Heat (7 page)

Joe is eight years younger than Mario but has the gravitas of someone twelve years older. His head is shaved. He is big, although not portly, and his bigness conveys power. He has a boxer’s waddle—legs apart, hands to his side, at the ready—which, when I attended a Bastianich family christening, I noticed his four-year old son was already imitating. Over the course of a dinner prepared by Betta—a white pizza, followed by green pappardelle with a quail ragù, then tortellini in thick cream—Gianni and Roberto speculated on how Joe worked with Mario.

“You must be the salt,” Roberto suggested, “and Mario would be the pepper.”

“You’re the money man,” Giovanni clarified. The idea was that Joe must have brought Mario under control and tamed him.

Joe shrugged and turned to me. “How do you say ‘whatever’ in Italian?”

Roberto and Gianni continued to press their point. For them, it was inconceivable that the man in pantaloons whom they’d picked up at the train station in 1989 would have left them to become a famous chef, without the help of someone much more worldly. Mario had been the clown of the town—or at least its most sybaritic spokesman. He had appeared in an annual Porretta talent show (“The other contestants were fourteen-year-old girls,” Roberto said) with a three-piece band, the barber on drums, the headstone carver on sax, and Mario on electric guitar, playing a long, loud version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey, Joe.” He had been the wild dancer at the disco, returning home with Bruno, the postmaster, to sing harvest songs until dawn. Mario had drunk more than anyone had ever seen before.

“Fifteen whiskies in one sitting,” Roberto said. “Can you imagine?”

“It was twenty,” Gianni said. “I used to count.”

He was the fat man with a dozen girlfriends who all seemed to be named Jennifer. “Even the Italian ones were Jennifer,” Roberto said.

“Why is a fat man so attractive to women?” Gianni asked.

“Is he fatter now or then?” Roberto asked by way of reply.

“You know,” Joe whispered to me across the table, “I don’t think I can take any more of this.” He hummed an opera aria.

After three years, Mario left Italy, and things became difficult for Gianni and Roberto. It was as though Mario’s leaving and the decline in the Valdiserris’ fortunes were connected. Mario returned to America to make money, just as Gianni and Roberto started losing it.

The restaurant had always been expensive, they said. Then, in a matter of months, there was less money in town. The year, 1992, marked the beginning of a Europe-wide recession, although neither Gianni nor Roberto had any understanding of what was going on elsewhere; they knew only that one month they’d been busy, the next month they weren’t. Orders at the factory where Roberto worked had fallen, and executives from abroad visited less often. Fewer families came from Bologna, and their vacation homes were not being rented: Who wants to go to the mountains and eat the spaghetti you can eat at home, when, for the same price, you can be on a beach in the South Pacific? There were deaths: Gianni’s mother, Betta’s father. There were gambling debts—casinos were Gianni’s secret affliction. La Volta was sold. Today there is a restaurant in the same place, but it has a French name and serves fish, and the two times I visited it was closed. It took Gianni nine years to come up with funds to open a new place, La Capannina, a pizzeria, located in a park by the river, where you could eat outside on a hot summer night. But the summer had been harsh, and business was poor. This was where we had our dinner, but it was too cold to sit outside, and the other customers—five of them, all workmen—were eating pizza and drinking beer. You could see unease in the mournful crinkles around Gianni’s eyes. Borgo Capanne, the little village on the hill, was now dead, his daughter Mila said, giving me a tour of it the next day.
Più bestie che persone.
There were more pets than people.

Mario left before the decline, with the help of his best friend from Rutgers, Arturo Sighinolfi. Arturo had visited Mario in Porretta. The two shared an understanding about Italian cooking. Arturo’s father was about to retire; for twenty-five years, he’d run Rocco, an Italian-American restaurant off Bleecker Street, in the “red sauce zone.” Arturo invited Mario to run the restaurant with him as a fifty-fifty partner—Arturo in the front, Mario in the kitchen. There was an apartment upstairs where Mario could live. The new Rocco, inspired by La Volta, would have a powerful Italian menu.

5

T
HE
B
ABBO KITCHEN
was actually several kitchens. In the morning, this small space—the work area is about twenty-five feet by ten—was the prep kitchen and run by Elisa. In the evenings, the same space became the service kitchen and was run by Andy. But between the hours of one and four-thirty, the different kitchens (more metaphors than places) overlapped.

