Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

by Bill Buford

  At the time, I was grateful for my casual affiliation with the food trade because it provided me with a glimpse of what this period was like among the restaurateurs I happened to meet: the speculation was constant, and underlying it all was a legitimate business concern. New York is different from most European cities, which often have several upmarket newspapers competing for an upmarket audience, the kind that tends to support high-end restaurants. New York has one, the Times, and its critic, in the view of many proprietors, can make or break a business. The fear isn’t that a critic might have a personal agenda; it is merely that judgment is unpredictable and sometimes arbitrary, even if its consequences can be absolute: if your restaurant gets trashed, for whatever reason, your trade will suffer, and, if it survives the trashing, you may not have another chance to prove yourself.

  One Saturday night in June, I was meant to have dinner with Mario but he canceled at the last minute. He had just learned that the Times had filled the vacancy left by Grimes. The new guy was Frank Bruni, who had been the paper’s bureau chief in Rome. Without anyone’s realizing, Bruni had dined at Babbo several times during the preceding month. (Holy fuck!) It was only on his last visit that he was finally spotted. His debut review would be of Babbo, and, this time, the critic had genuinely eaten his way through the menu anonymously. Mario had canceled our dinner in the hope that Bruni might return. He didn’t. He didn’t need to. His review was already written: it would appear on the following Wednesday.

  There was to be a preview on a local television news station: the practice was that the critic reads the review on New York One at nine-fifteen the night before it’s published (in shadows, to preserve his anonymity). On the afternoon of the broadcast, my wife, walking past Babbo, spotted John Mainieri, the maître d’, standing outside with a gaggle of the staff, smoking furiously (John doesn’t normally smoke), his shirt soaked through with sweat. “Come back in the evening,” he urged. “We’ll be celebrating or mourning, because our future is on the line.”

  “How am I?” Mario asked, rhetorically repeating the question I’d put to him. “I’ll tell you tomorrow. The whole year could be ruined.”

  My wife and I spent the evening in the restaurant, enduring the countdown as well as continuous displays of self-doubt. Martin Gobbee, who’d happened to wait on Bruni’s table on his last three visits, was rehearsing the exchanges he’d had with the man. Another waiter confessed that he’d just bought an apartment in Brooklyn (“Christ, I’ve taken on a mortgage!”). The wife of David Lynch, the wine steward, was pregnant (“Because, you know, we thought the future was solid”). Mario wasn’t around.

  There were two fears. One pertained to the critic. Only one thing was known about him: that he’d been previously based in Rome. This Bruni fellow actually knew Italian food. It followed that Babbo would be judged not simply against other New York restaurants but also against those from the old country. No other New York critic had that kind of knowledge.

  The other fear was Frankie.

  Frankie continued to have difficulties settling in, which was scarcely surprising, since almost the entire kitchen staff had resigned. Meanwhile, he had fired the new sous-chef and hired another. And then, with a day’s notice, Abelardo, from the prep kitchen, had been promoted to the pasta station, the most difficult in the kitchen. Mario was now having to be at Babbo every night. In addition, there had been some pejorative word-of-mouth patter. A Babbo regular, a writer and occasional food journalist, had eaten a bad meal—“my lamb was overcooked, and the squab was raw”—and had told so many people about his leaden lamb and his pink pigeon (“Was it because Andy is no longer there?”) that it became a public refrain, one that was regularly reaching Joe and Mario. The fear was that the patter would provoke a reappraisal—ironic now, since a reappraisal was already in the works. “This is what happens with regulars,” Joe told me, the sour word-of-mouth report circulating unstoppably. “They all self-destruct. They expect too much. They forget that it’s a business. You can never make them happy. All regulars crash and burn.” I had never seen Joe so angry.

  Recently, I contacted Frank Bruni. I had obvious questions—about the Italianness of Babbo’s cooking and how it compared to what he’d been eating in Italy—but what really interested me were more prurient preoccupations: Did he realize his review had put everyone in a panic? Did he have any idea that he represented what everyone feared, a reappraisal, at a time when the kitchen was in upheaval? Mario had been at the restaurant every time Bruni ate there: did he really think that was normal?

