If Mario Batali’s lighthearted TV persona and unconventional orange-clogs-and-shorts attire lead you to think he’s anything but a serious student of Italian cuisine, think again. In addition to partnering in four of New York’s most successful and critically acclaimed restaurants---Babbo, Lupa, Esca and the recently opened Otto---he’s garnered the top awards that recognize his important contributions to the industry, including being named the James Beard Foundation’s “Best Chef: New York City” in 2002. And in addition to being one of the longest-running hosts on the TV Food Network, with a constant schedule of taping and planning, he’s authored three cookbooks acclaimed by chefs and home cooks alike.

After studying classical Spanish theater at Rutgers University, the young Batali enrolled briefly at Le Cordon Bleu in London and later apprenticed with London's legendary chef and restaurateur Marco Pierre White. But it was three years cooking and learning in Borgo Capanne, a tiny town in Northern Italy (population 100), that cemented a family-nurtured love for Italian cuisine. Chef Batali recently took time to share some insights with The Main Course.

What philosophy unifies your four very different restaurants---Babbo, Lupa, Esca and Otto---and makes them all successful in their own ways?
Well, the concerns are different in each of them, but the objective in all of them is to achieve a comfort level between the cook/artist/performer and the customer/viewer/diner. And if we can achieve that, and the customers are happy and the cooks are happy, then we have a great experience. But if neither of the two parties are happy, then you have a closed restaurant. And if only one of the two groups is happy, you have one that will close. So, to create an opportunity for both the customers and the staff to have a superior experience is my constant struggle.

Do you think you’ve created a signature style that takes classic Italian ideas of food and hospitality and makes them accessible to American diners?
I think people overestimate that. What I’m doing is taking a lot of the local ingredients we have available here. I’m just using them in different ways than chefs like, say, Tom Colicchio or Jean-Georges Vongerichten or Daniel Boulud are using them. I happen to have chosen a more populist vernacular. I think Italian food is easier to like and love and less intimidating than most. So people overestimate my contribution, not in a bad way or a good way. It’s just that my food is simpler than a lot of other chefs’ food, and that makes it more accessible, and possibly easier to eat.

Your restaurants have served some dishes that made waves even in New York: an offal tasting menu, lard pizza, olive-oil gelato…. What’s the genesis of these ideas, and how do you sell them to your diners?
I think initially the ideas come from classic Italian cooking, or any European culture, for that matter. As far as something like the offal menu, Europeans would definitely not throw anything away, and the use of the head or the liver or the kidneys is part of their quotidian experience. I guess the success of selling it to New Yorkers is that to them it seems new. Serving the head or the tail or the tongue certainly doesn’t make me a pioneer in the real world---although maybe, in New York, in a fancy restaurant, I was a bit of one. But people were ready for it, they were tired of eating things they could easily make at home. When I go out to a restaurant I definitely order dishes that I know take either a long time to make or are difficult to source. Unless it’s a really special steak, there’s no reason for me to go out and eat that.

Do you think the nature of food in Italy has changed in the last decade?
Yes, for good or for bad, even the most classic Italian restaurants have been introducing non-traditional ingredients. And in some cases that’s good, because there should be no fear of new ingredients, and things can be redone or rediscovered in a better way. But when they start putting lemongrass in my lasagna, I’m worried. Some things are being destroyed because the Italians are just as tired of their basic food as the Americans and French were 20 years ago. So they’re reinventing to avoid palate exhaustion. Chefs feel that to be fascinating and fun, they need to bring in new things. And having eaten perfect tortellini in brodo all of their lives, the next thing they do not want to make is another perfect tortellini in brodo. They’re looking to challenge their customers. I don’t have a problem with change, but again, I’m very afraid of lemongrass in my lasagna.

You once wrote, “To hit a real home-run, sometimes taste, sight and smell must be augmented with the thought-inducing stimuli of the unfamiliar or the reimagined.”
It’s true. Cooking can be something as simple as just putting a perfect piece of prosciutto on the plate with a fig. Or it can be like the moment that Salvador Dalí first sliced an eyeball on a movie screen. And it’s up to the chef first and the diner second to decide what level of commitment they want to put into it. If the customer and the cook are in the same boat, then things can happen in a great way, whether it’s something as simple as thinly sliced raw zucchini and sea salt and lemon juice, or a complex dish of stuffed osso buco with the marrow bones on the side.