Andy was the first to show up, calculatedly a minute or two after noon, respectfully not wanting to disturb the a.m. authority structure. Memo, the senior sous-chef, arrived an hour later. Frankie, the junior sous-chef, was next. And then the others, one after another, late risers all, buzzing with their first coffee, smelling of soap, their hair still wet. The last was Nick Anderer, the “pasta guy.” Nick was tall, lean, a tennis player’s build, a blue bandanna always tied round his forehead, with the dark-haired, brown-eyed features of a Eurasian. Nick’s father was of German ancestry, and his mother was Japanese-American, and so he was called “Chino” (even though, in a better world, he would have been neither a Chino nor a Jappo, but just plain Nick). His station was the easiest to set up but the most demanding to run. Just about everyone orders pasta. By the time Nick arrived, between two and three, the kitchen got very busy.

By now, there were eighteen to twenty people in the kitchen. During this time, the prep people were frantically completing their tasks, while the line cooks were getting their stations ready, terrified that they wouldn’t finish before the first orders. In many ways, these afternoons were exaggerated expressions of something that was characteristic of both New York (where, with so many people concentrated onto a little island, space is precious and its value inflated) and the restaurant business (in which the size of the kitchen and the dining room are financial calculations, and a small kitchen meant more tables). The space concern was extreme. There was no lunch service because the metaphoric prep kitchen was still working at lunchtime. There was also no lunch service because so much of the restaurant’s equipment—tablecloths, cutlery, plates, glasses—was stored underneath the banquettes where a lunch crowd would sit: every morning, the restaurant was taken apart; every afternoon, it was put back together. The so-called Babbo office was two chairs and a computer in whatever basement cranny presented itself at the time. It seemed like an extension of the plumbing, jerry-built. When a hot-water tank exploded—for several days, the water for the dishes was boiled—the “office” was removed to get to the tank. The desk of Mario’s assistant was underneath a slop sink, gurgling with the foodstuffs swirling into it. The smell was pervasive.

In the afternoon, there was a hierarchy about space. Mario had warned me of this after I mentioned that I must have been sticking my butt out because I kept getting bumped. “They bump you because they can—they’re putting you in your place.” The next day, I counted: I was bumped forty times. Space was Andy’s first concern; when he arrived, he went straight to the walk-in to see if he could shift things from large containers to smaller ones. If he couldn’t, the work being done by the prep kitchen would have no place to be stored. Once, I helped him prepare a herb salad by destemming the herbs to concentrate their flavors. We started in the dining room, because there was no space in the kitchen. We moved to the dark coffee station in front of the kitchen doors, when tables were being set up, until finally we were backed up against the ladies’ room.

In the afternoon, if you can get a perch in the kitchen, you don’t leave it. You don’t answer the phone, run an errand, make a cup of coffee, have a pee, because if you do you’ll lose your space. Around two o’clock, trays of braised meat came out of the oven, but there was no place to put them, so they sat on top of the trash cans. Trays were stacked on top of those trays. And sometimes there were trays stacked on top of those.

Mario flits between the shifts, unpredictably. He no longer runs the kitchen—he sneaks up on it to see that it’s functioning properly or simply visits it when the spirit moves him—but the public expectation is that he’s there every night, preparing every dish, an idea that he reinforces, flamboyantly rushing out plates from the kitchen to special customers. The year after Babbo opened, he had a brain aneurysm, alarming his family. “I thought, Oh my God, here it comes,” his brother Dana recalls. “Mario’s Marilyn Monroe moment, having burned up both ends of the candle.” It also alarmed Babbo customers, who canceled their reservations. “The only time anyone could walk in and get a table,” Elisa remembers.

One afternoon, Mario showed up to make a special called a
cioppino.
He’d prepared the dish the night before but had got only four orders. “This time, the waiters are going to push it, and if they don’t sell out I’ll fire them,” he said cheerfully.
Cioppino
is a contraction of
“C’è un po’?”
—is there a little something?—an Italian-immigrant soup made from leftovers and whatever “little thing” a member of the household was able to beg from fishermen at the end of the day. On this occasion, the “little thing” would be crabmeat, and, true to the ideology of the dish, Mario roamed the kitchen, collecting whatever was on hand—tomato pulp and liquid, left over from tomatoes that had been roasted, carrot tops, a bowl of onion skins, anything. He would charge twenty-nine dollars.

Mario took over a position normally occupied by Dominic Cipollone, the sauté chef. Dominic had been at Babbo for two years; it was his first restaurant job. (“Whatever he is,” Mario said, “we made him.”) He has a heavy, saturnine manner and a Fred-Flintstone-in-need-of-a-shave look, and, at one point, in his lugubrious way, he turned and ran into Mario.

