The Secret of Excess

The first glimpse I had of what Mario Batali’s friends had described to me as the “myth of Mario” was during a weekend in January last year, when I invited him to dinner with some friends. Batali, the chef and co-owner of Babbo, an Italian restaurant in Manhattan, is such a proficient cook that he is rarely invited to people’s homes for a meal, and he went out of his way to be a grateful guest. He arrived with a jar of quince-flavored grappa, which he’d made himself (the fruit renders it almost drinkable); a bottle of nocino, which he’d also made (same principle, but with walnuts); three bottles of wine; and a white, dense slab of lardo—literally, the raw “lardy” back of a very fat pig, which he’d cured with herbs and salt. I was a reasonably comfortable cook, keen but a little chaotic, and I was delighted to have Batali in the kitchen, if only for his pedagogical interventions. He has been cooking for a cable-television audience for more than six years and has an uninhibited way of telling you that only a moron would wrap the meat in foil after cooking it. The evening, by then, had been effectively taken over. Not long into it, Batali had cut very thin slices of the lardo and, with a flourish of intimacy, laid them individually on our tongues, whispering that we needed to let the lardo melt to appreciate what the pig had eaten just before he died. The pig, evidently, had been five hundred and seventy-five pounds, almost three times the size of a normal pig, and, near the end, had lived exclusively on walnuts, apples, and cream. (“It’s the best song sung in the key of pig,” Batali said.) No one at dinner that evening had knowingly eaten pure fat before (“At the restaurant, I tell the waiters to call it prosciutto bianco, or else people won’t touch it”), and by the time he had persuaded us to a third helping my heart was racing and we were all very thirsty.

On trips to Italy made with his Babbo co-owner, Joe Bastianich, Batali has been known to share an entire case of wine during dinner, and, while we didn’t drink anything like that, we were all infected by his live-very-hard-for-now approach and had more than was sensible. I don’t know. I don’t really remember. There was also the grappa and the nocino, and one of my last recollections is of Batali around three in the morning—back arched, eyes closed, an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth, his red Converse high-tops pounding the floor—playing air guitar to Neil Young’s “Southern Man.” Batali had recently turned forty, and I remember thinking that it was a long time since I’d seen a grown man playing air guitar. He then found the soundtrack for “Buena Vista Social Club,” tried to salsa with one of the guests (who promptly fell over a sofa), tried to dance with her boyfriend (who was unresponsive), and then put on a Tom Waits CD and sang along as he went into the kitchen, where, with a machinelike speed, he washed the dishes and mopped the floor. He reminded me that we had an arrangement for the next day—he’d got tickets to a New York Giants game, courtesy of the commissioner of the N.F.L., who had just eaten at Babbo—and disappeared with three of my friends. They ended up at Marylou’s, in the Village—in Batali’s description, “a wise-guy joint where you get anything at any time of night, none of it good.”

It was nearly daylight when he got home, the doorman of his apartment building told me the next day as the two of us tried to get Batali to wake up: the N.F.L. commissioner’s driver was waiting outside. When Batali was roused, forty-five minutes later, he was momentarily perplexed, standing in his doorway in his underwear and wondering why I was there. Batali has a remarkable girth, and it was a little startling to see him so clad, but within minutes he had transformed himself into the famous television chef: shorts, high-tops, sunglasses, his red hair pulled back into a ponytail. He had become Molto Mario—the many-layered name of his cooking program, which, in one of its senses, means, literally, Very Mario (that is, an intensified Mario, an exaggerated Mario, and an utterly over-the-top Mario)—and a figure whose renown I didn’t fully appreciate until, as guests of the commissioner, we were allowed on the field before the game. Fans of the New York Giants are happy caricatures (the ethic is old-fashioned blue-collar, even if they’re corporate managers), and I was surprised by how many of them recognized the ponytailed chef, who stood on the field facing them, arms crossed over his chest, and beaming. “Hey, Molto!” one of them shouted. “What’s cooking, Mario?” “Mario, make me a pasta!” On the East Coast, “Molto Mario” is on twice a day (at eleven-thirty in the morning and five-thirty in the afternoon). I had a complex picture of the metropolitan working male—policeman, Con Ed worker, plumber—rushing home to catch lessons in how to braise his broccoli rabe and get just the right forked texture on his homemade orecchiette. (Batali later told me that when the viewing figures for his show first came in they were so overwhelmingly male that the producers thought they weren’t going to be able to carry on.) I stood back, with one of the security people, taking in the spectacle (by now a crowd was chanting “Molto! Molto! Molto!”)— this proudly round man, whose whole manner said, “Dude, where’s the party?”

“I love this guy,” the security man said. “Just lookin’ at him makes me hungry.”

Mario Batali arrived in New York in 1992, when he was thirty-one. He had two hundred dollars, a duffelbag, and a guitar. Since then, he has become the city’s most widely recognized chef and, almost single-handedly, has changed the way people think about Italian cooking in America. The food he prepares at Babbo, which was given three stars by the Times when the restaurant opened, in 1998, is characterized by intensity—of ingredients, of flavor—and when people talk of it they use words like “heat” and “vibrancy,” “exaggeration” and “surprise.” Batali is not thought of as a conventional cook, in the business of serving food for profit; he’s in the much murkier enterprise of stimulating outrageous appetites and satisfying them aggressively. (In Batali’s language, appetites blur: a pasta made with butter “swells like the lips of a woman aroused,” roasted lotus roots are like “sucking the toes of the Shah’s mistress,” and just about anything powerfully flavored—the first cherries of the season, the first ramps, a cheese from Piedmont—”gives me wood.”) Chefs are regular visitors and are subjected to extreme versions of what is already an extreme experience. “We’re going to kill him,” Batali said to me with maniacal glee as he prepared a meal for Wylie Dufresne, the former chef of 71 Clinton, who had ordered a seven-course tasting menu, to which Batali then added a lethal-seeming number of impossible-to-resist extra courses. The starters (variations, again, in the key of pig) included a plate of lonza (the cured backstrap from one of Batali’s cream-apple-and-walnut-fattened pigs); a plate of coppa (made from the same creamy pig’s shoulder); a fried pig foot; a porcini mushroom, stuffed with garlic and thyme, and roasted with a piece of Batali’s own pancetta (cured pig belly) wrapped around its stem; plus (“just for the hell of it”) tagliatelle topped with guanciale (cured pig jowls), parsnips, and black truffle. A publisher who was fed by Batali while talking to him about booking a party came away vowing to eat only soft fruit and water until he’d recovered: “This guy knows no middle ground. It’s just excess on a level I’ve never known before—it’s food and drink, food and drink, food and drink, until you start to feel as though you’re on drugs.” This spring, Mario was trying out a new motto, borrowed from the writer Shirley O. Corriher: “Wretched excess is just barely enough.”

Batali grew up outside Seattle. His mother, Marilyn, is half French Canadian, half English (it’s from her line that Batali gets the flaming-red hair and the fair complexion), and his father, Armandino, a former Boeing executive, is Italian. In 1975, Armandino was posted to Europe, to supervise the procurement of airplane parts made overseas, and moved his family to Spain. Already, Mario was, in the words of his sister Gina, “pushing the limits.” For Batali, Madrid, in the years after Franco’s death, was a place of exhilarating license: bars with no minimum age, hash hangouts, and flirtations with members of the world’s oldest profession. He was caught growing marijuana on the roof of the Madrid apartment building where the family lived, the first incident of what became a theme: Batali was later expelled from his dorm in college, suspected of dealing, and, later still, there was some trouble outside Tijuana, which landed him in jail. (The time in Madrid evokes a memory of one of the first dishes Batali remembers preparing, a late-night panino with caramelized onions, cow’s-milk cheese, and paper-thin slices of chorizo: “The best stoner munch you can imagine. Me and my brother Dana were just classic stoner kids, we were so happy.”)

When Batali returned to the United States, in 1978, to attend Rutgers University, in New Jersey, he believed that his future was in Iberian finance (“I wanted to be a Spanish banker—I loved the idea of making a lot of money and living a luxurious life in Madrid”), and his improbable double major was business management and Spanish theatre. After being expelled from his dorm, he got work as a dishwasher, at a popular student restaurant called Stuff Yer Face; one can’t help feeling that, in the name alone, destiny was calling. Gina Batali agrees—”This is when Mario became Mario”—although the evidence, a photograph of the young chef with an unrecognizably narrow waist, suggests that Mario didn’t become Mario for another few inches. Batali was rapidly promoted—to prep cook (preparing the food for the evening chefs), then line cook (working at one “station” in a “line” of stations, making one thing)—and still claims the record for most pizzas made in an hour. The life at Stuff Yer Face was fast, sexy (“The most booooootiful waitresses in town”), and happily recreational. (“I don’t want to come off as a big druggie, but a guy would bring a pizza pan turned upside down with lines of crank on it.”) And when, in his junior year, he went to a career conference, attended by representatives from major corporations, Batali realized that he would never be a banker. He was going to be a chef.