  Bruni admitted he’d been surprised that no one had caught on that he was there as a critic, especially after getting the same waiter three times in a row. And, no, he hadn’t thought that the kitchen’s performance was uneven, over and above the normal (and considerable) “disruptive feeling” of the whole place. And, no, he hadn’t picked Babbo for its Italianness, although, it’s true, he had found himself judging the food against what he’d been eating in Rome. (“Babbo is too elaborate to be genuinely Italian. Italian cooking is simple. Babbo is not simple. Italy is a starting point.”) Mainly, he was astonished that anyone would have been nervous. He explained that before he had taken up his position he had sought out the best the city had to offer. He spent four weeks eating at great New York restaurants and then considered where he’d had the most fun. “This review was my first time out, and I wanted it to be about the joy of dining in New York. It wasn’t scientific. I just liked Babbo a lot. It has a consistency of deliciousness that I knew I’d enjoy describing.”

  The review was a rave. Mario walked in, just after nine-thirty, with an enlarged photocopy (the text had appeared on a Web site). “Among the restaurants that make my stomach do a special jig,” Bruni wrote, “Babbo ranks near the top, and that’s one reason a fresh review appears today, six years after Babbo opened and received a three-star rating from Ruth Reichl.” Bruni confirmed the restaurant’s three-star status but suggested he’d wanted to give it a fourth star. At present, he pointed out, there were five four-star restaurants, and all of them were French. Was there a reason that an Italian restaurant was not among them? “Why not Babbo?”

  “There is a short, emblematic answer: the music. On the first of my recent visits to Babbo, what thundered—and I do mean thundered—from the sound system was relatively hard rock. Bucatini with the Black Crowes? (‘Their second album!’ a waiter proudly informed us.) Linguine with Led Zeppelin?”

  It was the perfect Batali review: the food was so good it could have been French; the food was so good it could have got the city’s highest accolade; but, in the final reckoning, the place was too rock ’n’ roll, a rebel without a fourth star.

  It was also a vindication of Frankie. I went back and found him leaning against the pass, reading the enlarged photocopy. He had been running the kitchen for half a year. He’d gained weight (the butter) and lost hair (his dark Italian-American curls receding to reveal an older man’s sage forehead). And he had a calmness I’d never seen. Ever since I’d met Frankie, he had been preparing for this day—when a critic would wander in and judge his cooking. The day had come, and Frankie had acquitted himself: he was running a four-star kitchen, marred only by the music tastes of his boss. In fact, if Mario hadn’t been here, worrying about Frankie’s kitchen, the music wouldn’t have been so loud—only Mario jacks up the volume so high that everyone in the restaurant is compelled to listen. Was it possible that Frankie, on his own, would have got the fourth star? Frankie chuckled. “I’m happy,” he said. We embraced. What can I say? He’s a dickhead, but a dickhead with talent, although I will always be mystified by the complicated process of restaurant pedagogy, the one where Mario learned so many things from Marco Pierre White, including not to be like Marco, and that then continued into the next generation, where Frankie learned so many things from Mario, including how to be like Marco Pierre White.

  I lingered, relishing Frankie’s day, this once-in-a-lifetime moment, a culmination of years in hot kitchens,
the hours of learning, perfecting, memorizing, until finally you reach a point where you’ve learned enough. Mario’s story came to mind—surviving that London pub, the humiliations of Italy, the failure of Rocco. It takes a long time. It had taken Andy a long time. And now Frankie: he had arrived.

