a little bit of everything on offer. He was caught growing marijuana on the roof of his father’s apartment building (the first incident of what would become a theme—Batali was later expelled from his dorm in college, suspected of dealing, and, later still, there was some trouble in Tijuana that actually landed him in jail). The marijuana association also evokes a memory of the first meals Batali remembers preparing, late-night
panini
with caramelized locally grown onions, a local cow’s-milk Spanish cheese, and paper-thin slices of chorizo: “The best stoner munch you can imagine; me and my younger brother Dana were just classic stoner kids—we were so happy.”

By the time Batali returned to the United States in 1978 to attend Rutgers University, in New Jersey, he was determined to get back to Europe (“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 unlikely double major was in business management and Spanish theatre. But after being thrown out of his dorm, Batali got work as a dishwasher at a pizzeria called Stuff Yer Face (in its name alone, destiny was calling), and his life changed. He was promoted to cook, then line cook (working at one “station” in a “line” of stations, making one thing), and then asked to be manager, an offer he turned down. He didn’t want the responsibility; he was having too good a time. The life at Stuff Yer Face was fast (twenty-five years later, he still claims he has the record for the most pizzas made in an hour), sexy (“The most booooootiful waitresses in town”), and very buzzy (“I don’t want to come off as a big druggy, but when a guy comes into the kitchen with a pizza pan turned upside down, covered with lines of coke, how can you say no?”). When, in his junior year, he attended a career conference hosted by representatives from major corporations, Batali realized he had been wrong; he was never going to be a banker. He was going to be a chef.

“My mother and grandmother had always told me that I should be a cook. In fact, when I was preparing my applications for college, my mother had suggested cooking school. But I said, ‘Ma, that’s too gay. I don’t want to go to cooking school—that’s for fags.’” Five years later, Batali was back in Europe, attending the Cordon Bleu in London.

His father, still overseeing Boeing’s foreign operations, was now based in England. Gina Batali was there, too, and recalls seeing her eldest brother only when she was getting ready for school and he was returning from his all-night escapades after attending classes during the day and then working at a pub. The pub was the Six Bells, on the King’s Road in Chelsea. Mario had been bartending at the so-called American bar (“
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 Yorkshire man named Marco Pierre White. Batali, bored by the pace of cooking school, was hired to be the new chef’s slave.

Today, Marco Pierre White is regarded as one of the most influential chefs in Britain (as well as the most foul-tempered, most mercurial, and most bullying), and it’s an extraordinary fortuity that these two men, both in their early twenties, found themselves in a tiny pub kitchen together. Batali didn’t understand what he was witnessing: his restaurant experience had been making strombolis in New Brunswick. “I assumed I was seeing what everyone else already knew. I didn’t feel like I was on the cusp of a revolution. And yet, while I had no idea this guy was about to become so famous, I could see he was 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’s making a deep green puree from basil leaves and then a white butter sauce, then 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, master’”) and they’d return with game birds or ingredients for some of the most improbable dishes ever to be served in an English pub:
écrevisses
in a reduced lobster sauce, oysters with caviar, roasted ortolan (a rare, tiny bird served virtually breathing, gulped down, innards and all, like a raw crustacean)—“the whole menu written out in fucking French.”

According to Batali, White was basically illiterate, but because he was so intuitive and physical—” a beautiful specimen, perfect, a classic body, like a sculpture, with broad shoulders, narrow waist”—he could do things to food that no one else had done before. “He made a hollandaise by beating the sauce so vigorously that it began to froth up and became something else—it was like a sabayon.” He was forever chopping things, reducing them, and making Batali force them through a sieve—” which was no bigger than a fucking tea strainer, because it was a pub and that was all he had, and I’d spend my whole day crushing some chunky shellfish reduction through this tiny thing, ramming it over and over again with a wooden spoon.”

White’s term of choice was “navvy.” “You know, we’re just two guys in the kitchen,” Batali recalls, “and I’m not cooking the fries right, according to him, or the zucchini, or whatever it was, and he tells me to sauté the snow peas instead, while he’s over in the corner doing some dramatic thing with six crayfish, and suddenly he calls out, ‘Bring me the snow peas
now,
’ and I duly bring them over. ‘Here are the snow peas, master,’ but he doesn’t like the look of them. ‘They’re wrong, you arsehole. They’re overcooked, you fucking moron. You’ve ruined them, you goddamn fucking navvy.’ But I’m an American, and I didn’t understand what ‘navvy’ meant, and I’d say something like ‘Navvy this, navvy that, if you don’t like my snow peas then make them yourself,’ which made him even angrier.” He threw a risotto into Batali’s chest. He beat up an Irish kid who washed the dishes. “He was intimidating,” Batali recalls. He stuck it out for four months—“I was frightened for my life, this guy was a mean motherfucker”—then dumped two handfuls of salt into a beurre blanc and walked out.

“I will never forget him,” White said, when I met him in London. “He has fucking big calves, doesn’t he? He should donate them to the kitchen when he dies. They’ll make a great osso buco. If he walked in today, and I saw only those calves, I’d know it was Mario.” According to White, Mario wasn’t taking his calling seriously. “The sleeping thing killed him.” He would have been a perfectly competent chef, White said, if only he’d got up when his alarm went off. He recalls dispatching Batali to buy tropical fruit. “He came back with four avocados. He was worn out. He didn’t know what he was doing. He’d been out until four in the morning. He was wild. Hard core. Joy Division was his favorite band, and that says it all.” White put his finger to his nose and sniffed. “Know what I mean?” White shook his head. “Would it be fair to say that, in those days, his enthusiasm for gastronomy was considerably greater than his talent? Is that a fair comment? Has his talent caught up?”

