Super Mario!

By John Cloud

Mario Batali grabs a brawny handful of parsley leaves and tosses them into the pot without looking. Onstage before a crowd of 400 at the International Home and Housewares Show in Chicago, Batali is demonstrating how to make fregula soup with clams. It's a simple recipe--fregula is just a kind of pasta--but the soup looks a mess. An intemperate amount of chili flakes has gone in, as has what seemed unadvisedly large pinches of saffron, which has a neat but metallic flavor that can overwhelm. As Batali stumbles over a loose cord onstage, it occurs to me that he must be exhausted. It's noon Sunday, and less than 12 hours before, he had been drinking with Emeril Lagasse and their entourages. They hadn't left the Peninsula hotel bar until 1:30 a.m., after the music stopped and the lights went bright. It had been the second night in a row that Batali had closed the place. Saturday night had ended with a couple of rounds of French white (the 2002 Silex, $115 a bottle) followed by three glasses of grappa, the high-proof distillation of grape pomace long favored by old men in Italy.

A mere six hours after closing the bar, Batali could be found swimming in the Peninsula's rooftop pool. After he swam, Batali put away crab cake Benedict while constantly checking his Treo for messages and simultaneously answering my questions. Then he was off for two hours of negotiations with retailers to persuade them to place orders for his cookware. Next he did the demo, and afterward he signed autographs for about 250 fans. He also kept up a running banter that had continued all weekend.

Burly Chicago guy: "Did you party with the Irish last night, Mario?"

Batali: "No, we partied with the Portuguese." (Lagasse is half Portuguese.)

A suburbanite fortysomething in faded jeans, sneakers and frosted hair: "Can I touch you, Mario?"

Batali, who was signing a book for the woman: "Only above the table, madam."

After the book signing, Batali would fly home to New York City. His plane late, he would miss the private HBO screening of The Sopranos at Manhattan's Ziegfeld Theater. But he would make the premiere of Ring of Fire, the Johnny Cash musical on Broadway. Batali would then have drinks at the wrap party after the play; he got home around 1 a.m. A few hours later, he would get up early to take his boys, 7 and 9, to school. (Batali and his wife Susi Cahn live in Manhattan.)

Something has to give, right? The man is 45. His girth is so magisterial that the inevitable Falstaff comparison seems inadequate. All that saffron in the soup--that's where he's showing weakness, I decided. So busy being a star that he's sloppy in the kitchen. To test the theory, back in Chicago I had sneaked into the prep area after Batali had left the crowd standing in applause. I found a cook named Kirsten West who had prepped the ingredients for the demo. "How's the soup?" I asked.

"It's got heat." She made a whooshing noise and raised her eyebrows. "But it's good."

I grabbed a spoon. The soup rocked. The chili balanced and electrified the saffron; chicken stock and the fregula smoothed everything out. Seeing my surprise, West shrugged. "The man knows how to cook."

This is Mario Batali's moment. Often it's difficult to pinpoint the instant a man becomes a brand. Typically you can identify that moment in retrospect--for instance, if you look at the other stars in the food universe, you could argue that Lagasse became something larger, an uberversion of himself, nearly a decade ago, when his management team literally trademarked his expressions "BAM!" and "Kick it up a notch." You can also predict a branding; with her new magazine Every Day with Rachael Ray, the unnaturally perky Ray--who plays a flibbertigibbet on her show 30 Minute Meals but is said to be a savvy businesswoman--seems poised to grow beyond her niche of working women.