“I had a natural affinity for the kitchen, and my mother and grandmother had always told me that I should be a cook. In fact, when I was preparing my college applications my mother suggested cooking school, but I said, ‘Ma, that’s too gay. I don’t want to go to cooking school—that’s for fags.’ “ But five years later Batali showed up for his first day at the Cordon Bleu in London.

His father, still working with Boeing, was now based in England. Gina Batali was there, too, and recalls seeing her brother in the early mornings, when he returned after being out all night, having attended classes during the day and then worked at a pub. The pub was the Six Bells, on the King’s Road, in Chelsea. Mario was bartending at the “American bar” (“I had no idea what I was doing”), when a high-priced dining room opened in the back, and a chef was hired to run it, a Yorkshireman named Marco Pierre White. Mario quit cooking school, already bored by the pace, and was hired to be the new chef’s slave.

Today, Marco Pierre White is regarded as one of the most influential chefs in Britain, and it’s an extraordinary fortuity that these two men found themselves working together, both in their early twenties, in a tiny pub kitchen. Batali didn’t understand what he was witnessing: his professional experience had been making strombolis in New Brunswick. “I assumed I was seeing what everyone else knew already; I didn’t feel like someone on the cusp of a revolution. And yet I could see that this was a guy who really looked at preparing food from outside the box. He was a genius on the plate. I’d never worked on presentation. I just put shit on the plate.” He described White making a deep-green basil purée, and a white butter sauce, and swirling the green sauce in one direction and the white sauce in the other, and drawing a swerving line down the middle of the plate. “I had never seen anyone draw fucking lines with two sauces.” White would order Batali to follow him to market (“I was his whipping boy. ‘Yes, master,’ I’d answer. ‘Whatever you say’ “), and they would return with game birds or ingredients for some of the most improbable dishes ever to be served in an English public house: écrevisses in a reduced lobster sauce, oysters with caviar, and roasted ortolan—the rare and tiny game bird, served virtually breathing, its innards to be gulped down like a raw crustacean.

According to Batali, White was so intuitive and physical that he could do things to food that no one had done before. “He made a hollandaise by beating the sauce so vigorously that it began to froth up and become something else—it was like a sabayon.” He was forever chopping things, reducing them, and making Batali force them through a sieve—”which was, of course, no bigger than a tea strainer, because it was a pub and that was all he had, and I’d spend my whole day crushing some chunky shellfish reduction through this tiny thing, ramming it over and over again with a wooden spoon.” White is also said to have been spectacularly abusive. “You know, we were just two guys in the kitchen,” Batali recalls, “and I’m not cooking the fries right, according to him, or the zucchini, or whatever it was, and he tells me to sauté the snow peas instead, while he’s over in the corner doing some dramatic thing with six crayfish, and he suddenly calls out, ‘Bring me the snow peas now!’ and I duly bring them over. ‘Here are the snow peas, master,’ but he doesn’t like the look of them. ‘They are wrong, you moron. They are overcooked, you goddam fucking navvy,’ but of course I didn’t understand what ‘navvy’ meant, and I’d say something like ‘Navvy this, navvy that, if you don’t like my snow peas then make them yourself,’ which made him even angrier.” Batali says White threw a risotto at him: “He was a mean motherfucker.” Batali stuck it out for four months, and then, “frightened for my life,” he dumped salt in a beurre blanc and walked out.

Batali is a person of overpowering self-confidence, but in White’s kitchen his self-confidence failed him. He would like to dismiss the man, but he can’t—after all, White is the person who showed him what a chef could be—and, as a result, White is both wholly loathed by Batali and wholly respected. Even now, nearly twenty years later, you can hear in Batali’s account a nagging irritation at his failure to charm or work with someone who understood so much about the potential of food—that “it was a wide-open game.” From White, Batali learned the virtues of presentation, stamina, and intense, athletic cooking. And from White he learned a hatred of most things French. (White’s pub menu was in French.) He has an injunction against reduced sauces—boiling a liquid like meat broth down to a syrup. (“If you can run your finger through it and an impression is left behind, then it’s not me, it’s too French.”) And a prohibition on tantrums: “It’s so old school, so made for the movies.” But mainly Batali learned how much he had to learn. Provoked by White’s command in the kitchen, he embarked on a grand tour of the grandest restaurants in Europe, tracing White’s skills, like some-one following a genealogical line, back to their origins: La Tour d’Argent, in Paris; Le Moulin de Mougins, on the Côte d’Azur; the Waterside Inn, outside London. (“You learn the essentials of a place in a few months. If you want to learn them properly, you stay a year, to cook through the seasons, but I was in a hurry.”) At times, he was doing highly tedious tasks (squeezing duck carcasses for twelve hours, to get the extra ounce of juice that went into a duck stock). But he knew the approach was correct. “You learn by working in the kitchen,” Batali told me. “Not going to cookery school. That’s how it’s done.”

That’s what I wanted to do—to work in the Babbo kitchen, as Mario’s slave.

I was accepted—Mario told me, after I put the proposal to him—on “a trial basis.” He said, “The question is space. Is there room for another body?” There wasn’t, but somehow I squeezed in. I would do a night or two “plating pasta,” and a day in the “prep kitchen,” preparing food for the evening. The prep kitchen was run by Elisa Sarno, and she was expecting me at 7 A.M. But a few days before, on January 26th, I was invited to attend a kitchen meeting.

About twenty people showed up. In April, Mario was publishing “The Babbo Cookbook.” The restaurant, he said, was about to come under more scrutiny. There would be television crews, bigger crowds, and restaurant critics, asking if Babbo was as good as it was when it opened, four years earlier. Because the book revealed “all our secrets,” the menu would change, and Batali invited people to propose specials (“a classic recipe done in our way”) and suggested reading old cookbooks for ideas. He reiterated the kitchen’s principles: that we’re here “to buy food, fix it up, and sell it at a profit—that’s what we do”; that consistency is essential (“If someone has a great dish and returns to have it again, and you don’t serve it to him in exactly the same way, then you’re a dick”); and that the success of Babbo, “the best Italian restaurant in America,” arises out of its style—”More feminine than masculine: people should think there are grandmothers in the back, preparing their dinner.”

There was a labor issue—kitchen rage. A chef had just left because he couldn’t control his temper. He banged pots, threw utensils, “poisoned the kitchen with his anger.” The behavior wasn’t to be tolerated. But implicit in the discussion was an acknowledgment of the extreme stress of being a cook during the dinner service.

When I presented myself to Elisa, a handsome, athletic woman in her forties, whom I’d met before, and liked, she didn’t seem all that happy to see me. I discovered that I was witnessing her kitchen personality—a tough, no-nonsense brusqueness—developed in part because she was a woman of authority dealing with men rarely prepared to cede it to her. She had been at Babbo since it opened, originally working as a line cook, but she hated the pressure and the hours, and was happier here, in what she treated as her own kitchen.

I put on an apron and a jacket, and was given a tour. One corner of the kitchen is taken up by the “walk-in”—a refrigerated closet with floor-to-ceiling shelves—and another corner is given over to dishwashing. Pots, pans, and various plastic containers are stored overhead. Elisa was describing each one according to its size, but I was distracted by the dishwasher, who was assaulting a giant pot with a high-pressure gadget that was spraying water powerfully, in unpredictable directions. “These are the one-quarts,” she said, “and here are the two-quarts, four-quarts, six-quarts, and eight, all with their own color-coded lids; hotel pans and half-hotels are there, along with the sheet trays and half-sheet trays.” The containers, I learned, were the medium of the prep kitchen—everything went into them so that it could be fetched in the evening—and great weight was expressed in questions like: Is this (chicken feet, say, or a quantity of beef cheeks) to be put in a six-quart or will it fit into a four? I was wondering is this what you learn in cooking school, what a hotel pan is, when Elisa stopped, suddenly realizing that I wasn’t carrying any knives. “Where did you put your knives?” she asked.

