by Jane Kramer
In 2014, Yotam Ottolenghi published Plenty More, a companion to his transformative vegetarian cookbook Plenty, and a year later, the cookbook NOPI, written with NOPI’s head chef, Ramael Scully. Today Ottolenghi is “back where I started, with pastry,” finishing a luscious book called, appropriately, Sweets. He and his husband, Karl, now have two sons.
POST-MODENA
OCTOBER 2013
The words “Italy” and “new gastronomy” were an oxymoron when Massimo Bottura opened the Osteria Francescana in Modena, in 1995, and started creating the dishes that would turn him into a luminary of the culinary avant-garde. Take Black on Black, his tribute, by way of squid ink, katsuobushi, and a black cod, to Thelonius Monk. Or Camouflage, his nod to Picasso, with a civet of wild hare “hiding” in custard under a blanket of powdered herbs and spices. Today, dishes like those have earned him three Michelin stars, raised Francescana to third place on San Pellegrino’s famous list of the best restaurants in the world, and put Italy on the map for the kind of travelers who prefer to eat their spaghetti and meatballs at home.
Bottura gets emotional thinking about food. His friends know this because he thinks out loud. Very loud. It happens when he starts to imagine a recipe—inspired, perhaps, by the arrival of a new Big Green Egg cooker or a wheel of Parmesan that he’s been aging for fifty months, but just as often by, say, a Robert Longo painting or some vintage Lou Reed vinyl or a line he suddenly remembers from Kerouac or Céline. He describes the process as a kind of synesthesia, where the worlds he loves start coming together in his head, and he has no choice but to call someone with the news. It could be a childhood friend a couple of blocks away in Modena or another chef thousands of miles from Italy, depending on who, in his words, “has to hear this.” People listen. They hear the beginning of a loud, breathless, unstoppable recitation, and know that, as one friend put it, “It’s Massimo, cross-pollinating again.” Bottura calls it, “Tasting my creativity.”
The first time I heard Bottura “thinking,” I wondered if he was angry—or, worse, bored. I was wrong. I got used to Bottura’s shouts. I began to think of them as bardic. I would wait for him to jump up from the breakfast table—“the best place to catch him focused,” his American wife, Lara Gilmore, maintains—grab his cell phone, disappear into the library, where he keeps a gleaming 1970s Transcriptors hydraulic turntable, a pair of MartinLogan speakers, and his vast collection of CDs, tapes, and records, and, with the music blasting, begin to shout. I would watch him brake his motorcycle in the middle of a busy Modena street, dig for his phone, and, to the accompaniment of honking horns, begin to shout. I learned a lot about food, listening to Bottura think, though I would happily have skipped the night he punched a number into his phone and yelled, “Senti questa!”—“Listen to this!”—while driving a Mercedes at perilous speed down the autostrada to Reggio Emilia and, at the same time, leaning low into the windshield to take pictures of the moon rising under the arch of a Santiago Calatrava bridge. That was unsettling, given that I had hoped to get to Modena alive that night and sample the Eel Swimming Up the Po River on Bottura’s Sensations tasting menu, and even to beg a chef ’s reprise of Black on Black, which had been “retired,” like the number of a star pitcher.
Bottura thinks of his dishes as metaphors. They tell stories. His eel—cooked sous vide, lacquered with a saba sauce, and served with creamy polenta and a raw wild-apple jelly—refers to the flight of the Estense dukes to Modena in 1598, after Clement VIII seized their capital at Ferrara and claimed its eel marshes and fisheries for the Church. Camouflage—with its custard of foie gras, dark chocolate, and espresso foam—comes from a conversation between Picasso and Gertrude Stein, as a camouflaged truck rolled past them on Boulevard Raspail, in 1914. (Picasso, who had never seen camouflage before, cried, “Yes, it is we who made it, that is cubism.”) And the short story that inspired Black on Black is about a French chef who turns out the lights when a group of irritable gourmets sit down to dinner, telling them, Eat with your palates, not your eyes. Bottura thought of that story late one night in his library, listening to Monk in the dark. He decided to create a recipe that would honor Monk, but he couldn’t turn out the lights at Francescana. So he filleted the cod; seared its skin in dehydrated sea urchin and an ash of burned herbs; flipped it over to nestle in a layer of slivered root vegetables and ginger (for “spaghetti”); and poached it in a dried-tuna broth, blackened with the squid ink. At Francescana, it came to the table as a beautiful deep black circle in a bowl. The “lights” went on when you picked up your knife and fork and cut into the cod’s bright white flesh. “Black and white,” Bottura says. “Piano keys.”
