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Miriam, who can’t get a pastina to roll out the dough, no longer makes handmade pasta. When her daughter takes over, will she roll it out by hand? In Tuscany, you can’t get the meat at the heart of the region’s cooking, so Dario and the Maestro found a small farm that reproduces the intensity of flavor they grew up with. How long will that taste memory last? The Maestro will die. Dario will die. I will die. The memory will die. Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity. Find it; eat it; it will go. It has been around for millennia. Now it is evanescent, like a season.

I
HAD SOUGHT
out the old church because I knew I’d be leaving. I felt I had probably learned enough, finally, although I didn’t know how to articulate what I had learned until I visited the butcher shop for the last time. By now, Dario was like a brother, and he wasn’t going to be easy to leave. And the Maestro?

I gave myself a purpose: I was going to give the Maestro my steel—the thing you sharpen your knife against. It was an inside joke. The Maestro sharpens his knife five hundred times a day. It was the rhythm of his labor. His knife was very sharp. But his steel was very dull, and at some point he had taken to using mine: he hadn’t asked, he’d just taken it. I was flattered by this. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was a way of showing trust: yes, you’re making a mess of everything, but it’s going to be okay.

“Maestro. Here. For your knives.” I shoved the steel in his direction.

He stared at it for a long time. When he looked up, the rims around his eyes had welled up with tears. I stuttered pathetically, thinking: How do I say good-bye to these people? I will never leave.

Then he exploded. “No!” he said. That familiar injunction. I’d heard it so many times. “No. I cannot take this steel. It would not be correct.” He opened his knife drawer. “It goes here,” he said, “until you return.”

(That’s how you leave: by never saying good-bye.)

And I learned that: to return. I came back the following year and the year after that. I hope to return every year (after all, I may never have the chance to learn so much), until I have no one to return to.

D
INNER WITH
M
ARIO

The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down. Each day brings only two opportunities for field work, and they are not to be wasted minimizing the intake of cholesterol. They are indispensable, like a prizefighter’s hours on the road. (I have read that the late French professional gourmand Maurice Curnonsky ate but one meal a day—dinner. But that was late in his life, and I have always suspected his attainments anyway; so many mediocre witticisms are attributed to him that he could not have had much time for eating.) A good appetite gives an eater room to turn around in.

—A. J. L
IEBLING,
Between Meals

N
EW YORK, AUGUST 1998.
The
New York Times
review that awarded Babbo its three stars, written by the paper’s restaurant critic, Ruth Reichl, was variations on the theme that here, at last, was a place prepared to take risks. The service was described as attentive but eccentric. Reichl was particularly taken by Joe’s table-breadcrumb removal technique, using a spoon, which he defended by saying that this was how crumbs were dealt with in Italy and, besides, “I like the way it looks.” The wine list was uncompromisingly Italian. “Try it and if you still don’t want it,” Mario was quoted as saying, advocating a bottle by an unknown maker, “I’ll drink it myself.” And the menu was “loaded with dishes that Americans are not supposed to like” (Reichl cited headcheese, octopus, beef cheeks, lamb’s tongue, and calf brains). Her favorite dish was a “spicy, robust” squid preparation called a “Two-minute calamari, Sicilian lifeguard style.” “Eating it, I always imagine myself on a wind-swept beach in Sicily,” Reichl wrote—an elegant adverbial touch: the critic not only liked the food but was already a regular.

She had also been a target. When Reichl had showed up, she wasn’t to know how dedicatedly everyone had been preparing for her. Until her review was published, the restaurant’s second floor was closed; the bar accepted no more than six people; the maximum seating was restricted to eleven tables; and, by the end of the night, there were no more than fifty covers. (Today, Babbo does as many as three hundred and fifty.) When there, Reichl had the most experienced waiter, plus a backup waiter, a floor manager, and two runners. The music was either calculatedly purposeful—on Reichl’s first visit, a selection of Bob Marley tunes, to whom Mario had heard she was particularly partial—or else studiously atmospheric: a languid compilation of opera arias, say (and all of it very different from what you’d hear now, a motley miscellany, circa Rutgers class of ’82, of Moby, the Jayhawks, Squeeze, R.E.M., and the early Stones, intended solely to entertain the proprietor chef while he’s knocking back glasses of white wine at the bar, the high-volume message being that this is my house and I’ll play what I want to).