“My knives?”

“You don’t have knives?”

“I’m meant to have knives?”

“Oh, my God. O.K. Bring them next week.” And then she muttered to herself, “God, I hate lending people my knives.”

She led me into the walk-in, talking fast now, wanting to get on with her day. “This is where we put stuff for the grilling station”—she pointed to a shelf packed with green-lidded containers, indistinguishable from a dozen other shelves with green-lidded containers. “This is the pasta shelf. This is the pantry shelf. Oh, yes, and this is the masking tape. Everything is labelled and dated. Where’s your pen? You didn’t bring a pen?”

Vegetables were in the back. Fish were stacked on the floor in Styrofoam crates, delivered before I arrived, some giant silver Mediterranean thing.

“Time to bone the ducks. Come.”

There were three boxes of ducks.

“Wipe the counter, wet a cloth—do you remember where the cloths are? Get a cutting board, an eight-quart and two four-quarts, a hotel pan”—which ones were the hotel pans?—”and parchment paper. You get sheets from the pastry station. The four-quarts will be for the gizzards. Here, take one of my knives. Will you bring your knives next week?”

Yes, yes, of course.

“Unpack the duck from the top, so you don’t get blood all over you. Remove the gizzards. They go into a container. Cut off the legs to make a confit, but first chop off the knobby bit at the bottom with a cleaver—use this,” she said, handing me a giant tomahawk thing—”and then remove the breast. You do know how to bone a duck, don’t you?”

“Well, I think, yes, I do. I mean, I’ve done it.” But when? Was that in 1993?

“And you know about the oyster?”

“The oyster?” I asked, and my mind did a calculation. Duck, an animal with wings: fowl. Oyster, molecular thing without wings: mollusk. Ducks don’t have oysters; oysters don’t have ducks. “The oyster?” I repeated.

“Yes, it’s the nugget of meat you don’t want to lose. It’s here,” she said, swiftly cutting the breast in half and whipping her knife around the thigh. She had an appealingly easy manner with the knife, which seemed to involve no effort, and the meat instantaneously cleaved in two. I was thinking, I want to learn how to do that, and didn’t quite get the location of the duck oyster—was it in front of the thigh or behind it?—when she was off; a deliveryman had appeared.

I looked around the kitchen. In front of me was a wall of cookers, with vats of something boiling on top. The pastry chefs were beside me, cutting up pineapples. Behind me, two guys were making pasta. On the floor was a giant mixer, knocking around a mound of dough. It was seven-fifteen in the morning.

I picked up a duck, removed the wings, and hunted around for that oyster. I felt an obligation to honor this bird in my hand, by insuring that its thigh oyster found its way onto the plate. But where was the little fucker?

As I slowly got through my first ducks, I stacked up their parts on my cutting board. The idea was that you should whip through each one, slice, slice, slice, just as Elisa had done—the knife doing that effortless thing, all edge, no pressure, the meat opening up like magic—and drop each bit into its appropriate container. But I wasn’t sure I was getting it right. I stacked up the thighs on one corner, hoping to hide my first, hacked-up experiments.

Meanwhile, Elisa was opening boxes. (“Frozen pig cheeks,” she was saying to the deliveryman. “Frozen is no good for me.”) The deliveryman didn’t reply; he was staring at me. (“Did you count these lamb shanks?” she was now saying. “It’s never the number you say—I can’t run a kitchen if I don’t know the number of lamb shanks.”) His stare was making me very self-conscious.

I looked across at one of the cooks, Cesar, who was doing something with quails. The deliveryman hadn’t moved—was he actually shaking his head?—when, somehow, I dragged the blade of Elisa’s knife, smoothly and delicately, across the top of my forefinger, from behind the first knuckle to the nail. There was a moment: did I do what I think I did? Yes. And the top of my finger erupted in a gush of red blood.

“Did you just slice yourself?” Elisa asked, breaking off her lamb-shank count, and in a tone that said, You’ve been here half an hour, and this is what you’ve done?

“Yes,” I said, “but not to worry.” I wrapped my hand in the nearest soiled cloth. “I do this all the time. You should look at my fingers. A road map of scars and nicks. I think I need glasses. Near-sighted. Or farsighted. Both, actually. Really, it’s what I do.”

“Do you need to go to the hospital?” It sounded like an accusation.

I shook my head, a little worried by her worry. There was a lot of blood.

“Band-Aids are in the refrigerator,” she said. “You’ll need to wear a rubber glove. The Band-Aids won’t stay dry.”

I retreated to the dining room, crunched up the wound with a criss-crossing of Band-Aids, sank the thing into a rubber glove, and returned. It was nearly nine o’clock, and my cutting board had a modest square of about five inches of work space. The rest of it was stacked with pieces of duck.

And so I resumed. Chop, trim, wrestle, pop, thwack. I cleared my board. And, as I did, the Band-Aids started to work themselves loose, and the clear synthetic glove started to expand and droop, filling up like a water balloon with my blood. If I did this again, and sliced off a little bit of this glove, it was going to be a mess. But I was falling behind, and Elisa was looking at me.

She picked up a thigh. To me, it seemed I’d got the oyster. In front and back, wherever the thing was, there was plenty of meat. That wasn’t the problem. “There’s too much fat,” she said, trimming it off, and then added, as if she’d failed to mention a crucial instruction, “You are aware that these are going to be served to people.”

I came to like Elisa; she was, I realized, after a few weeks under her tough tutelage, teaching me the basic techniques of a chef, especially knife skills. It seems that I’d been using a knife for years without knowing how to use one. On that first morning, I paused to sharpen my knife, and Elisa stopped what she was doing and stared: I was doing it backward (ergo, I had always been doing it backward). Then, there was this rocking thing. The idea is that when you’re chopping food you want to leave the tip of your knife in place, on the cutting board: you then end up rocking the knife back and forth, and the blade slides effortlessly, and with much more control, through whatever it is you’re chopping. Everyone who cooks probably knows these things, but I didn’t.

Some techniques seemed fussy. Carrots were a trauma. Long-cooking meat broths have carrots in them, along with celery, onions, and herbs, which soften the meatiness of a meat liquid. Evidently, there were only two ways to cut up a carrot, rough cut and fine dice. Rough cut meant slicing the carrot in half, lengthwise, and then—chop, chop, chop—cutting it into perfectly identical half moons (which, to my eye, had nothing rough about them).

The nightmare was fine dice, which meant cutting every bit of the carrot into an identical one-millimetre-square cube. A carrot is not shaped like a cube, and so you painstakingly had to trim it up into a long rectangle, then cut it into thin, one-millimetre planks, and then take your one-millimetre planks and cut them into long, one-millimetre slivers, and then take your perfectly formed slivers, and, chop, chop, chop, cut them into one-millimetre cubes. I seemed to have done my first batch almost right—either that or it was late and everyone was in a hurry and no one looked too closely at the geometric mishmash in the container I’d filled. My second batch involved thirty-six carrots. It took me a long time to cube thirty-six carrots. Normally, Elisa popped around to make sure I wasn’t mangling what I was working on, but she must have trusted me with the carrots—after all, what can you do to a carrot?—so that when she finally looked in I was almost done. She shrieked, “I said fine dice. These are not fine dice. I don’t know what they are, but they’re wrong.” I had been cutting carrots for two hours, and then, like that, they were tossed. I wanted to weep. It was some weeks later that I finally succeeded in getting carrots right, although the achievement was secretly marred by the fact that to earn Elisa’s approbation—”These are good,” she said, picking up my four-quart and dumping the contents into a braising liquid—I had discreetly eaten several hundred imperfect cubes.

I prepared pork for a ragù (only after my first batch was returned—”These are chunks, I asked for cubes”) and learned how to trim the fat off a flank of beef. Jointing rabbits, I was taught how to tie up the loin with a butcher’s looping knot, and I was so excited by the discovery that I went home and practiced. (I told Elisa about my accomplishment. “I tied up everything,” I said. “A leg of lamb, some utensils, a chair. A friend came around, and I tied up her, too.” She shook her head. “Get a life,” she said, and returned to her task.)