“Dom, you just bumped me,” Mario said.

Dominic apologized. His tone was ironic; it said, Of course I bumped you. You’re a big guy and you were in my way.

But Mario was not appeased. “Dom, don’t ever do that again.”

Dom was unsure how to respond. Was it a joke?

“I do not want to be bumped by you,” Mario continued. “You see this counter? I own it. You see this floor? I own it. Everything here I own. I don’t want you to bump me.”

I discovered Dominic in the walk-in. “I’ve got Mario at my station. I’m cleaning up after him, and he’s bumping me. I’m staying here.”

(In the event, thirty-four
cioppini
were sold that night. “The waiters came through,” Mario told me when I showed up the next morning and found him reclining on a banquette, drinking a whiskey. “I’m very happy.”)

Once Mario left the kitchen, you never knew when he was coming back. Elisa recalled the trepidation that had surrounded his departures in the early days, especially during a Chinatown phase, when he’d return with purchases he felt should be served as specials. Duck feet, say, or duck tongues. “Very, very small, with a tiny bone in the back which was almost impossible to get out.” Or jellyfish, which, in the tradition of preparing local ingredients in an Italian way, were cut up into strips, marinated with olive oil, lemon, and basil, and served raw as a salad. “It was disgusting,” Elisa said. It was equally unnerving when Mario returned with nothing, because then, with no distractions, he started rooting around in the trash. The first time I witnessed the moment—a peculiar sight, this large man, bent over and up to his elbows in a black plastic sack of discarded foodstuffs—I was the unwitting object of his investigation. I had been cutting celery into a fine dice and was tossing away the leafy floret heads (after all, how do you cube the leaves?). The florets have the most concentrated flavor, and I knew it couldn’t be right to be throwing them away, but that’s what I was doing: I had a lot of celery to dice.

“What the hell is this?” Mario asked, when he appeared, holding up a handful of my celery leaves, before plunging back into the plastic bag to see what else was there to discover—which was, of course, more celery florets, hundreds of them. He pulled them out, shaking off whatever greasy thing was adhering to their leaves (they’d be served that night with steak). “What have you done?” he asked me in astonishment. “You’re throwing away the best part of the celery! Writer guy—busted! Remember our rule: we make money by buying food, fixing it up, and getting other people to pay for it. We do not make money by buying food and throwing it away.” I witnessed the garbage routine several more times, involving kidneys (“Elisa, we don’t throw away lamb kidneys”), the green stems of fresh garlic (“Frankie, what are you doing? These are perfect in soup”), and the rough dirty tops from wild leeks (“Somebody talk to the vegetable guy—he’s killing me”). Anything vaguely edible was thrown out only if it was confirmed that Mario wasn’t in….

I
N THE EVENINGS,
I started plating pasta.

“Like this,” Mario said. He took my tongs before I could plate a spaghetti and dropped it slowly from up high. “You want to make a mound of pasta and give it as much air as possible.” And, later, with the tortelloni: “You want only a splash of sauce. It’s about the pasta, not the sauce”—a maxim I would hear over and over again, distinguishing the restaurant’s preparation from an Italian-American one. (In red sauce joints, the dish is less about the pasta and more about the sauce, as well as the ground beef in the sauce, plus the meatballs or the sausages or both the meatballs and the sausages as well as the peppers, the pickled onions, and the chili flakes.) Mario took my spoon—the tortelloni break up if you use tongs—and told me how to hold it. “You’re not a housewife. Don’t use the handle. Seize the spoon, here, at the base of the stem. You’ll have more control. It’s only heat.” (Foolish me, I thought, and had a sudden fantasy, occasioned by my embarrassment, of a futurist cutlery, including a post-modern spoon, all spoon and no handle, except, possibly, a half-inch spur on the side for the wusses who needed one.) Later, Mario explained the components of the tortelloni. The tortelloni was a soft, pillowy pasta, stuffed with goat cheese and served with dried orange zest and a dusting of fennel pollen, which was like an exaggerated version of fennel. Fennel pollen was a discovery of food writer Faith Willinger, an American living in Florence who had some secret source there: on trips to the States, she stashed the fennel pollen in her suitcase, shrink-wrapped in a smuggler’s hundred-gram plastic bag. And the orange peel? Because orange and fennel are a classic combination. They also give some bite to a soft, unacidic dish.