In White’s kitchen, Batali was a failure, and you can tell that he’d like to dismiss the experience but can’t: after all, White was the first person to show Batali what a chef could be. As a result, White is both loathed by Batali and respected. Even now, twenty years later, you hear in Batali’s account a nagging irritation at his failure to charm or work with someone who understood so much about the potential of food—that “it was a wide-open game.” From White, Batali learned the virtues of presentation, speed, stamina, and intense athletic cooking. And from White he acquired a hatred of things French. Batali has an injunction against reduced sauces, the business of boiling a meat broth until it is reduced to an intense syrup. (“If you can run your finger through it and it leaves an impression, then it’s not me, we won’t serve it, it’s too French.”) And a prohibition against tantrums. (“It’s so old school, so made for the movies.”) But mainly Batali learned how much he had to learn.

Provoked by White’s command, Batali embarked on a grand tour of the grandest restaurants in Europe, tracing White’s skills back to their origins like someone following a genealogical line: the Tour d’Argent in Paris; the Moulin de Mougins, in Provence; the Waterside Inn, outside London, then regarded as the best restaurant in Britain. “In four months, you learn the essentials of the place,” Batali told me. “If you want to learn them properly, you have to stay a year, to cook through the seasons. But I was in a hurry.” Most of the time, Batali was stuck doing highly repetitive tasks: squeezing duck carcasses, night after night, using a machine designed to get that extra ounce of juice to go into a duck stock, which, in turn, would be reduced into one of those “sticky, gummy” sauces for which Batali was developing such a distaste. “You learn by working in the kitchen. Not by reading a book or watching a television program or going to cooking school. That’s how it’s done.”

That’s what I wanted to do—to work in the Babbo kitchen, as Mario’s slave.

K
ITCHEN
S
LAVE

Serendipitously, I found that a man cooking turned out to be seductive. I’d invited a woman over for dinner—let’s call her Mary Alice. I put on some Erroll Garner, then some Miles Davis, then “Moonglow” and the theme from
Picnic,
the most romantic music I know from the most romantic love scene ever filmed, and brought out the first course which I’d made beforehand—shrimp Rothschild, which is hollowed-out loaves of bread sautéed in clarified butter, then filled with shrimp braised in fish stock for just a couple of minutes, the stock then reduced practically to a syrup, topped off in the oven with some Gruyère and a slice of truffle. I brought it to her.

“Oh,” she said and followed me back to the kitchen where I put together the tournedos Rossini—small filets of beef topped with foie gras, a truffle slice, and a Madeira reduction.

“Ah.” She began asking very detailed questions about what I was doing and who I was.

What cinched it was a spectacular creation called Le Talleyrand. You make it with canned cherries of all things and ground almonds and sugar, cover them with a meringue, and in the meringue you put half an empty eggshell, bake it, and for the spectacular part you turn off the lights, ignite a little kirsch or rum, pour it into the eggshell when it comes out of the oven all browned, and it looks like a small volcano—which is where things can get very moist.

Mary Alice’s eyes were limpid and beseeching. “You’re the deepest and most complex man I know, and I love your knowledge and your fingers…but I made another date tonight at ten.” And off she went to spend the night with another guy. All my work went to benefit him! And he never even called to thank me.

—J
ONATHAN
R
EYNOLDS,
Dinner with Demons,
2003

1

I
WAS ACCEPTED
“inside” on a trial basis. “The question is space,” Mario said. “Is there room for another body?” There wasn’t. There wasn’t room for the people already there. But somehow I squeezed in. To start, I’d do a night or two plating pasta plus Fridays in the prep kitchen, preparing food for the evening. Mario then invited me to attend a Saturday morning kitchen meeting. It was January 26th, 2002.

Twenty people showed up, gathered round a long table upstairs, Mario in the middle. In April,
The Babbo Cookbook
would be published, and its publication, he said, had a number of implications. “We’ll come under more scrutiny. There’ll be television crews, bigger crowds, and, most importantly, the critics will be back.” Babbo was a three-star restaurant and, according to Mario, was now likely to be reassessed to see if it still deserved its stars. What he really meant was that the new
New York Times
restaurant critic hadn’t written about Babbo, and he might use the occasion of the book’s publication to pay a visit, and Mario wanted everyone to be ready. “What’s more,” Mario said, “because the book will reveal our secrets, we’re going to have to change our menu.” He invited ideas for dishes and suggested that his cooks read through old recipes, looking for a traditional thing that can be made new. He then reminded everyone of the three essential principles of the kitchen: that we were there “to buy food, fix it up, and sell it at a profit—that’s what we do”; that consistency was essential (“If someone has a great dish and returns to have it again, and you don’t serve it to him in exactly the same way, then you’re a dick”); and that the success of Babbo, “the best Italian restaurant in America,” had arisen from its style: “More feminine than masculine. People should think there are grandmothers in the back preparing their dinner.”