Word: buford
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...BILL BUFORD, HEAT...
...incisive, cracklingly funny book scheduled for release May 30. Actually, as you can guess from the title--Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as 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...
...Buford portrays Batali in other earthy moments--spitting on a cooktop at a Nashville, Tenn., benefit dinner (apparently to prove the cooktop was hot); asking Babbo's wine director for "two more bottles, along with your two best Mexican prostitutes"; snoring his way through a 5 a.m. taxi ride after a night out. But Heat is also a portrait of a talent who worked his way from a dishwasher in college to a small-time Greenwich Village cook to America's impresario of all foods Italian. On that Nashville trip, 32 local chefs showed up to volunteer to cook with...
...Batali--partly because he is a man of catholic, unquenchable appetites--seems to know exactly what our overfed country is hungry for. (It's also not terribly surprising that a country where nearly two-thirds of adults are overweight venerates a large guy as a cooking icon.) Buford notes that Batali once flirted with an apposite motto: "Wretched excess is just barely enough...
...capering, slightly naughty joy: at a cooking demo, he rolls up stuffed-eggplant slices and then pretends to lick them like the wrapper around a joint. "Just like we did in the '70s," he says, and the audience cheers. Sometimes he takes the act too far. In Heat Buford quotes a liquored Batali asking one of his waitresses to "take off your blouse" for his table. Batali says everyone understood that he was joking. "It's never anything as sinister as it sounds when someone writes it down," he told me. But when you're in the business of hedonism...