Bottura is one of a small far-flung brotherhood of exceptionally gifted and inventive chefs who have deconstructed, distilled, concentrated, and with uncommon respect, reconstructed the flavors of their own traditional cuisines. They are in constant touch. They text, they tweet, they call. They travel across the planet to share their ideas and secrets and techniques—the thermal immersion circulators, micro-vaporizers, precision smokers, and freeze dryers. They convene in August for the MAD weekend—the Noma chef René Redzepi’s annual gathering of the tribe in Copenhagen. They fish and hunt and forage and cook together at wilderness outings like Cook It Raw, gastronomy’s extreme sport (which Redzepi once, possibly to his regret, described as Boy Scout camp). They meet at the food writer and impresario Andrea Petrini’s Gelinaz! (don’t ask) cook-offs and riff on the history of one dish. This year the destination was Ghent and the dish was a classic nineteenth-century meat-and-vegetable timbale; Bottura sent his brother Paolo, who is a car dealer, to be “Massimo Bottura” and present his version, along with a video of the two men trading clothes at the airport—to make the point that no chef can claim to own a recipe, even one he has invented. They recount their most catastrophic gastronomic adventures to enraptured foodies at places like the New York Public Library, where Bottura was last “in conversation” with two of the American brothers, Daniel Patterson of the San Francisco restaurant Coi and David Chang of Momofuku.
He told a story about trying to cook seventy reindeer tongues sous vide, in a bath of ashes and olive oil, on the floor of a small hotel bedroom somewhere in the forests of Lapland, with the thermal circulators set so low that he had to spend twenty-four hours on the floor with them, waiting for the molecular miracle that would transform those thick, rubbery lumps into tempting morsels. This fall, in an exhibit at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, in Paris, you can see the “black meteorite” sculpture of carbon ashes, ground coffee, flour, and egg whites in which he had cooked a veal tongue—an image that came to him while thinking (out loud) about the artist Lucio Fontana’s mid-century series Concetto Spaziale.
Bottura was born in Modena and grew up in a big house not far from the restaurant he owns now. Modena is a small city in Emilia-Romagna, half an hour northwest of Bologna in the Po River Valley, which is to say in the country’s breadbasket, a source of agricultural wealth that is the envy of all Italy. The Po and its web of tributaries—Modena sits between two—account for a food tradition that includes the country’s only authentic Parmesan (Parmigiano-Reggiano), its best prosciutto and culatello, its richest sausages (try pheasant stuffed with cotechino), its darkest Vignola cherries, and its finest balsamic vinegars, some of which were already on Modena’s tables when Cicero, writing the Philippics, described the colony by its Latin name, as Mutina firmissima et splendidissima. Modena is steeped in praise, history, and satisfaction. Bottura says that when he opened Francescana the local borghesi—few of whom actually thought to eat there—were instantly suspicious, convinced that no one could cook better than the way they had always cooked, meaning exactly the way their mothers and grandmothers, and all the mothers before them, had. This of course could be said of anywhere in Italy, a country so resistant to culinary experiment that grown men will refuse to eat their wives’ cooking and go “home” for lunch instead.
So it’s probably more shocking than surprising that
at first, Modena—home to a twelfth-century university and cathedral, to Italy’s West Point, to the Ferrari founder and the Maserati factory, to a concert hall, an opera house, seven theaters, three good museums, and a foundation with one of the best photography collections anywhere—was immune to the lure of gastronomic refreshment. The problem was pride as much as provinciality. “When you taste a Bottura dish, the flavors you thought you knew become deeper, wider, longer,” his friend Massimo Bergami, the dean of the Alma business school, at the University of Bologna, says. “He’s building on the genuine identity of Italian cuisine. But to most Italians, identity has to do with borders, with saying, Go no farther. Our towns were walled once, and the ones with the most ‘identity’ within their walls have often preserved it obstinately, defensively, in a very static way.” It seems that, while Spain was ready for a Ferran Adrià, Denmark for a René Redzepi, and Brazil for an Alex Atala, Modena was not quite ready for a Massimo Bottura, who said, “I want to donate my dreams to people” in the same breath as he talked about the tortellini his mother, Luisa, made.