All in all, the strategies built round Reichl’s visit call to mind a coach preparing for a big game. They also created an illusion of dining room serenity and a genuine serenity in the kitchen. Was her food different as well? There is no way of knowing, but its preparation was certainly more orderly than the normal high-stress frenzy. Elisa remembers that the whole restaurant (she was then making the starters) was in a condition of constant dress rehearsal—waiting for Ruth. Joe was in the front, overseeing the service. Mario was in the kitchen, whispering every order and inspecting it before it went out. Even Andy was cooking. He was working the grill and wasn’t allowed to expedite until
after
Reichl’s review.

Reichl came to Babbo five times and ate everything on offer. The
Times
encourages its critics to make an effort at being anonymous. Reichl, with a head of black hair, was known to wear a blond wig and wouldn’t have made the reservation under her own name. But the practical truth is that a critic, after only a handful of reviews, is spotted by the people who worry about this sort of thing. Mario knew she’d be there long before she arrived.

The importance attached to the review now seems exaggerated but was a symptom of the ambitions of the new restaurant: Mario and Joe wanted those three stars. (Before Otto opened, they went through a similar drill; the hope then was for a more modest two stars, which it duly received, a more than honorable laurel for a pizza joint.) But I was mystified by the stories—the stratagems, the clandestine preparations—and asked Mario if, knowing a critic was in the house, he could make the meal better than what otherwise might be served. Wasn’t the point of the kitchen consistency—a dish was a dish was a dish?

“Trust me,” he said. “Our knowing makes a difference.”

Reichl left the
Times
in 1999 and was replaced by William Grimes, who was the critic for the next five years. (Grimes gave Otto its two stars.) At the beginning of Grimes’s tenure, Mario was convinced that Babbo would be reappraised. The worry informed that first instruction on my first day: be prepared—the critics will be back. Mario never mentioned the concern again. Instead it became Frankie’s paranoiac refrain (the you-guys-are-doing-this-deliberately-so-that-Babbo-will-lose-its-three-stars-and-I’ll-be-fucking-fired refrain). When Grimes left, the spot was filled by Amanda Hesser, an accomplished food journalist and, it seemed, a friend of the Batali-Bastianich approach. I didn’t know there was a unifying methodology, but Mario seemed to believe in one: “She
loves
us,” he told me one day, citing her enthusiasm for Lupa, their Roman-inspired trattoria not far from Babbo, and the implication was that since she liked Lupa she’d like everything else. But Hesser didn’t take up the position permanently; it remained unfilled for another five months.

At the time, I was grateful for my casual affiliation with the food trade because it provided me with a glimpse of what this period was like among the restaurateurs I happened to meet: the speculation was constant, and underlying it all was a legitimate business concern. New York is different from most European cities, which often have several upmarket newspapers competing for an upmarket audience, the kind that tends to support high-end restaurants. New York has one, the
Times,
and its critic, in the view of many proprietors, can make or break a business. The fear isn’t that a critic might have a personal agenda; it is merely that judgment is unpredictable and sometimes arbitrary, even if its consequences can be absolute: if your restaurant gets trashed, for whatever reason, your trade will suffer, and, if it survives the trashing, you may not have another chance to prove yourself.

One Saturday night in June, I was meant to have dinner with Mario but he canceled at the last minute. He had just learned that the
Times
had filled the vacancy left by Grimes. The new guy was Frank Bruni, who had been the paper’s bureau chief in Rome. Without anyone’s realizing, Bruni had dined at Babbo several times during the preceding month.
(Holy fuck!)
It was only on his last visit that he was finally spotted. His debut review would be of Babbo, and, this time, the critic had genuinely eaten his way through the menu anonymously. Mario had canceled our dinner in the hope that Bruni might return. He didn’t. He didn’t need to. His review was already written: it would appear on the following Wednesday.

