Heat (6 page)

“Gina, you’re a genius.”

And so it went, ten different people, each one fed by hand.

I find myself thinking of Mrs. Waters’s seduction of Tom Jones, in the Henry Fielding novel. Actually, I see the movie version with the young Albert Finney, where “passions and appetites” blur and Mrs. Waters’s soft sighs commingle with Tom’s energetic consumption of a vast piece of roast beef. Food has always had erotic associations, and I suspect that cooking with love is an inversion of a different principle: cooking to
be
loved. The premise of a romantic meal is that by stimulating and satisfying one appetite another will be analogously stimulated as well. How exactly does Tom Jones’s appetite for a rib medium rare stimulate a craving for Mrs. Waters? Fresh pasta cooked in butter, Mario once told me, illustrating how these things seem to conjoin, “swells like a woman aroused.” Marjoram, he said on another occasion, has the oily perfume of a woman’s body: “It is the sexiest of the herbs.” Lidia, Joe Bastianich’s mother, was more explicit. “What else do you put in another person’s body?” she asked me rhetorically when I met her for lunch one day. “Do you understand?”

4

P
ORRETTA TERME, 1989.
The small restaurant of La Volta was perched high above the town of Porretta Terme, on a hill overlooking a mountainous valley between Bologna and Florence. Mario arrived by train on a Monday afternoon in November, bearing golf clubs, even though there was no golf course for a hundred miles, and an electric guitar with a small boom-box amplifier (“total fuzz at volume three”), in the hope that when he ran low on money he could cover his expenses by busking. He was wearing pajama-like pantaloons and red clogs. But there was no one to meet him (“I arrived alone at the train station of bumfuck”). He didn’t know how to use the phones and couldn’t speak Italian. When Roberto and Gianni Valdiserri finally tracked him down, they were astonished by what they saw. He did not look like the highest-paid sous-chef from the Four Seasons; he looked like an Albanian peasant, Roberto told me when I visited during a break from my time at Babbo.

The “terme” in Porretta Terme means “baths” and refers to the local sulfur springs. On my first morning there, I was woken by an instructor on a loudspeaker leading an exercise class of overweight senior citizens in one of the pools. Italians are entitled to two annual visits, paid for by the government, and can have a number of irrigations (nasal, rectal, vaginal) to deal with bowel troubles, infertility, hot flashes, and creaky knees. In an older part of town, the buildings are from the eighteenth century, when affluent Bolognese families used to come here on summer holidays to escape the heat of the plains: grand rooms, high ceilings, tall windows with wooden shutters painted an orange-yellow evocative of Hapsburg Vienna. Many are abandoned; so, too, is the old rail station, built in an imperial style, carved into the side of a mountain. For nearly two centuries, the train, the best way of crossing the Appennines, stopped in Porretta (a “Porretta box” was sold on the platform—a prosciutto
panino,
a piece of fruit, a chunk of parmigiano, and a half bottle of Lambrusco). Now tourists arrive on charter buses, wearing bathing caps. I couldn’t find Porretta in any travel guides, although I located a first edition of Faith Willinger’s
Eating in Italy,
published the year Mario arrived. There was nothing about the town, but La Volta, in the nearby village of Borgo Capanne, was cited as “the rising star on the road known as the Porrettana” (the old highway at the bottom of the valley). “Giovanni Valdisseri presides in the rustic dining room, and his wife and sister-in-law work together in the kitchen,” Willinger wrote. “The salumi are local, and the pasta is hand rolled, freshly made, not to be skipped.”

Borgo Capanne is six miles above Porretta. You reach it on a zigzaggy road of ferocious ascent. The first mile is nothing but sheerness until you come upon a church just before a village called Pieve.
Pieve
is old Italian for “country church.” After another mile, the land flattens out briefly, and you enter a village surrounded by small vegetable plots. This is Orti. An
orto
is a small vegetable farm. Poggio is next, resting atop a hill.
Poggio
means “hilltop.” Finally you reach Borgo Capanne. A
capanna
is a mountain hut; a
borgo
is a village: village of mountain huts. And if you climb the hill just above it you discover, predictably enough, stone ruins of the first habitations, sheltered in the woods. The modern part of the village has a wide view of the valley and the mountains (with volcanic cartoon peaks, like pyramids, covered by dense woods). Borgo Capanne is a cluster of interconnecting houses, everything adjoined honeycomb style, as though for protection—from the wild, from wolves, from whatever unknown thing might come up the road. To enter the honeycomb, you pass under a stone arch. In Italian, an arch is a
volta.
This is where you find the restaurant. Above the restaurant is an apartment: this was Mario’s new home.