Your dad, Armandino Batali (an ICE® graduate), owns a salumaria/restaurant in Seattle. Can you tell us about it?
It’s called Salumi. It’s 11 seats and it’s busy all time. He’s open from Tuesday to Friday, from 11:30 to 3:15. He’s truly chasing his passion, and on his own terms. He does all kinds of cured meats: prosciutto, seven or eight different kinds of salami, pancetta, porchetta; and it’s all served in a luncheonette environment. It’s extremely successful.

Opening one of your cookbooks is a different experience from opening other chef-written cookbooks. There aren’t complex preparations and multi-part dishes that just aren’t suited to home cooking. Can you comment?
The food at my restaurants is mostly the food of Italy’s grandmothers. It’s not about 19 steps. It’s not about 5 different techniques. It’s about the simplicity of the ingredients, and each of them singing for themselves. And although it’s been said a thousand times, I think that the easier the food is, often enough, the more it tastes like the original song. We didn’t try to make dishes easier for the books, they just are easier. We certainly didn’t dummy them down.

You opened your first restaurant, Pò, in just twelve weeks. You’ve written three cookbooks. Your taping and travel schedules would make anyone’s head spin. Are you a natural super-achiever?
I would like to think that. At this point in my career it’s very hard for me to turn down opportunities that I think are auspicious. I like things that are fun and I look to do them a lot, and that I have the opportunities to do them makes me a lucky guy. So, as busy as my schedule looks, I don’t ever wake up and say “Oh, crap, I got to do that.” I’m lucky that it’s worked out that way. But it is busy!

Your wife Susi’s family owns Coach Dairy Goat Farm. That must be fun to have in the family.
It’s an amazing place to visit, and the products are amazing. They’re truly geniuses. They’re located in Pine Plains, New York, in Dutchess County. We spend as much time as we can there---there’re 1,800 goats, and my kids love every one of them. It’s truly a working farm. It looks like a farm, it feels like a farm. It’s very enjoyable to spend time up there.

What advice do you have for young chefs about how they can know when they’re ready to move to a new restaurant?
The minimum time spent in any one restaurant should be a year no matter what. You may feel that you’re done earlier, but it’s truly in a year that you learn the discipline and technical things you need to know about a particular restaurant. It’s important to see four seasons in one kitchen. If you only work in a kitchen through the summer, you’ll only learn how to slice tomatoes. You need to see the depth of depravity of trying to work something in March or April when there’s nothing in the greenmarket and you’ve been looking at nothing but turnips and beets and apples since October. And understanding how to make food out of that, particularly in the pastry world but also in the savory world, is something that you need to know.

Why particularly in pastry?
Because there’s not a speck of fruit by the time March or April rolls around. Citrus is gone, and there’s not a berry in sight. You’re stuck with passion fruits and pineapples. Which isn’t bad, but it’s a tough time of the year, and chefs need to know how to work through it.

What kind of ingredients are you really passionate about in the restaurant kitchen?
Produce---vegetables---are the most exciting thing to me. The constant evolution of the greenmarket-chef relationship is something that makes it very exciting to work in a restaurant kitchen and see what comes through. You know, when you get your first asparagus, or your first acorn squash, or your first really good tomato of the season, those are the moments that define the cook’s year. I get more excited by that than anything else.

What projects do you have on the horizon?
Many. Probably the most exciting thing I’m doing right now is developing a vineyard in Maremma, in Southwestern Tuscany, with Joe Bastianich. And I’m working on two restaurants. One is a Spanish idea that I’m developing with Andy Nusser, who is executive chef at Babbo. And something else I’m working on, with Lidia Bastianich and Joe Bastianich, is kind of a classic modern-Italian restaurant that will be large and priced properly---somewhere between Lupa and Babbo. It will be a big, elegant feeling place.

As far as TV, I have a new show that will come out in October, tentatively called “Ciao America.” It’s me traveling around to Italian-American families and enclaves throughout the States and learning about the dishes and ingredients that these people love. And my other show, “Molto Mario,” is continuing, me cooking with my buddies, having a good time. I’ve been doing “Molto” for nine years, and I’ll continue to do it until eternity.

Any book projects?
I have two books on the boards right now. One is The Big Italian Cookbook, which will have many of the recipes that have appeared on my TV shows over time. It will be a sort of “larger capsule” than the other three books I’ve done. Hopefully this will be an understanding of the technical ability and simplicity that makes Italian food good, and give a little bit of an overview. The other one is the Esca Cookbook, with Dave Pasternack, but that’s a while down the road.

Do you see opening restaurants in other cities?
I never thought I would, but I’m considering it now. But nothing that would be as artistic as any of the four restaurants I have in the city. If I was to do anything in Las Vegas, for instance, it would have to be… idiot-proof. And I still haven’t decided if I’m capable of that.

September, 2003

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