I became captivated by the smells. By midmorning, when many things had been prepared, they were cooked in quick succession, and the smells came one after the other, waves of smell, like sounds in music. There was the smell of meat—the kitchen was overwhelmed by the rich, sweet, sticky smell of older lamb. And then, in minutes, it was chocolate melting in a metal bowl. Then a disturbing non sequitur like tripe (a curious disjunction, having chocolate in your nose followed immediately by stewing cow innards). And then something ripe and fishy—octopus poaching in a hot tub—followed by an over-extracted pineapple. And so they came, one after the other—huckleberries, chicken broth, the comforting chemistry of veal, pork, and milk as someone made a Bolognese ragù. Once I mastered some basic skills, I surprised myself by recognizing that I had stopped feeling self-conscious. There I was, in this back room, people’s knives knocking against cutting boards in the same rhythmic rocking way, mine among them: no windows, no natural light; no connection to the outside world; no idea what the weather might be; only one phone, the number unlisted; unreachable—surrounded by these intense associations of festive meals.

Mario returned from Europe in 1985 and went to San Francisco, where he was soon joined by his brother. The two of them rented a Victorian house in the Haight-Ashbury district. Mario’s first job, not a happy one, was for a catering firm, where he prepared the biggest meal of his life, an Apple Computer office party for seven thousand people, which was held at a baseball stadium—he remembers having to push out wheelbarrows of shrimp and distribute them with a shovel (“How much fun is that?”)—but within six months he got what he was looking for, and was made a sous-chef at the Clift Hotel. For Dana Batali, being the roommate was not without the predictable stresses: he had an office job and had to leave at eight, which is when he regularly discovered his brother, along with several other chefs from the Clift Hotel kitchen, in various stages of collapse on the living-room floor, the room filled with smoke and empty bottles, the stereo on loud. Steve Crane, a friend who was a waiter at the time, remembers that he and Mario (“a clown riding around on a Suzuki 1100 painted to look like a zebra”) spent their after-hours at Stars, the restaurant that had recently been opened by Jeremiah Tower, the so-called patriarch of California cuisine. “The perfect resto of the moment,” Mario recalls. “Lively stylized food with attitude and energy— in short, much of the inspiration for everything I have done since.”

This was at the height of the California food revolution—not just of Tower but also of Alice Waters (and her neo-Provençal cooking), of raw seafood and marinated shellfish, of citrusy vinaigrettes and bright-colored salsas. “It was there, during the California explosion, that I first met chefs who wanted to talk about their craft,” Mario told me, “and where I learned that the palate is a very individual thing.” This is where he developed an appetite for vinegars and lemons. “Since then, my food has always been on the upper edge of acidity,” he said. “I tune things up with acidity, I fix things with acidity. A lot of flawed food made by these French guys would be brightened up with just a touch of acidity—to get you salivating.”

The Clift Hotel was owned by the Four Seasons, and after two years Mario was invited to work at the Biltmore in Santa Barbara, a stately old Spanish-colonial hotel the corporation had just bought and wanted to revitalize. Mario was brought in for all the obvious reasons (“energy, edge, fire, youth,” according to Brian Young, the manager who hired him); he was given his own restaurant, La Marina, and, according to Mario, became, for his age (twenty-seven), the highest-paid young chef in the company. But the experience was restless-making. Mario mentions some “weak pastas,” a smoked veal rack, a grilled lobster with fried artichokes. “The truth is, I don’t have much memory of the time,” he says. “I was staying out late. I was staying out very late.” Andy Nusser, who is currently the executive chef at Babbo, met Mario then, at a late-night dinner party, where someone had brought foie gras but didn’t know how to serve it. Rising to the challenge that a good chef should be able to make a meal with whatever is at hand, Mario prepared a sweet, vinegarlike reduction of orange Nehi soda and Starburst fruit candies. (“First, you remove each Starburst fruit gum from its wax-paper wrapper and put the candies in a saucepan, where, over a low heat, you melt them until you have a bright-colored syrup, and, then, separately, you cook the soda, until it’s reduced by half.”) Nusser insists that the result was very good (and was so impressed that he decided that night to become a chef).

At the end of that year, the Four Seasons management asked Mario to run a more exclusive restaurant, in Hawaii (“They begged me, they were desperate”). Batali not only turned down the offer; he quit. He called his father, Armandino. Did he know of a place in Italy where he might be able to work for room and board? He wanted to learn how to cook like his grandmother, Leonetta Merlino Batali.

Leonetta Merlino had grown up working in the first Italian import store in Washington—Merlino’s, which her parents had opened in Seattle in 1903. The store was sold in the late sixties, and it has been a source of aggravating regret to Mario that his father didn’t take it over. (“They lost it,” Mario recalls. “They fucked it up.”) Everyone in the family has powerful memories of visits to Leonetta’s house for lunch (her husband died when Mario was six), which featured her handmade ravioli. Although she made large batches of the stuff, a thousand, twelve hundred at a time, relying on a family recipe from Abruzzi (an improbable mixture of calf’s brains, pork sausage, chicken, Swiss chard, and parmigiano and Romano cheeses), and rolling out the dough with a long pole, prized for the texture it created (“rough, like a cat’s tongue”), she allowed the children only six pieces. They still talk about it (“We knew there were more!” Gina Batali recalls. “We could see them!”), but the grandmother was determined to teach them to eat a family meal in an Italian way, with the pasta coming after the antipasto (a plate of salume and marinated vegetables) and before the secondo, of roasted meat, often lamb, always cooked with rosemary, always well done. The ravioli recipe is still in the family—Mario’s brother prepares it on Christmas Day (Leonetta, having made the ravioli so often she had no idea how she did it, was filmed by a cousin, who prompted her with questions)—as are many other of Leonetta’s recipes, preserved on two thousand three-by-five cards: a pasta sauce made from spare ribs (with, Mario recalls, “this kind of red pinky piggy flavor”); tripe; and, a feature of New Year’s Eve, a salty baccalà (dried codfish, rehydrated with milk and cooked until it breaks down and becomes a sauce), served with hot polenta poured out onto a wooden board.

Armandino Batali sent me copies of some of the recipes. I found the stack of three-by-five cards surprisingly moving, a kitchen conversation between the dead and the living. I’ve often thought that food is a concentrated messenger of a culture, compacted into the necessity of our having to eat to survive, and I felt this powerfully as I read these mementos from another generation and listened to Armandino’s children talk about the eccentric-seeming recipes of their grandmother, who had learned them from her mother in the back room of a food store in Seattle, who, in turn, had learned them from her mother, in a house in a village in Abruzzi.

Armandino did not know of a place where Mario might work with a matronly Italian cook in exchange for room and board. But he had some friends who might know. He wrote five letters and got one reply. It was a trattoria on a hill above a town where airplane parts are made for Boeing. Room and board for the son of Armandino? A sous-chef for a Four Seasons restaurant? Of course. When can he start?

The Babbo kitchen is actually several kitchens. In the mornings, this small space—the work area is about twenty-five feet by ten—is called the prep kitchen, and is run by Elisa. In the evenings, it is called the service kitchen, and is run by Andy Nusser. And between the hours of one and five the two kitchens (more metaphors than places) overlap.

During this period, the prep chefs try to finish their duties and the evening cooks get their stations ready. There can be between fifteen and eighteen people in the kitchen. In many ways, these afternoons are exaggerated expressions of something that is characteristic of both New York (where space is precious and its value inflated) and the restaurant business (where the size of the kitchen and the dining room are financial calculations, and a small kitchen means more tables). At Babbo, the space concern is extreme. There is no lunch service because the metaphoric prep kitchen is still working at lunchtime; there is also no lunch service because so much of the restaurant’s equipment—tablecloths, napkins, cutlery, plates, glasses—is stored underneath the banquettes where a lunch crowd would sit. (Every morning, the restaurant is taken apart; every afternoon it is put back together.) The so-called Babbo “office” is an extension of the plumbing, jerry-built in whatever basement cranny presented itself at the time. (When a hot-water tank exploded—water for washing the dishes had to be boiled—the walls of the office were taken down so that the repairmen could get to the tank.) The desk of Mario’s assistant is near a slop sink, gurgling with the foodstuffs swirling into it. The smell is pervasive.

There is 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 is Andy’s first concern when he arrives; he goes straight to the walk-in to see if he can shift the contents of the large containers to smaller ones (if he can’t, the work being done by the prep kitchen will have no place to be stored). Once, I was helping him prepare a salad. We started in the dining room, because there was no space in the kitchen. We moved to the dark coffee station when tables were being set up, until finally we were backed up against the ladies’ room. If you’re lucky enough to 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, or, when you return, you won’t have your space. Around two o’clock, trays of braising meat come out of the oven, but there is no place to put them, so they are stacked on the first available surface—a waste bin, the pasta freezer, somebody’s lunch. Trays are stacked on top of those trays. And sometimes there are trays stacked on top of those.