There was to be a preview on a local television news station: the practice was that the critic reads the review on New York One at nine-fifteen the night before it’s published (in shadows, to preserve his anonymity). On the afternoon of the broadcast, my wife, walking past Babbo, spotted John Mainieri, the maître d’, standing outside with a gaggle of the staff, smoking furiously (John doesn’t normally smoke), his shirt soaked through with sweat. “Come back in the evening,” he urged. “We’ll be celebrating or mourning, because our future is on the line.”

“How am I?” Mario asked, rhetorically repeating the question I’d put to him. “I’ll tell you tomorrow. The whole year could be ruined.”

My wife and I spent the evening in the restaurant, enduring the countdown as well as continuous displays of self-doubt. Martin Gobbee, who’d happened to wait on Bruni’s table on his last three visits, was rehearsing the exchanges he’d had with the man. Another waiter confessed that he’d just bought an apartment in Brooklyn (“Christ, I’ve taken on a mortgage!”). The wife of David Lynch, the wine steward, was pregnant (“Because, you know, we thought the future was solid”). Mario wasn’t around.

There were two fears. One pertained to the critic. Only one thing was known about him: that he’d been previously based in Rome. This Bruni fellow actually knew Italian food. It followed that Babbo would be judged not simply against other New York restaurants but also against those from the old country. No other New York critic had that kind of knowledge.

The other fear was Frankie.

Frankie continued to have difficulties settling in, which was scarcely surprising, since almost the entire kitchen staff had resigned. Meanwhile, he had fired the new sous-chef and hired another. And then, with a day’s notice, Abelardo, from the prep kitchen, had been promoted to the pasta station, the most difficult in the kitchen. Mario was now having to be at Babbo every night. In addition, there had been some pejorative word-of-mouth patter. A Babbo regular, a writer and occasional food journalist, had eaten a bad meal—“my lamb was overcooked, and the squab was raw”—and had told so many people about his leaden lamb and his pink pigeon (“Was it because Andy is no longer there?”) that it became a public refrain, one that was regularly reaching Joe and Mario. The fear was that the patter would provoke a reappraisal—ironic now, since a reappraisal was already in the works. “This is what happens with regulars,” Joe told me, the sour word-of-mouth report circulating unstoppably. “They all self-destruct. They expect too much. They forget that it’s a business. You can never make them happy. All regulars crash and burn.” I had never seen Joe so angry.

Recently, I contacted Frank Bruni. I had obvious questions—about the Italianness of Babbo’s cooking and how it compared to what he’d been eating in Italy—but what really interested me were more prurient preoccupations: Did he realize his review had put everyone in a panic? Did he have any idea that he represented what everyone feared, a reappraisal, at a time when the kitchen was in upheaval? Mario had been at the restaurant every time Bruni ate there: did he really think that was normal?

Bruni admitted he’d been surprised that no one had caught on that he was there as a critic, especially after getting the same waiter three times in a row. And, no, he hadn’t thought that the kitchen’s performance was uneven, over and above the normal (and considerable) “disruptive feeling” of the whole place. And, no, he hadn’t picked Babbo for its Italianness, although, it’s true, he had found himself judging the food against what he’d been eating in Rome. (“Babbo is too elaborate to be genuinely Italian. Italian cooking is simple. Babbo is not simple. Italy is a starting point.”) Mainly, he was astonished that anyone would have been nervous. He explained that before he had taken up his position he had sought out the best the city had to offer. He spent four weeks eating at great New York restaurants and then considered where he’d had the most fun. “This review was my first time out, and I wanted it to be about the joy of dining in New York. It wasn’t scientific. I just liked Babbo a lot. It has a consistency of deliciousness that I knew I’d enjoy describing.”