Word: bastianich
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...Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher (Alfred A. Knopf; 325 pages)--the book is mostly about the author, Bill Buford, a former New Yorker editor and freakishly dedicated foodie. Buford went to work as a cook at Babbo, one of seven Batali-Bastianich restaurants in Manhattan. But Batali is the book's most memorable, entertaining character. In one scene--a dinner at Batali's restaurant Lupa--Buford, his wife and Batali share at least 10 bottles of wine and a prodigious amount of food. "By the time the pastas appeared (I hadn...
...point, we also began having international days where they were required to have something weird," she recalls. (That may explain her son's fondness for items like duck testicles, an ingredient in one of the dishes at Del Posto, a $12 million Manhattan restaurant he opened in December with Bastianich and PBS chef Lidia Matticchio Bastianich, Joseph's mother...
...spread across the U.S. in the last few years. "There has been a revolutionary improvement in Italian food," says Tim Zagat, a co-founder of the restaurant guides that bear his name. Zagat doesn't credit Batali entirely for that improvement--in fact a much earlier pioneer was Lidia Bastianich, who was cooking in the authentic Italian vernacular at her New York City restaurants when Batali was rinsing beer glasses in college. But Zagat says Batali's visibility on the Food Network brought Italian culinary simplicity to a much wider audience...
...simultaneously opening new restaurants: after Pò (which he no longer co-owns) came seven others--plus a bar and a wine shop--that have all succeeded, with one exception. Batali routinely mocks the fustian techniques of French cooking, so it seemed quite a leap last year for him and Bastianich to launch Bistro du Vent, a French restaurant on 42nd Street. The food isn't quite French and isn't quite Batali. Struggling for an identity, Bistro du Vent is the first Batali-Bastianich venture where you can easily get a seat. Both men seem to sigh heavily whenever...
Their six other restaurants are flourishing; Bastianich estimates that they collectively serve 2,000 people a night. Last year the James Beard Foundation named Batali its Outstanding Chef--the top award a U.S. cook can win. This year the foundation has nominated Molto Italiano, Batali's 2005 book, as best international cookbook and Del Posto as best new restaurant. The winners will be announced at a Manhattan gala on May 8, a few days after Batali returns from cooking chicken thighs and tortilla casserole for scores of NASCAR drivers, crewmen, and their families at Talladega Superspeedway in Talladega...