Luisa Bottura cooked all day. She didn’t have to. Her own mother had helped found and run a very successful fuel company, dealing first in wood and then in coal, and when Luisa married Alfio Bottura, who came from a rich landowning family, he took over her family’s business, switched to diesel fuel, and made another fortune. But she could usually be found in the kitchen, where with the help of her mother and her maid, she cooked for a daughter and four sons, their hungry friends, a brother-in-law and a sister-in-law who had moved in, and anyone her husband wanted to bring home for lunch or dinner except his mistress—“he had two ‘wives’” was the local term.
Bottura was the youngest son by six years. He says that his brothers would come home from school, find him watching the women cook, and chase him around the kitchen with whatever makeshift weapons were at hand. He took to hiding under the kitchen table, where, being five or six and always hungry, he “discovered my palate” by devouring the bits of tortellini dough that fell to the floor from the women’s rolling pins. It was instantly addictive, he says, like the taste of his wife’s cookie batter dropped from a wooden spoon. “That kitchen, under the table, was my safety place,” he told me. “I remember the yellow of the pasta on a warm day, with the sun streaming through the window. I could see it through the slats. ‘A perfect color,’ I thought. ‘Good for tagliatelle, too.’”
In 1988, after a trip to Southeast Asia—“my first exotic vacation,” Bottura calls it—ended with a bout of food poisoning in Chiang Mai, he thought about how soothing a bowl of his mother’s “birthday tortellini” would be, and began to work on a dish that he called the Tortellini Are Walking on the Broth. Two layers of broth, thickened with a seaweed agar “to create the movement of water, and six tortellini bobbing between them, in a layer of warm broth, crossing the Red Sea, going home.” His wife, Lara, describes it as “Max’s ultimate provocation of a town where no one would say, ‘I’m better than la mamma.’” Eventually he made his compromesso storico with Modena. He called that dish Noah’s Ark, because every family’s tortellini tradition was in it. Bottura says, “My thought was you don’t let tradition bind you. You let it set you free. The broth of Noah’s Ark is the broth of many mothers. I put all their traditions together in one pot—duck, pigeon, guinea fowl, chicken, veal, beef, pork, eel, and frog’s legs, with some kombu seaweed from Japan, for a wise cultural contamination—and make the broth. When all those flavors are concentrated, the meat comes off the bones, the bones are roasted, and each handkerchief of tortellini is filled with one of those broth meats.” I asked his mother, who is eighty-nine, what she thought. “Massimo’s cooking is fantastic,” she said. “But I cook better.”
Bottura began to cook for his friends when he was still in high school. They were a notorious crew—“six of us, plus twenty worshipers,” one of them told me, laughing—known as either the bad boys or the golden youth of Modena, depending on who was talking. They were all good-looking. They threw the wildest parties. They were into every Italian teenage preoccupation—music, motorcycles, cars, soccer, girls, and clothes. (Bottura’s taste once ran to Gigli, Gaultier, and Moschino; now he’s happy in jeans, T-shirts, and a comfortable pair of New Balance.) “There were the serious, political kids, and there was us,” Massimo Morandi, a Modena businessman who is one of Bottura’s oldest friends, says. “Most of us came to school by public bus. Okay, I had a car—a Rabbit—but Max had his choice of cars. One day it was his father’s gray Mercedes, the next his brother Andrea’s green Porsche, the next his brother Paolo’s black Saab. Cars like that, parked outside the school next to the teachers’ little Fiats, created a lot of envy. But Max wasn’t showing off; he was just being crazy.”
Bottura was also irrepressibly hospitable, like his mother. Whenever he and his friends were through partying for the night, they trooped to Luisa Bottura’s door for pasta. They called it the after party. “It was never a problem,” she said. “My door was always open. I loved to watch them eat.” It wasn’t long before Max took over the three-in-the-morning shift in Luisa’s kitchen. “The atmosphere around Max was pure Animal House,” his friend Giorgio de Mitri, who owns the Modena arts-communications company Sartoria, says. “But when the playing stopped it was aglio, olio, e peperoncino, and there was Massimo at the stove. He was very good at cooking fast.”