Mario flits between the shifts, unpredictably. When the restaurant opened, he was the expediter, the one who read off the orders when they appeared on a ticker-tape machine (having been dispatched by a touch-screen computer in the dining room) and approved the plates before they went out. That role has been taken over by Andy, but the public expectation is that Mario is still running the kitchen (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,” Dana Batali recalls. “Mario’s Marilyn Monroe moment, having burned up both ends of the candle.”) It also alarmed Babbo customers, who cancelled their reservations. (“The only time anyone could just walk in and get a table,” Elisa remembers.)

One afternoon while I was working in the prep kitchen, Mario showed up to make a special called a cioppino. He’d prepared the dish the night before, but it got only four orders. (“This time, I’m going to tell the waiters 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?”—and is an Italian-immigrant soup, made from leftovers and whatever little something a member of the household was able to beg from the fishermen at the end of the day. The little something, on this occasion, was going to be crabmeat, and, in the spirit of the dish, Mario proceeded to collect what was on hand—tomato pulp and liquid (left over from tomatoes that had been roasted), plus any spare vegetables. He would charge twenty-nine dollars.

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

“Dom, you 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.

“Dom, don’t ever do that again,” Mario said.

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

“I do not want to you to bump me,” 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,” he said. “I’m cleaning up after him, and he’s bumping me. I’m staying here.”

Once Mario leaves the kitchen, you never know when he’s coming back. Elisa recalls the trepidation that surrounded his departures in the early days, especially during a Chinatown phase, when he returned with purchases he felt should be served as specials: duck feet, say, duck tongues, a bag of jellyfish, which in the tradition of preparing local ingredients in an Italian way he cut up into small strips, marinated in olive oil with lemon and basil, and served, raw, as a salad. “It was disgusting,” Elisa says. It was equally unnerving when Mario returned with nothing, because, with no distractions, he invariably started rooting around in the trash. The first time I witnessed this—and it’s 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 tips (after all, how do you cube the leaves?). The leaves have the most concentrated flavor of the celery, and I knew that 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—more celery leaves, of course, hundreds of them. He pulled them out, shaking off whatever greasy thing was adhering to their leaves. “What have you done?” he asked me in astonishment. “You’re throwing away the best part of the celery! New Yorker 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 then 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 (“Frank, 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.

In the evenings, I plated pasta.

“Like this,” Mario said. He took my tongs before I could plate the spaghetti. “You want to make a mound of the pasta, 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.” He explained the components of the dish. The tortelloni was a soft, pillowy pasta, stuffed with goat cheese and served with dried orange zest and a dusting of fennel pollen. The fennel pollen was like an exaggerated version of fennel and was the discovery of the food writer Faith Willinger. And the orange peel? For no other reason than that orange and fennel are a classic combination. The result gave some bite to a soft, unacidic dish.

Mario was examining the plates going out. He eyed a skirt steak and addressed the grill chef, Mark Barrett. “Your salsa verde is breaking up. You’ve got too much oil in it, and the plate is too hot. Replate.” He studied a dish from the sauté station—the duck—stuck his finger into it, and tasted. “Dom, take down your sauce.” It was too salty, needed diluting. “And the duck,” he said, picking up a slice of the breast. “You want to give the fatty side an extra minute. The meat is fine.” It was verging on rare. “But render more of the fat.”

An orecchiette was returned from the dining room, half eaten, the plate borne into the kitchen by the maître d’, John Mainieri, who explained, “There are not enough florets on the broccoli.” Five people gathered around the plate and started eating from it. “She says that the last time she ate here the broccoli had more florets.” Everyone picked out a floret and stared at it closely.

“It’s true,” Mario said. “We’ve had larger florets, but nature isn’t making big florets at the moment.”

Mario seemed to accept returns with remarkable cheer. On one occasion, a bucatini was sent back. “The meat was rancid,” the waiter said. The meat was guanciale, “the pride of the restaurant,” Andy observed. But another pasta was prepared, and Mario handed it to a runner. “When you give it to him,” Mario said, “will you pistol-whip him with your penis?”

This evening, another return, half an hour later, again from the broccoli-floret table. A steak. It was chewy. “She doesn’t want a new dish. She wants steak, properly prepared.” (The cooks assaulted the steak, indignantly tearing off pieces with their hands, and turned to each other, saying, “Chewy?”)

Then the second steak came back as well. Now, evidently, it had been overcooked. And there was also a chop. It, too, was not satisfactory.

“For fuck’s sake,” Mario declared, finally losing his patience. “Find out their names. They’re not coming back.” He paused. “What are they drinking?”

“A Solaia 1997.” Four hundred and seventy-five dollars per bottle.

“Forget it,” Mario said, and ordered another round of entrées.

The restaurant in Italy that Armandino found for Mario was called La Volta, and was run by two brothers, Gianni and Roberto Valdiserri. (Roberto was an engineer at the factory that made the airplane parts.)

La Volta is perched on a hill overlooking a mountainous valley between Bologna and Florence, above the town of Porretta Terme, where Mario arrived, late on a Monday afternoon in November, 1989, completing a train journey that had begun in London the day before. He was bearing golf clubs, even though there was no golf course for more than fifty miles, and an electric guitar with a small boom-box amplifier (“total fuzz at volume 3”), in the hope that when he ran low on money he could cover his expenses by busking. He was wearing pajamalike pantaloons and red clogs. But there was no one to meet him (“Alone in the train station in bumfuck”), he didn’t know how to use the phones, and he couldn’t speak Italian. When Roberto and Gianni finally showed up, they were astonished by what they saw. He did not look like the highest-paid sous-chef from the Four Seasons; he looked like a peasant from Eastern Europe, Roberto told me when I visited the place last September.

The “terme” in Porretta Terme means bath, and comes from the local sulfur springs. On my first morning there, I was woken by loud oompah-pah music and an instructor on a loudspeaker leading an exercise class of elderly women in a sulfur pool. In the town center, most of the buildings date from the thirties, around the time it was discovered that sustained exposure to the local vapors had therapeutic merit. There were two discos and three ice-cream venders. I couldn’t find the place listed in a tourist guide. But the mountains, rising steep and green out of the valley floor, were uncultivated and wild, and were on the border between the two greatest regions of Italian cooking—Tuscany, with its game and wine, and Emilia-Romagna, with its cheese, pasta, and cured meats.

Roberto and Gianni drove Mario to the restaurant, about four miles up a zigzaggy hill. There was an apartment above the restaurant, Mario’s new home. The restaurant was closed that day, but they prepared a small seasonal supper for their new chef (“I’m, like, holy shit, family meal and we’re having white truffles!”), and, eying him warily, introduced him to the members of the family. Roberto was the expediter, after he finished his job in the factory. Gianni managed the place. Betta, Gianni’s wife, was the cook. Her father, Quintiglio Canarini, was the forest forager, truffle scavenger, and mystic gardener.

The next morning, Mario reported for duty. Betta didn’t show up for two more hours, and then she rolled a giant pasta sheet by hand. Mario began taking notes and started a six-month apprenticeship in what he calls the “ladies’ trick” of handmade pasta. Betta went on to make stricchetti, small bow ties, which were served with sliced porcini mushrooms and little red onions cooked in olive oil—stricchetti ai funghi. She made a different pasta the next day and a different ragù, one with guinea-hen legs. It was a month before anyone prepared a classic Bolognese. “They’d got bored of it,” Mario said, “but then they taught me how to do it and that became my weekly task. Veal and pork and beef and pancetta, slowly cooked with olive oil and butter. Just browning and browning, although it never turns brown, because of the fat that has come out of the meat, and then you add white wine and milk and, at the end, a little tomato paste, so that it’s pink-brown.”

He befriended 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”) and accompanied him when he went looking for berries and mushrooms. He had rules about porcini and picked the ones found near oak and chestnut trees—the ones under the pines and poplars were inferior. His real talent was finding truffles. In time, Mario and Quintiglio fell into the habit of having breakfast before the others got up—an egg baked in olive oil with a slice of Fontina cheese and a truffle on top. For Christmas, 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), beef bones, an onion, and a carrot—the vegetables left whole to keep the broth clear. The tortellini was stuffed with mortadella (a very Bolognese ingredient), mixed with turkey, parmigiano, and nutmeg. In the spring, they started eating from Quintiglio’s garden, which was planted according to a lunar schedule (lettuce during a waxing moon; beets and parsnips during a waning one). Quintiglio took Mario into the river for the “weird little watercress that grew there” and a bitter wild dandelion, which he boiled for nearly an hour and served with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. “Every mouthful of what he made was poetry,” Mario says. For Mario, Quintiglio was the first proponent of finding what is made by the land around you and feasting on it, of learning to taste its uniqueness, of recognizing that you are eating something that you can enjoy only now, here, during this day in a season, grown in this dirt.