  29

  SO,” MARIO ASKED ME, “what about your own restaurant? Say, a small place in Italy, maybe in the hills. Italian for the Italians. A few tables. Open only on weekends. Completely authentic. Jessica in front, you in the back. Or,” he paused theatrically, “you could do something here.” He wiggled his eyebrows. “We have the means…”

  It was a ridiculous suggestion, but I accepted it as a flattering indication of how much I’d learned. I had no idea how much that was until I sat down with Mario and jabbered away about the girello, speculated on what could be done with the sottofesa, enumerated the miracles that can be performed on a shank. I’d assumed anyone who had spent time in Italy knew this stuff. I hadn’t recognized that not even most Italians didn’t.

  “Please,” Mario said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Wow. In this small area of expertise, I know more than Mario. The apprentice has become a disciple has become a—what? Something: if nothing else, the Maestro’s student, and Dario’s, as well as Betta’s. (It’s only now that I realize I’d forgotten an important lesson from the butcher shop: that when I got home no one would know what I was talking about.) Even so, against my better judgment, my mind wandered, contemplating Mario’s suggestion, preparing food that was genuinely Italian and genuinely simple. Could “simple” work in New York? Or a version of the macelleria? I pictured the display case, the eccentric opening times, the hours I’d put in memorizing Dante: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.” Midway through my life, once again.

  The occasion was a debriefing dinner—postponed by Mario (because of Bruni), although, post-Bruni, Mario no longer had the high-testosterone swagger I had known him by but something bigger: omnipotence, perhaps. Our evening had begun on the stoop, where Mario hangs out and summons waiters by cell phone to keep his wine glass refreshed. He had emerged in something of a sprint, customers grabbing him until he was out the door. (“Kathleen Turner just gave me tongue,” he said breathlessly, having been stopped by the actress before he escaped and who, rather than peck him on the cheek, had slipped in a wetty. “I hate it when people do that, especially with her husband staring at me.”) Mario was bearing two bottles of white wine, which disappeared so fast I don’t remember drinking them. (“Hey, Lynchy,” he said, phoning the wine steward, “bring us two more bottles along with your two best Mexican prostitutes.”) Those downed, we set out for Lupa, but not before dispatching three cops to Otto. They’d chatted with us on the stoop, tolerantly watching us slowly lose our ability to watch them. “Hey, Amanda,” Mario said, phoning the manager, “give them the corner table and lose the bill.”

  At Lupa, we had a Vernaccia di San Gimignano (bottle number five), and thirty-five different dishes, many composed on the spot by the restaurant’s genius chef, Mark Ladner—a spread that, before my Italian experiences, I would have considered excessive, but now seemed perfectly reasonable: after all, compared with Scappi’s 1,347-plate pranzo, what’s thirty-five little plates? There were cured things, fried things, and vegetable things, including stuffed zucchini flowers deep-fried in a mix of olive oil and butter, which, according to the chef, made for a more interesting texture than normal peanut oil, a detail that fascinated me so much I wrote it in my notebook, believing I’d be scoping out the green market in the morning for zucchini flowers. (In the event, I missed the morning.)

  We were on to reds, two bottles of Giovanni Manetti’s Flacianello, the one made from the very vines I’d seen from that ridge by the old church in Panzano. Those finished, Mario and I passed the half-case point, a full case in watery view. By the time pastas appeared (I hadn’t realized that the first thirty-five dishes were starters), my notes grew less reliable. According to one entry, there were eight pastas, but what I wrote seems incomplete: “ramps, breadcrumbs, spaghetti, wife” (when did she arrive?) followed by an instruction to her from Mario—” You will eat your pasta or I will rub the shrimp across your breasts”—which is confusing because I don’t remember any shrimp. By now, we’d had, by my count, forty-three plates of food, although I feel compelled to add that the plates really were very small. Main courses arrived. And more wine. (“Bricco dell’ Uccellone,” my notes say. Three bottles, which brought our tally to ten, mitigated by the presence of a third drinker, my wife—if she was drinking. If she was there.) I remember pork and oxtail stew and an uproar following the appearance of a swordfish. “It’s perfectly nice,” Mario protested, “but, hey, it’s a fish. It’s from under the sea. Who wants fish?” After this, who knows? For a start, my notes are upside down (never reassuring), and what means this remark—” Let’s push the envelope a little”? Or Mario’s request of the waitress: “It’s not fair I have this view all to myself when you bend over. For dessert, would you take off your blouse for the others?” (Lucky woman—she works for the guy.) Or this: “Two thirty; exterminator here.” To disinfect the restaurant or us? Alarmingly, we then left to get something to drink (Mario was parched), when he put the question to me again: so, a restaurant?