But Batali is becoming a brand virtually as you read this. This week he will make the rounds of morning talk shows to promote his new role as the official chef of NASCAR and his new cookbook, Mario Tailgates NASCAR Style. And just as he prepares for cooking demos and book signings at six NASCAR races this season, Batali and business partner Joseph Bastianich, 37, have begun construction on two restaurants in Las Vegas and another site in Los Angeles to be called Mozza that will house both a restaurant and a pizzeria. In July, Batali will launch 78 new items in his cookware line. All that comes after a string of New York City restaurant successes--he has helped open eight Manhattan eateries in the past 13 years--that few chefs can emulate. Many are trying. "Mario does things first, and then two, three years down the line you see it in Cleveland and Chicago," says Patrick Martins, a co-founder of Heritage Foods USA, which sells meat, fish and other goods to high-end restaurants around the U.S. "Mario starts playing with pig bellies and tripe and intestines and even the bladder, and then a lot of people have followed and placed orders [for the same items]. He has reawakened those, quote, low-end cuts."

For those who know Batali only as the host of how-to cooking shows where he prepares uncommon Italian dishes--Paduan gnocchi, quail with peas, something called lamb squazetto and literally thousands of others--the NASCAR partnership will come as a surprise. (As will some of the dishes in the new cookbook, which include mudslide pie made with Oreos and graham crackers.) But Batali's visits to NASCAR events to research the book revealed--not least to him--that his appeal transcends foodies or Italophiles. Last June, just before he threw the green flag at the NASCAR event at Pocono Raceway in Long Pond, Pa., tens of thousands of fans began to chant, "MOLTO! MARIO!"--a reference to Molto Mario, one of the five Food Network shows in which he has starred since 1996. NASCAR was impressed. "You have a certain image of chefs, especially in New York, as hoity-toity," says Mark Dyer, a NASCAR vice president. "But this guy gets into the infield and is just one of the guys ... In many ways, these events are like big Woodstocks every weekend. Sometimes there are 150,000, even 200,000 people camping, cooking out, having a good time. And Mario, you know, he is capable of being at the center of any good time." He is also a guy who understands the concept of synergy: on the back of the NASCAR book you'll find a snapshot of Batali (sunglasses, regal smile, a gold marker in hand for autographs) standing beside NASCAR legend Richard Childress--and next to them is a bottle of wine from the vineyard (called La Mozza) that Batali and Bastianich own in Tuscany.

Batali the mogul is an emerging figure, but Batali the chef is captured in an incisive, cracklingly funny book scheduled for release May 30. Actually, as you can guess from the title--Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher (Alfred A. Knopf; 325 pages)--the book is mostly about the author, Bill Buford, a former New Yorker editor and freakishly dedicated foodie. Buford went to work as a cook at Babbo, one of seven Batali-Bastianich restaurants in Manhattan. But Batali is the book's most memorable, entertaining character. In one scene--a dinner at Batali's restaurant Lupa--Buford, his wife and Batali share at least 10 bottles of wine and a prodigious amount of food. "By the time the pastas appeared (I hadn't realized that the first 35 dishes were starters), my notes grew less reliable," writes Buford. "According to one entry, there were eight pastas ... followed by an instruction to [Buford's wife] from Mario--'You will eat the pasta, or I will rub the shrimp across your breasts'--which is confusing because I don't remember any shrimp." (Batali says, chuckling, that he doesn't recall uttering those words.)

Buford portrays Batali in other earthy moments--spitting on a cooktop at a Nashville, Tenn., benefit dinner (apparently to prove the cooktop was hot); asking Babbo's wine director for "two more bottles, along with your two best Mexican prostitutes"; snoring his way through a 5 a.m. taxi ride after a night out. But Heat is also a portrait of a talent who worked his way from a dishwasher in college to a small-time Greenwich Village cook to America's impresario of all foods Italian. On that Nashville trip, 32 local chefs showed up to volunteer to cook with Batali. (Batali's influence can also be seen in the crudo sensation in New York City and L.A.--crudo being Italian-style raw fish, brightly flavored and very pricey. And Batali has inspired top chefs like Michael Symon of Cleveland, Ohio, to begin curing meats in-house to develop their flavors more idiosyncratically.) As for Heat, Batali waves off "the stupid s___" he does in the book--"can't do anything about it"--and jokes that Philip Seymour Hoffman is "the only one of size" who could play him in the rumored film adaptation.