La Volta was closed the day Mario arrived, but a seasonal supper was prepared for him (“I am, like, holy fucking shit, family meal, and we’re having white truffles!”), and everyone introduced themselves. Roberto was the expediter, after he finished his day job (he was an engineer at a factory that had been making airplane parts since World War II, when Mussolini came up with the idea of hiding the manufacturing of his air force in the mountains nearby). Roberto’s brother Gianni managed the place. His wife, Betta, was the cook. Her father, Quintiglio (“Quintiglio Canario, the fifth son of the canary, a beautiful name for a beautiful man”), was the forest forager, truffle scavenger, and mystic gardener, and he and Mario struck up an instant rapport: “So tickled to have an American in the village.”

The next morning, Mario reported for duty. Betta didn’t show up for two more hours and then rolled out a giant sheet of pasta by hand. “It was the first food I saw,” Mario recalls, although he wouldn’t be allowed to touch the dough for two weeks. He took notes and embarked on a six-month apprenticeship in what he calls the “ladies’ trick of handmade pasta.” Betta went on to make stricchetti, small bow ties, served with porcini mushrooms and little red onions cooked in olive oil. She made a different pasta the next day and a different ragù, one made from guinea-hen legs, roasted until the bones fell out and the meat dissolved into a sauce. It was a month before anyone prepared a Bolognese, the traditional meat sauce of Emilia-Romagna. “They’d gotten bored of it,” Mario said, “but then they taught me how to make it, and that became my weekly task: veal, pork, beef, and pancetta, cooked slowly with olive oil and butter. Just browning and browning, although it never turns brown because of the fat that seeps out of the meat—which you leave there, it’s part of the dish—and add white wine and milk, and, at the end, a little tomato paste, so that it’s pink-brown.”

He accompanied Quintiglio (“a salt-of-the-earth dude with big feet, strong hands, a deep voice, floppy Italian ears, and a buttoned-up shirt and jacket”) when he went looking for berries and mushrooms. He had rules about porcini and picked only the ones near oak and chestnut trees—the ones under the pines and poplars were inferior. His real talent was for finding truffles. When Armandino visited Mario the following year, he said, “It was as though God had arrived in town just before me—truffles were on everything.”

In time, Mario and Quintiglio fell into a habit of having breakfast together: a glass of red wine and an egg baked in olive oil with a slice of fontina cheese. For Christmas lunch, Quintiglio showed Mario how to make a classic
brodo,
the holiday broth served with tortellini. It required an old chicken (one no longer producing eggs), some beef bones, a bone left over from a prosciutto, an onion, and a carrot—the vegetables left whole to keep the broth clear. In the spring, they ate from Quintiglio’s garden, planted according to a lunar schedule (lettuce during a waxing moon; beets and parsnips during a waning one). Quintiglio took Mario to the Reno River for a “weird little watercress that grew there,” wild onions, and a bitter wild dandelion, which he boiled for forty-five minutes and served with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Today, Mario’s greens are cooked in the way Quintiglio taught him. (“Much better to boil the shit out of them and
then
sauté them in olive oil and garlic—you can then actually chew the fuckers.”) For Mario, Quintiglio was the first proponent of finding what is made by the land and feasting on it, of recognizing that you are eating something that you can enjoy only now, here, during this day in this season, grown in this dirt.

But the first months were not easy. Dana Batali recalls them as a time when Mario was forced to learn humility and “the things he wanted to cook were scoffed at,” although, from what I can tell, the dishes Mario prepared (raw scampi, a leek soufflé, grappa-cured salmon) were done to establish his credentials and remind his hosts that he had been, until recently, highly regarded as a chef. But Mario’s father picked up an uneasiness in his son’s letters as well. “The experience shook him up a bit.” For his part, Mario remembers it as the last lonely time in his life, a sustained pleasurable period of melancholy, “a happy sadness.” At the end of dinner, he’d go up to his room, light a candle, put on headphones, playing mainly Tom Waits during his ballady, self-pitying, hey-buddy-can-I-have-another-drink phase, read (working his way through the novels of Faulkner), looking up to take in the view—the mountains, the Reno River—and longing for company but recognizing he was better off without it. “It was a great rush. I knew, that first week, once I saw the food, that I’d made the right move. This wasn’t a food I knew. It was traditional. Simple. No sauces, no steam tables, no pans of veal stock, none of the things I had learned to do.”

Italy changed Mario, his father said. “When he arrived, he was still a wild guy. He drank a lot, smoked, chased girls. He had no idea what he was going to do with the rest of his life. Italy focused him. It gave him his culture.”