  And I realized: no. I did not want a restaurant.

  When I started, I hadn’t wanted a restaurant. What I wanted was the know-how of people who ran restaurants. I didn’t want to be a chef: just a cook. And my experiences in Italy had taught me why. For millennia, people have known how to make their food. They have understood animals and what to do with them, have cooked with the seasons and had a farmer’s knowledge of the way the planet works. They have preserved traditions of preparing food, handed down through generations, and have come to know them as expressions of their families. People don’t have this kind of knowledge today, even though it seems as fundamental as the earth, and, it’s true, those who do have it tend to be professionals—like chefs. But I didn’t want this knowledge in order to be a professional; just to be more human.

  I also had a piece of unfinished business I didn’t think Mario would understand. For more than a year, I’d been thinking of Caterina de’ Medici.

  The Medici story was the one told endlessly in the butcher shop, although I’d heard it elsewhere as well; Gianni, in Porretta, for instance, repeated it as often as Dario. A beloved member of Tuscany’s favorite family crosses the Alps to become the queen of France and gives away Italy’s secrets. Thus ends Italian gastronomy; thus begins the French. Outside Tuscany, of course, no one believes it. The Oxford Companion to Food lists it among history’s most foolish food fables in an entry headed “culinary mythology” and describes how it is routinely demolished by historians who point out that Caterina was never meant to be a queen, but only a princess. What’s more, she was only fourteen at the time, so what would she have known about food? Besides, she probably didn’t cross the Alps but arrived by boat in Marseilles (ergo, no pack animals full of goodies) and for the next ten years was in the doghouse (fertility issues), anyway. And, finally, a codified French cuisine didn’t emerge for at least another century, long after she was dead.

  I’ve got to admit it’s a persuasive list of objections, but does it mean the story was made up? Okay, so Tuscans give Caterina too much credit—can you blame them? They’re Tuscans. But would this be the first time that modern historians, working in the established niche of myth bashing, had gone too far?

  The queen, we know, was living in rough times. She didn’t have her first child until she was nearly thirty (downright old age in the sixteenth century) but then, getting the hang of it, had five in quick succession. The king turned out to be a philandering scumbag with a mindless penchant for running around in armor (he died in a jousting match, when the queen, now Catherine, was forty). The country was on the verge of civil war (Catholics and Huguenots), and there wasn’t a lot of time to think about lunch. But the most telling e
pisode in Catherine de Médicis’s culinary life occurred in the 1560s, when she was not fourteen but well into her forties, and, with her sad-sack king husband gone, had become the most influential woman in France. To create unity at a time of factional fighting and to engender respect for the monarch (and for the reign of her three sons), she, as queen regent, mounted an extraordinary campaign. With an entourage of eight thousand horses, soldiers, and attendants, plus the royal chef, along with his extensive staffs of cooks, carvers, scalcos, and servers, she embarked on a two-year culinary tour of France, setting up banquets and festivals and regal entertainments in what amounted to a sixteenth-century royal road show. For two years, she sought to consolidate the monarchy in a way that an Italian would understand: by feeding people.

  Where else, in the 1560s, was anyone in Europe preparing lavish, elaborate banquets with many courses? Not in France or England or the German countries. But an eight-course Italian pranzo comes to mind, one with 1,347 different dishes, made by Bartolomeo Scappi. The menu was undated—that was part of its rhetorical force when it was included in Scappi’s 1570 edition of his works—but was almost certainly prepared during the preceding decade. Such a banquet, or something like it, was surely one of the models for Catherine de Médicis’s road show: a Renaissance Italian feast.