But the first months were not easy. Dana Batali recalls it 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 only to establish his credentials and to remind his hosts that he had been, until recently, highly regarded as a chef. But Mario’s father also picked up an uneasiness in his son’s voice when they spoke on the phone. “The experience shook him up,” he recalls. 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 to his room, light a candle, put on headphones, and, listening mainly to Tom Waits in 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 River Reno—and longing for company but recognizing that 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. The food was traditional. Very simple. No sauces, no steam tables, no pans of stock, none of the things I’d learned to do. This was exactly what I’d hoped for.”

Mario remained in Italy for three more years, and when he returned to the United States, in 1992, he was a different person. “Italy changed Mario,” his father recalls. “It made him serious; it gave him his culture.” He had been poor for a long time; he was now ready “to make money.” A friend from Rutgers, Arturo Sighinolfi, who had visited Mario in Italy and stayed in the apartment above La Volta, provided the opportunity. Arturo’s father was about to retire; for twenty-five years, he’d run Rocco, an old-fashioned Italian-American restaurant off Bleecker Street, in Manhattan’s so-called 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, not an Italian-American one.

It was the second week of March, the warmest day since the summer, and I had been at Babbo for nearly two months. Everyone wanted to change the menu. The rabbit would be served not with Brussels sprouts but with spring peas, pea shoots, and a bright-orange vinaigrette made from baby carrots. (“We’re giving you not only the rabbit but what’s inside his head,” Mario explained. “You get to eat him and what he wants to eat, too!”) There was a delivery of fava beans. They were to replace the chickpeas in a dish called Pyramids in Brodo, an item introduced by Mario the previous week—a piece of pasta architecture squeezed at the top and stuffed with what was left over from boning the ducks: the gizzards, some duck ragù, and a risotto made with duck stock. (“No one has any idea what’s inside—it could be Jeffrey Dahmer’s penis, for all they know.”) Wild nettles had been ordered but hadn’t arrived. “This is so typical,” the pastry chef, Gina DePalma, observed. “The moment it gets warm, everyone wants spring. Fava beans, berries, and English peas, but it takes the earth longer to catch up with the weather, and I worry about what we’re going to get. It won’t be local.” In fact, the fava beans and peas came from California; the market in Union Square was still barren, except for the first batch of ramps, the unequivocally local wild leek from upstate New York, which were now added to spaghetti, put on top of a pork tenderloin, draped across a wild striped bass, pickled for the summer, and eaten regularly by the chefs—thrown on the flat top, squirted with oil, turned once, and scooped up with tongs.

Early on, I’d asked Mario what I could expect to learn from my time here. “The difference between the home cook and the professional,” he said. “You’ll learn the reality of the kitchen. As a home cook, you can prepare anything any way anytime. It doesn’t matter if your lamb is rare for your friends on Saturday, and not so rare when they come back next year. But here people want exactly what they had last time. Consistency under pressure. And that’s the reality—a lot of pressure.” I would also develop an expanded kitchen awareness: “You’ll discover how to use your senses. You’ll find you no longer rely on what your watch says. You’ll hear when something is cooked; you’ll smell degrees of doneness.”

It was an unlikely prospect, especially when the kitchen remained so stubbornly incomprehensible. The menu was crazy, so wildly large and varied—some fifty pastas, sixty entrées, and forty desserts—that the pace was always frenzied. In fact, I was being educated by the frenzy. Over and over again, I’d pick up a smell, as a task was being completed, until finally I came to identify not only what it was but where it was in its preparation. The next day, it would be the same again. I was reminded of a recollection of Andy Nusser’s, when he decided that he wanted to be a chef and went to cooking school. “You don’t learn knife skills at cooking school,” Andy said, “because they give you only six onions, and, no matter how hard you focus on those six onions, there are only six of them, and you’re not going to learn as much as when you cut up a hundred.” Repetition is at the heart of cooking. One day, I was given a hundred and fifty lamb tongues. I had never held a lamb’s tongue, which I found to be greasy and unnervingly humanlike. But, after cooking, trimming, peeling, and slicing a hundred and fifty, I’d become an expert.

One morning, Elisa went out to deal with a delivery, and I picked up a change in the way the lamb shanks smelled. They were browning in a large pan about ten feet away, and I walked over, in a trance, turned them, and resumed my task. My nose had told me that they were sufficiently browned and that in a minute they’d be ruined. By the time Elisa returned, I’d removed the shanks and thrown in another batch. She looked at me, slightly startled.

It was a modest breakthrough, and I was then allowed to cook. The first item, appropriately, was lamb shanks; they were followed by beef cheeks and short ribs (browned and then braised in a wine-based liquid until they started to fall apart). Then duck thighs, rabbit ragù, beef tongue, and guinea-hen legs.

Working alongside Mario, I recalled a suggestion he’d made, that at some point I might try being a line cook. When can I start? I asked him.

“What about now?” He addressed the grill chef. “Mark, move over. As of tonight, you’re training a new person.”

The dishes Mario prepared in 1992 at the new Rocco read like episodes in an autobiography; each one is so intimately associated with a specific moment in Mario’s life that the menu is more literary than culinary—cooking as memoir. Ravioli stuffed with brains and Swiss chard is his grandmother’s recipe. A review in New York singled out an “old-fashioned tagliatelle in a ragù Bolognese”—the very ragù that Mario prepared weekly at La Volta. The stricchetti with porcini and cremini is a variation on what Betta made on Mario’s first day in her kitchen. The leek soufflé (with grappa-cured salmon) was the dish that Mario had cooked for his first Christmas lunch in Italy, to prove that he, too, could cook. Mario had finally arrived in New York City, and had a lifetime of cooking to express.

In his second month at Rocco, Mario met Susan Cahn, his future wife, who grew specialty vegetables and sold cheese on behalf of her parents, the owners of Coach Farm. She then went to Rocco to celebrate her birthday. Mario’s family happened to be in town from Seattle—also there to celebrate a birthday, his mother’s. Cahn recalls Mario rushing back and forth from the kitchen, returning each time with a surprise—another course, another bottle of wine, another grappa, and, finally, an accordion, which his father began playing, leading everyone in Italian drinking songs until three in the morning. Cahn, who is so many things that Batali isn’t—petite, dark-haired, East Coast, Jewish to his lapsed Catholic, early-to-bed to his out-until-early, reserved and deliberate to his outgoing and impulsive—illustrates the kind of person Batali probably gets on with best. “I’m very, very different,” she told me, as though to say: “Get real. Mario could not live with another version of himself.” Arturo Sighinolfi, his new business partner, was, it seems, not so different, and, nine months into the enterprise, their partnership collapsed.

They weren’t getting customers, and even Dana Batali was perplexed: “The food was good. I don’t know why no one came to eat it.” Whatever it was, it confused the regulars. “I asked Mario to start slowly,” Arturo told me, when I tracked him down in Miami, where he is now a bartender. “I’ve been to Italy. I know what’s good. I didn’t like the old style of food, either. But I said, ‘Let’s incorporate your stuff with the old menu.’ But no, for Mario it was his way or the highway. This was my father’s restaurant. I’d known the customers for twenty-five years. They looked at the menu, said ‘What’s this shit?,’ and walked out.”

The parting was acrimonious, and Arturo still has nightmares about it. (He’d had one the night before I phoned: “I can never watch the Food Network, because I don’t know when he’s going to be on it and I don’t want to see him again.”)

Mario was unemployed and homeless. Armandino invited him to return to Seattle, and he developed a business plan for a restaurant—a longing born out of the regret of having allowed Merlino’s, the family store, to be sold. Mario didn’t take up his father’s invitation, because, finally, he’d found a venue. (And, in the aftermath, Armandino, inspired by his son, moved to Italy, at the age of fifty-eight, to be an unpaid apprentice to two butchers in Tuscany, where, in a complicated variation on the father-like-son adage, he learned how to cure meats—something his own father had done. Last year, Armandino’s business, Salumi, a salume factory that serves lunch, was awarded twenty-seven points for its food by the Zagat survey of America’s top restaurants, one more point than Babbo.)