There is some debate in Modena as to when Bottura became the serious cook he is now. His mother says, “In my kitchen.” Morandi says on a camping trip, in the late seventies: thirty kids, a couple of tents, and on the last night, “a celebration, with Max cooking a spaghetti carbonara so perfect that we all clapped.” But Paolo Bottura knows that it happened when his best auto electrician left his dealership to open a restaurant. Paolo wanted the electrician back, wooed him, and two years later, told Max that there might be a restaurant for sale. It was a truck stop, really, in a village near Modena called Campazzo di Nonantola, but Max was at loose ends. He had finished high school with amazing ease, considering that he rarely studied. He had put in his obligatory year with the Italian army stationed at home in Modena—and won so many titles for his base’s soccer team that no one stopped him when he took to driving in and out of the base without permission, honking at the gates and calling, “Open up. It’s me, number one.”
He went to law school to appease his father, who wanted a lawyer in the family business. “I liked it, but it wasn’t the right place,” he says. “I didn’t feel that I was living my own life.” He was also working afternoons for his father. That ended when the two men fought over a commission that his father refused to pay, saying, “You sold too low.” Bottura told me, “I started screaming and never went back. I pictured myself waking up every morning, foggy, fighting with my father over one cent per liter of diesel gas. I had no money. But I bought that falling-apart trattoria. I thought, ‘Why not?’ I was already cooking for all my friends. I wanted to show that I could do it.”
Marco Bizzarri, who shared a desk with Bottura in high school and is now the president and CEO of Bottega Veneta, says, “I was doing my military service, and I remember calling Max’s mother, asking for him, and Luisa saying, ‘He’s opened a restaurant.’ I couldn’t believe it. I was the blue-collar bad boy; my parents worked in a tile factory. But I had gone through life with Massimo. We had aced our French tests together, with Max reading from the book we were supposed to know and me mouthing the words and trying not to laugh. I knew Max could be anything he wanted. He was like a child, someone always growing, and you never knew what was coming next. But I never expected Campazzo. The truckers were still eating there, they were yelling at him, ‘What is this? We’re paying more but eating less!’”
It was 1986. Bottura was twenty-three and trying to transform a roadside trattoria where, by all accounts, the chipped glasses were as old as the trucks outside, and everything else was brown and muddy yellow except the hideous gold-painted metal food trolley that he wheeled around, p
retending not to see his friends. Most of the bad boys were on their way to respectable lives, but their nights were reserved for the Trattoria del Campazzo, the consensus being that, wherever Max was, there would be a party later. His worst problem was the “entertainment”—an accordionist with a singing wife who came with the place and whom Bottura was either too timid or too kind to fire, until after six months of forbearance, his friends gave him an ultimatum: us or them. Meanwhile, Campazzo was looking prettier. Bottura’s girlfriend at the time was studying interior design. She hung curtains and replaced the old tablecloths with creamy linens. Her mother filled in nights, washing dishes, and Luisa Bottura came every day with her maid to make the pasta, while Massimo got busy at the stove and started riffing on their old Modena recipes. “Economically, it was terrible,” he says. “But the food got better.”
A few months after Campazzo opened, a woman from the village knocked on the door, asking for the new owner. Her name was Lidia Cristoni. She had been cooking in Modena for thirty-five years, many of them at what was then its best restaurant, but she was losing her sight and could no longer negotiate the city’s streets. Bottura installed her in his kitchen that morning, and two days later saw to it that she had an operation on her eyes. She had planned to stay for a year or two, and stayed for seven. “She was my second mother-mentor,” Bottura says. “A master pasta-maker. She could handle a hundred and sixty eggs a day.” I asked Lidia about Campazzo one day last summer, when Bottura and I visited her at the clinic where she had just had heart surgery and was already complaining about the food. “Massimo had a fantastic will,” she said while Bottura dug into the lunch she had refused to finish. “But he was so nervous about the restaurant. He was grinding his teeth, he wasn’t sleeping, he wasn’t eating—he was down to sixty kilos. I gave him salamis, I told him, ‘Mangia! Mangia!’ or I’ll leave. One day the health people showed up to say that we couldn’t use any eggs at all because of salmonella. Max didn’t know what to do, but I did. I told the inspector that I had twenty fresh eggs from my own hens. He said, ‘Give me ten,’ and left.”