Mario Francesco Batali was born Mario Francis Batali in 1960. He Italianized the middle name in college--"I hated Francis," he says--but he's only half Italian. Batali's mother Marilyn is of Canadian and English heritage. His father Armandino, a former Boeing executive who has his own bustling restaurant in Seattle, is the Italian one. Batali grew up in Washington State and then, after Boeing transferred his father, in Spain. Batali has two siblings, Dana and Gina, and Marilyn Batali says she requested that each child prepare one meal a week. "At some point, we also began having international days where they were required to have something weird," she recalls. (That may explain her son's fondness for items like duck testicles, an ingredient in one of the dishes at Del Posto, a $12 million Manhattan restaurant he opened in December with Bastianich and PBS chef Lidia Matticchio Bastianich, Joseph's mother.)

Although a great peddler of excess, Batali first became famous for his restraint in the kitchen, his veneration of simple Italian traditions. After graduating from Rutgers University, where he majored in economics and Spanish theater, Batali worked in kitchens in Britain, California and Turkey, where he was a yacht chef. ("Very good gig. Paid well. Virtually no responsibility. You get some rich yuppie group of six from Chicago paying $60,000 for a week on a boat. They would tip you a thousand bucks at the end of the week if they were happy. Which was enough to live in Bodrum for six months.") But his formative cooking experience was apprenticing for no pay at La Volta, a trattoria in the tiny town of Borgo Capanne, Italy.

At La Volta, which is now defunct, Batali learned the basics--handmade pastas; slowly cooked Bolognese sauce; wild mushrooms, greens and berries foraged from the forest floor and served nearly unadorned the same day. In 1993, when Batali helped launch his first restaurant, Po, he brought that unaffected Italian sensibility to downtown Manhattan. (He also needlessly added an accent mark to the name of Italy's Po River.) "He was doing some things so simple--things like affogato, which is gelato [Italian ice cream] with a shot of espresso in it. It's a classic in Italian restaurants, but I had never seen it in the U.S. And there it was in the menu at Po," says Faith Willinger, author of Eating in Italy and a leading expert on Italian cuisine. "I took one look at his menu and had immediate respect for him."

Drawn to Batali's downtown image, the Food Network came calling two years after Po opened. TV gave Batali a bully pulpit for the new-old Italian cooking--less spaghetti buried in red sauce, more pumpkin ravioli--which has spread across the U.S. in the last few years. "There has been a revolutionary improvement in Italian food," says Tim Zagat, a co-founder of the restaurant guides that bear his name. Zagat doesn't credit Batali entirely for that improvement--in fact a much earlier pioneer was Lidia Bastianich, who was cooking in the authentic Italian vernacular at her New York City restaurants when Batali was rinsing beer glasses in college. But Zagat says Batali's visibility on the Food Network brought Italian culinary simplicity to a much wider audience.

Po was relatively inexpensive--its six-course tasting menu was $29--and Batali was soon feeding downtown artists, actors and, crucially, reporters. He became the most charismatic of the young New York City chefs--fun, funny, a little crude. There was something brash about his willingness to serve a just-picked strawberry drizzled with sweet balsamic vinegar rather than do something more complex and chef-ish like extruding a berry-vinegar solution into a foam. Great California chefs like Jeremiah Tower (for whom Batali briefly worked) and Alice Waters launched the American culinary revolution in the 1970s by trumpeting fresh ingredients above all. Twenty years later, Batali performed a neat trick. He made the revolution feel young and hip again--he was just 32 when Po opened--and his respect for traditional Italian cuisine also lent his food a sense of history uncommon to American restaurant fare; Batali has always said most of his dishes are mere reinventions of old--in some cases ancient--Italian recipes.

Batali turned out to be an incredibly productive TV cook, able to shoot as many as eight back-to-back episodes of Molto Mario. "As soon as the camera was off, I'd say [to the crew], 'Nine minutes, m_____f_____s!'" says Batali. "They hated me initially, but they loved me eventually." Because of his speed, Batali was able to deliver 517 episodes of the show in just six seasons of shooting. (The show went out of production in 2003, but it still airs in reruns.)