The new venue was Pó, a former Indian restaurant with a low-rent lease that Batali picked up from a panicky landlord when the tenants left in the middle of the night. Batali, with no money, borrowed (some from Cahn—she said, “There was never a moment’s doubt that he was going to succeed”), and invited his friend Steve Crane, from San Francisco, to be his partner. They opened the restaurant six weeks later, in May, 1993, quietly, because they didn’t have the cash to buy many ingredients, and had no liquor license and no air-conditioning (during the second-hottest summer in the history of the city). But they were in business, and at the end of August the Times food critic Eric Asimov wandered in, and was overwhelmed by the pure Italianness of the food. It was, Mario recalls, heartening to find, at last, that “the food I wanted to make in New York City was the food that the people of New York City wanted to eat.”

Pó is like a teen-age Babbo—thirteen tables, plus two out on the sidewalk in summer—with similar lighting and design (both places were designed by a cousin of Cahn’s) and a menu that was heavily influenced by La Volta. For Steve Crane, the first two years were the best. Mario was in the kitchen (“like an athlete”), Crane was in the front, and the place became a late-night haunt of chefs, the result, Crane recalls, of Mario’s pressing his card into the hands of the people he met, building up a business by word of mouth, and consolidating it by treating invited customers as V.I.P.s. (The practice has been refined at Babbo, and the only times I’ve seen Batali red-faced with anger involved the neglect of V.I.P.s. He rarely shouts, but when the maître d’ failed to spot a record producer who had appeared at the bar he exploded—”You fucking moron. You fucking motherfucking moron”—and chased him out of the kitchen with such menace that I thought he was going to throw something. “If it’s a V.I.P. table, you prepare the order now,” he once hissed at the kitchen staff, reinforcing his rule that V.I.P.s get served first and fast. “You don’t prepare the food when you’re good and ready. You don’t make them wait because you’re a fucking great talent in the kitchen and you know better. You are not some fucking artist. I am counting. Ten seconds. They must have their starters in ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven.” And, with hysterical speed, the starters appeared, the pale look on the pantry chefs preparing them being one of unmitigated panic.)

According to Crane, the problems at Pó started after the head of programming at the nascent Food Network saw Mario running the kitchen with just one assistant, and invited him to do a test show. Mario the celebrity chef produced strains between the partners. Crane recalls, “I’d walk in, and there’d be a photo shoot I didn’t know about, and the photographer would say, ‘Hey, you there, get out of the way.’ “ (“What could I do?” Mario asks. “No one was interested in the maître d’.”) Three years ago, Mario assigned a price to the restaurant, and gave Crane a choice: pay it, it’s yours; take it, it’s mine. Crane paid. When the deal was signed, tears welled up in Mario’s eyes. “Mario is the toughest guy I know,” Crane said. “ ‘Hit me with your best punch,’ that’s his attitude. I had never seen him cry.” It was painful, Mario said. “It was like someone putting his name on your first baby.” Mario had never thought that Crane would want the restaurant. “He was shocked,” Crane says. “He didn’t think I could run the place without him.” And yet, curiously, he isn’t running the place without him. Mario remains, in a ghostly fashion—not only on the menu (which features many of his La Volta dishes) but, maybe, even in the kitchen. “Is Mario here?” I mischievously asked a waitress when I ate there last weekend. “Not tonight,” she said, clearly distressed by having to answer a question put to her regularly.

Cooking is about transferring heat, and the most rudimentary method is the grill: the source is a flame, and food is placed above it until enough heat has been absorbed to change its molecular makeup. Grilled foods have two textures—they’re cooked inside and out, with a skin that has been caramelized by the direct exposure to the flame—and at Babbo there are a lot of grilled items (the method says “rustic, outdoors, Italian”). There’s meat, like lamb chops, which you cook until your “touch” tells you it’s done (big cuts, like a three-inch rib-eye steak, need to be cooked in an oven as well); birds, which you cook until you simply know they’re done (or you split them open slightly and have a peek inside); and there’s a fish—branzino, or Mediterranean sea bass.

The branzino, stuffed with fennel and roasted garlic, is always cooked the same way. The grill is the size of an oven top, about four feet by three, with flames coming from long gas jets, and the fish is put on it at an angle, with its tail pointing to the left-hand corner and its head to the right. This is the practice for the meat as well—cooked on the diagonal, then turned ninety degrees and cooked on the other diagonal, which gives it the crusty skin and the grill’s crisscrossing hatch marks. It is also a way of insuring that you know where your meat is at any moment. Stage one—it’s pointing to the right. Stage two—it’s pointing to the left. Stage three—flipped over, and still pointing to the left. And the last stage, pointing back to the right. (It seems obvious, but when the grill gets busy you need the obvious.) With the branzino, you do the first crisscross turn with a pair of tongs—lifting the fish by pinching its flesh, with one tong on top and the other one slipped into its opened cavity. Once that side is done, you roll it over gently. The tricky part is the last stage, when you grab the head, slip one of your tongs underneath the tail, and lift it. Three things can go wrong. If it’s done lurchingly, the fish breaks in half. If it’s done too soon, the skin sticks to the grill. And if it’s done too slowly your arms go up in flames. On my first night, more than twenty branzinos were ordered; by seven o’clock, the hair on my arms had disappeared, except for one straggly patch by my elbow, which had melted into a black goo. But by the second night I seemed to be getting it—such is the pedagogy of relentless repetition.

I was coming to recognize that there are two kinds of cooks: those who do meat and those who do pastry. The pastry cook is the scientist and works with exact measurements and stable ingredients that behave in a predictable fashion. You mix a specific quantity of milk, eggs, sugar, and flour, and you have a pastry. If you add more butter, your pastry is crumbly; another egg, it’s cakey. It’s mathematical.

The cooking of meat, though, is variation and improvisation. Meat is, after all, the tissue of a once living creature: each piece is different, and there are no easy rules for cooking it. Meat is done when it feels done. This can’t be taught in a cookbook—this feel, a thing you learn until it’s stored in your memory, like a smell. Conventionally, a piece of meat—a lamb chop, say—is medium rare when it has a certain softness to the touch. (To illustrate, Mario would press the softest part of his pudgy palm and say the meat should have “this kind of bounce,” a pillowy trampoline puffiness, which was no help, because his hands are like no one else’s, great mitts of excess, squat and wide.) I kept getting it wrong. My touch, the second after I’d turned the meat, glistening with hot fat, was always heavy-handed, and I’d burn myself, and I wouldn’t know if it was the moment or not.

Then I began touching the meat not for doneness but for undoneness. I’d put my lamb chops on the grill—five of them, each a different shape, with a different quantity of fat—and touch one, even though I knew it was going to be soft and mushy. Then I’d turn the chop and touch it again. Still soft, like wet wool. Turn it, touch it—so on, until, finally, one of the chops started, just, to get firmer. Touch it. Firmer still. Touch it. No change. Touch it. Ready.

Because meat needs to rest, meat dishes are cooked the moment an order comes in. Orders are called out by the expediter, and the person at each station calls them back in confirmation. “Two Chinos,” Andy would say, which was kitchen shorthand for a pasta tasting menu (because the pasta chef was Asian), and he answered, “Two Chinos.” Or: “Followed by Love, Sweetie, Butt,” meaning that the next course was an order of a pasta called love letters, sweetbreads, and halibut, and the pasta chef would answer back, “Love,” and Dom, the sauté chef, would answer, “Sweetie, Butt”—a sequence of words that, if listened to with any detachment, seemed to constitute a narrative in their own right. Or: “Bar loser tender,” which meant that there was a person at the bar alone (the loser) who had ordered a pork tenderloin.

I had been at the grill for nearly two months when I had, in the kitchen’s phrasing, my first experience of being “hammered.” It was June, the hot beginning of a hot summer. The menu had changed again. Lamb shanks and short ribs had been dropped. The duck was being served not with barley but with a cherry compote and a cherry vinaigrette. Accompanying the branzino was a nine-herb salad. I made it one afternoon with Andy, trimming off stems: chive and chamomile flowers, parsley, chervil, oregano, lovage, celery leaves, the fluffy fur from baby bronze fennel, and something called “salad burnet”—an explosion of summer greenness.