Jim Clenenden, the owner of Au Bon Climat vineyards in Santa Barbara and one of Mario’s former late-night friends, described the change more prosaically. Clenenden visited Mario at La Volta five months after his arrival. “What happened? When I saw him last, he was a West Coast guy with a New Jersey accent. Look at him: that red hair, that pale complexion. Does he look Italian to you? He could have been Mark Battle. Suddenly he was Mario Batali! The change was stupefying.” Clenenden’s visit was stupefying in other ways: eleven dishes, eleven bottles of wine, a meal that finished at four in the morning, a brutal hangover, and all the time “Mario speaking in Italian—although still American enough,
just,
to tolerate a visitor from California.” Batali hadn’t mastered the menu yet, Clenenden recalled, but was in the middle of a tremendous transformation. “He wasn’t even close to reaching a plateau. Any moment he was going to discover the next big thing—you could tell.” This was April. By the summer, the metamorphosis was complete.

O
N THE LAST NIGHT
of my visit, I had dinner with Gianni and Roberto, prepared by Betta—a doll-like woman in her forties with jet black hair and very pale skin—and served by her two children, Emiliano, twenty-eight, and Mila, now sixteen and remembered by Mario as an infant in a straw basket on the kitchen floor. I was joined by Joe Bastianich, who happened to be in the country on business. Mario’s time in and around Porretta has figured so large in the story he tells of himself that Joe, too, wanted to see the place firsthand. I didn’t know Joe well. At Babbo, he worked the front of the house—the service, the wine—and you rarely saw him in the kitchen. You also didn’t see him much during the day, because he found the Babbo office intolerable. Compared with Mario, Joe was quiet in manner, with a guardedness that might be mistaken for shyness. But he wasn’t shy, just less outgoing than his often outrageous partner, with whom he had the good sense never to compete for attention or recognition. (“Joe needs me,” Mario confessed one night. “He couldn’t do any of this without me.” “Mario is the cook,” Joe explained to me on another night. “I’m the waiter.”)

Gianni and Roberto were intrigued by Joe. Gianni is a soft man. He has thick wrists, big hands, and an elastic middle that betrays a life lived without the slightest expense of exercise. But he eats with joy, and since he eats abundantly and without inhibition he seems almost always happy. He has a handsome face with thick expressive eyebrows that are always coming together in a quizzical look, like that of a confused forest animal.

Roberto, his brother, seems more grounded. He is stocky and has a square head, a square body, and a solid manner. Unlike Gianni, who is bald, Roberto has plenty of hair, which is stiff and straw-like and sits squarely on his head, not unlike a helmet. You could imagine Roberto in a suit and tie, although tonight (befitting the enduringly wintry weather of the Appennines) he was wearing a dark wool sweater with a cotton shirt underneath.

Both brothers are dedicated food romantics. Mario had told me about long trips the three of them routinely took in quest of some meal of indisputable regional authenticity—a four-hour drive to Mantova, say, for the perfect ravioli filled with autumn squash—only to have one bite, realize that the pasta had been made by a machine rather than by hand, and walk out in protest, their hunger dealt with by emergency
panini
grabbed in a bar on the drive back home. To this day, Roberto is still indignant that a spaghetti alla carbonara, prepared by Mario, had been served with the eggs on top rather than mixed in the pasta. “I saw it with my own eyes! They were on top! It was scandalous!”

Joe Bastianich was not a romantic. He grew up in immigrant restaurants in Queens and has a nitty-gritty matter-of-factness about money. He was impatient with Gianni and Roberto. His manner said, “Mountains schmountains, restaurants are a business: Why are you guys such fuckups?” Joe is the son of Felice and Lidia Bastianich, both immigrants, who were running their own restaurant, a thirty-seater called La Buonavia, the year Joe was born, in 1968. (Lidia now has a television show, cookbooks, and her own restaurant in midtown.) Joe’s childhood memories are dominated by “the not-so-pleasant realities of preparing food for a living”—cleaning the grease traps, sweeping up the insects after the exterminator visits, the pervasive smell of shoe polish, and the stink of a changing room crowded with “sweaty, fat Italians and Croats reading the racing forms,” where Joe did his schoolwork and slept on tomato cases until he was carried home. To this day, he can’t stand bay leaves. “Three times I’ve pulled a leaf out of the throat of someone choking on it, including my grandmother when I was nine years old, and for what? Do you think the flavor is so important?” Chicken makes him shudder, the result of accompanying his father in the car to the wholesale market to pick up cheap poultry, “the
cheapest
poultry,” piled high with ice to keep it from spoiling, and when the ice melted it became a pink “chicken water” that slopped down Joe’s back. Joe never wanted a restaurant; he wanted money and became a Wall Street trader, only to discover he hated it. He recalls waiting for his first bonus, counting the minutes, cashing it, and returning to the office to resign on the spot: then he went straight to JFK and bought a ticket to Trieste. He remained there a year, living out of a Volkswagen bus, working for chefs and winemakers, needing to understand this thing that, he now appreciated, was going to be his life.