He was simultaneously opening new restaurants: after Po (which he no longer co-owns) came seven others--plus a bar and a wine shop--that have all succeeded, with one exception. Batali routinely mocks the fustian techniques of French cooking, so it seemed quite a leap last year for him and Bastianich to launch Bistro du Vent, a French restaurant on 42nd Street. The food isn't quite French and isn't quite Batali. Struggling for an identity, Bistro du Vent is the first Batali-Bastianich venture where you can easily get a seat. Both men seem to sigh heavily whenever the name of the place is mentioned.

Their six other restaurants are flourishing; Bastianich estimates that they collectively serve 2,000 people a night. Last year the James Beard Foundation named Batali its Outstanding Chef--the top award a U.S. cook can win. This year the foundation has nominated Molto Italiano, Batali's 2005 book, as best international cookbook and Del Posto as best new restaurant. The winners will be announced at a Manhattan gala on May 8, a few days after Batali returns from cooking chicken thighs and tortilla casserole for scores of NASCAR drivers, crewmen, and their families at Talladega Superspeedway in Talladega, Ala.

When Batali delivered the commencement address last year at Rutgers, he urged the graduates to "get a brand," which he defined as "your own truth, expressed consistently." "For better or worse, I've got a brand," he said in the speech. "The orange clogs, the ponytail, the attitude, my seeming fluency in Italian--it's instantly recognizable. But what matters to me is, it's not fake." O.K., but the challenge he now faces is not to misjudge how far you can stretch your brand without cheapening it. In the '90s, because of his Manhattan restaurants, Batali vaulted into the small coterie of cooks who were seen as fine artists rather than mere craftsmen. His brand seemed to be quality, a refined ristorante simplicity. But as he hawks his line of pork sausages to NASCAR fans, one already senses the distress of his original aficionados. Do you order a $30 squab from the NASCAR chef? Cautionary tales lurk in every corner of the food world: remember Rocco DiSpirito of NBC's The Restaurant? Both the show and the eatery, Rocco's 22nd Street, are gone. Wolfgang Puck doubtless earns millions from ventures like his little plastic-wrapped, refrigerated sandwiches sold at the airport. But eating in one of his retro-glitzy sit-down restaurants is now as much an act of irony as gastronomy.

Food is fad--it's gone the second we swallow it--and one day Batali's restaurants will seem musty and trite. But at least for now, Batali--partly because he is a man of catholic, unquenchable appetites--seems to know exactly what our overfed country is hungry for. (It's also not terribly surprising that a country where nearly two-thirds of adults are overweight venerates a large guy as a cooking icon.) Buford notes that Batali once flirted with an apposite motto: "Wretched excess is just barely enough."

Since he moved to New York City in 1992, Batali has become an ur-Manhattanite--a Bush-hating liberal, a partier, a good friend of R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe. When I asked how he persuaded a middle-American institution like NASCAR to work with him, Batali answered, "I present a compelling case because"--self-conscious pause--"I'm fun." A year ago, a Rutgers classmate who is a well-connected NASCAR aficionado brought him to his first big race. On a lark, Batali and his friend had decided to throw a dinner for the drivers. "We handed out little cards with an invitation to all the drivers' motor homes," says Batali. "And they came. It wasn't like we checked with NASCAR." But when it came time to put together a partnership deal, it didn't hurt that Batali already knew Brian France, NASCAR's CEO. A couple of years earlier, France had paid Batali to cook his wife's birthday dinner on the couple's boat in Key West, Fla. (Batali does six or seven such private meals a year. He won't say precisely what he charges, but if you're interested, expect the tab to approach six figures.)