Evidently, when it gets hot people want to order from the grill, the hottest part of the kitchen. It was ninety-three degrees when I arrived that day. Once the service starts, the air-conditioning vent over the grill is closed, because it disturbs the flames and dries out the resting meat. I was told to line up pitchers of water, and at five-thirty there was the sound of the ticker machine. “Game time,” Memo Trevino, one of the sous-chefs, said. A chart prepared by the maître d’ said that nearly two hundred and fifty people were expected. It turned out to be more, and the biggest number arrived in the first ninety minutes.

One of the mysteries of a restaurant is that there is almost always one thing or another that everyone seems to order, and you never know what it’s going to be. One night, everyone wanted duck or branzino, and Dom and I were the busiest chefs in the kitchen—there were twenty-five branzinos and twenty-three ducks. It was a hot night, and I understood the appeal of grilled fish. But why duck? One evening, it was rabbit. Then: no rabbit. Tonight, it was lamb chops, mainly cooked medium (medium rare was easier to feel, and well done was easiest of all—you just killed it).

“Ordering branzino, two lamb medium, one lamb well done, one lamb m.r.,” Andy called out.

I answered, “Branzino, two lamb medium, one well done, and one m.r.” Why, I remember thinking, does one go to an Italian restaurant and order lamb chops? They were served with Jerusalem artichokes, red onions in vinegar, a red-pepper coulis, lemon, mint, and a spicy yogurt; that is, all the elements of fruit and citrus and heat that you’d expect from a Mario dish. But they were, finally, just lamb chops.

A lamb chop has fat along the rib, and, once you’ve grilled both sides, you roll it onto the rib to render the fat away. At one point, there was so much fat the grill caught fire. Although you’re cooking your meat above a flame, you don’t want a fire—the taste is black plastic—but I was told to let it burn and avoid the flame; it was the only way to get rid of so much fat. And that was when the orders started.

“Ordering!” Andy sang out. “Two lamb medium, squab, two tenders, rib eye!” And I spun around, dipped into the lowboy refrigerator, loaded up one arm, spun back, dropped the meat on a tray, and seasoned it. I lined up the chops on the grill, in two rows of five, all pointing to the right, flopped the tenderloins into a corner, put on the rib eye, but hadn’t got to the squab when I heard the ticker tape. “Ordering three branzino and two lamb medium m.r.” The same routine: seasoned the lamb chops, lined them up, pointing to the right, different spot from the first batch (which I’d turned now and which were pointing to the left), because these were medium rare. But what was I to do with the branzino? There was no room.

The ticker tape again. “Ordering three lamb medium, branzino, rabbit.” More? I stopped what I was doing—I had to get the new orders on the tray where I seasoned the meat, at least that, because otherwise I was going to forget them with the next batch of orders. Uncooked meat was stacking up because there was no room on the grill.

Again the ticker tape. This was starting to feel like an athletic event. I was hot—sweat dripping off my nose—and moving as quickly as my concentration allowed, flipping, turning, poking, being burned, one row pointing to the right, another to the left, poking again, stacking up meat here, rushing over the branzinos that had been waiting for a spot, turning, the flames in the corner of the grill still burning, fed by the fat cascading off the new orders. It was exhilarating and frightening (what happens if I fall behind?) and physical and just plain weird. And still the orders kept coming—lamb medium, lamb m.r. What’s wrong with these people? I was surrounded by meat. Meat on the grill. Meat on the seasoning tray. Meat on the resting tray, in big heaps. So much meat that it no longer seemed like meat. Or maybe it seemed exactly like meat. It was tissue and muscle and sinews. And still more orders.

“This is the buzz,” the sous-chef told me later. “This is the fun part,” Mark, my grill coach, said. “This is what you live for,” Andy told me. “It feels really fucking good.” I was finally discovering what Mario had described to me as “the reality of the kitchen”—a roomful of adrenaline addicts.

And then, as suddenly, it slowed down, and the evening’s first cycle was finishing.

It would repeat itself three more times—three “hits,” the last at eleven-thirty—but now there was a break.

During a slow period, someone made food. I often had pasta (because of the way the dough was worked—for nearly an hour, which raised the level of gluten—the pasta had an unusual tenderness and elasticity; it was like some kind of perfectly cooked vegetable, certainly not like normal pasta, and I regarded it as a privilege to eat it, even while standing). Tacos were the kitchen favorite, made with tenderloin scraps or steak, or, once, with beef tongues. These were surprising moments, happy collegial meals, the chefs leaning against a counter, eating off the same plate, talking in English and Spanish. And then the ticker-tape machine started up.

I’d got a message that friends had appeared in the dining room, and I prepared to meet them. I had to cool off first. I doused myself with ice water, put a cold towel on my head, and stood in the walk-in. Steam was pouring through the heavy cotton chef’s jacket. I removed my head band, and Dom walked in and hooted with laughter. I was standing in a hot foggy cloud, trying not to move. I changed my jacket and got a new apron. I had the thought that if cooking is the transfer of heat then the real cooking wasn’t at the grill or on the flat tops; it was the whole kitchen. The kitchen was the heat source. I washed my face again and walked out into the dining room, so civilized, filled with well-dressed couples, and I asked myself, “What’s wrong with them, that they all want to eat lamb chops?”

Except for Mario, who spends most of his evenings in the dining room, usually at the bar, prominently placed so that everyone entering and leaving the restaurant sees him (most people want to see him; it’s a feature of their visit), few chefs leave the kitchen. It’s too disorienting; the cultures of serving and being served are too different. Chefs’ hours are unsocial—they work when others play; they work to allow others to play, preparing meals that they’re not earning enough to purchase. It’s easier to remain in the kitchen—the contradictions never come to the surface. I saw the cooks go into the dining room only once. The maître d’ had popped in with news. “Hooker on Table 24,” he said, and, one by one, the male chefs filed out of the kitchen and when they returned debated the woman’s price. Holly Burling, a pantry chef, and the only woman working that night, had a look of modest moral confusion. “Do I have to look, too?” she asked me.

“Maybe it’s because they’re guys in aprons that they have to prove their maleness over and over again,” Elisa said one day, not long after one of the chefs, objecting to her suggestion that portions of sweetbread should be six ounces and measured on a scale, said, “No, no. Too much work. Just call them B-cups”—and he grabbed his own breasts to illustrate the concept. “Everyone here knows what a B-cup is.”

The kitchen exaggerated people—in that small hot box of a work space. It was as if, pressed together, you were outside the normal social order. People behaved differently. More sexist, cruder, harder, sometimes verging on violence. I found that I liked it: I think most people in the kitchen did—it had a blunt, unapologetic reality.

Ever since Mario gave up Pó, he has seemed, at times, like a man so fiercely driven by the next thing that you wonder how he keeps it all in his head. He is a father now (with two boys, four and almost six), and so is his partner, Joe Bastianich; it was in celebration of this that they named their first venture together Babbo, which means Papa. The two then opened two more Manhattan restaurants—a Roman-style trattoria called Lupa and a theatre-district place devoted to fish, called Esca. This was followed by a wine store, Italian Wine Merchants. Now Batali wants a Spanish restaurant (Andy Nusser will run it). In June, he and Bastianich got the lease on a space at 1 Fifth Avenue, right around the corner from Babbo (it will open in October, as a pizzeria called Otto). The same month, the two bought land in Italy for a vineyard.

Batali needs the excitement of new ventures, of having to be always stimulated, I thought, when one evening he disappeared—ran over to one of the other restaurants, popped into the kitchen, had a drink at the bar, rushed back to the Babbo dining room (“Oh, they’re needy tonight”), and then made his way to the kitchen.

In the kitchen Mario is different. He is no longer Molto Mario. He is not performing, and he doesn’t have an audience. He is focussed, unsmiling because he doesn’t need to smile, taciturn because there’s no need to be chatty, and utterly at ease. In most situations, Mario has the impish look of a class clown, slightly mischievous, teasing: whatever he’s going to do next, it’s going to charm you, and he knows that it will. In the kitchen, there’s no clown act, no clown mask, and no charm. His face is relaxed, transparent. He can be rude with impunity. He is often moody, and, in a kitchen so small, with so many people crushed into it, his moods affect the other cooks, who become irritable and difficult, long after Mario has left.

His view is that he doesn’t really have to be there, and yet he should be there, nevertheless—simply to know what’s going on. And while it’s true that a restaurant loses its focus when the chef isn’t in the kitchen, Mario is there for another reason, too. It’s his retreat, the place where he can simply be Mario. He is happiest when he is preparing food—the mysterious pleasure of bringing pleasure to others. ♦