Batali and I were talking at a bar in Chicago. He was in town for the housewares show, where his display featured a garish, full-scale plastic replica of an Italian farmhouse. As we spoke, a hefty guy, beer in hand, walked over to our table. He introduced himself as a "firefighter here in Chicago" and said he wanted to shake Batali's hand. The firefighter's wife then came over--the first of an endless stream of fans who would approach Batali over the weekend. Cards were pressed into his hand; pictures were taken; autographs were requested on books and shirts and, in one case, a KitchenAid stand mixer. One young female fan walked up to Batali late Friday night and greeted him by biting his cheek.

The next morning, a pixieish 37-year-old named Darcie Purcell (whose business card reads "Brand Manager--Mario Batali") led Batali into a conference room to see finished versions of new items in his cookware line for the first time. A $100 risotto pan weighing an astonishing 12 lbs. came out first. "Wow," Batali said proudly. "You're not gonna be lifting this up with one hand." But there was bad news: the kitchenware chain Sur La Table wouldn't be buying the pan--"too niche," apparently.

The next item he was shown was a handsome pizza peel, one of those flat, round metal sliders used to move pizza to and from an oven. Batali looked eager.

"When will those be market ready? June?" he asks.

The answer is maybe.

"We're gonna get a big splash at this restaurant I'm opening in Los Angeles, which is gonna have a huge pizza oven ... So let's make sure we have 20 of them there, and we can use them all day." Turning your restaurant into a marketing tool works if you're Hard Rock Cafe, but it isn't clear how well it works at the high end. Batali seems to have few qualms: when an assortment of spoons, turners, ladles and skimmers is shown for his approval, Batali says, "All of this will be on display at Mozza in Los Angeles, and it will sell infinitely."

Confidence is a requirement of someone who works with flame, but Batali sometimes slips into an overconfident caricature, the boor at the center of the room. Later that night he will tell Lagasse about a poorly attended cooking demo he did at last year's housewares show for a distracted crowd. It had been a running joke this weekend that few people had come last year, but now Batali let loose: "I'm like, 'Do you know how much people in New York would pay to f______ stand where you're standing?'" Batali was giggling, and everyone doubled over as his voice lifted a couple of comedic octaves. "I'm in the middle of talking, and they're like, 'Got any samples?'" Playing along, someone cackled and added, "Let me go through my pockets for you, stupid a__hole." I think to myself that the Food Network would be a lot more fun if it showed these guys in real life.

Back in the product meeting, someone suggests selling a Batali apron "at a stand in your restaurants." Finally, Batali draws the line at marketing himself.

"That's a great idea!" he says with mock enthusiasm. "Just past the bar, next to the piano player. You too can buy throwaway aprons in the gift shop. Have your picture taken with the likeness of Mario Batali!"

Batali's cookware has sold well since it was launched last year. The 2005 products were anchored around three cast-iron pieces--a 6-qt. pot, a grill press and a lasagna pan large enough to bathe an infant in. "It was the most successful launch of cast iron I've had in my career," says Marjorie Daugherty, the cookware buyer for Crate & Barrel. "We sold 6,000 pieces in the fall, and it was out for January and February." She also believes "Mario's are the best wooden tools on the market."

Her enthusiasm isn't unique. At a dinner with Sur La Table executives that evening, I mentioned to Kerin Seeger, the company's vice president of merchandising, that at my local Sur La Table store, Batali's cookware was crammed onto a lower side shelf. Seeger looked horrified. On the spot, she unleashed her cell phone and left a pointed message for an underling to call her back. It was a theatrical gesture, but she didn't seem to be doing it for Batali, who was well out of earshot. "We love this product," Seeger told me emphatically. (In the end, Sur La Table did order the risotto pan for its stores this year.)

Actually, not all of Batali's cookware looks great--his new plastic cutting boards feel as flimsy as Frisbees--but all of it looks different. That's because Batali's design team includes Sam and John Farber, the legendary father-son duo that founded OXO International, which makes those chunky, black Good Grips products that are some of the best-selling kitchen tools in history.

The Farbers come from cookware royalty--Sam's uncle S.W. Farber launched Farberware with a percolator in 1930--and their collaboration with Batali is unusual. Typically, a celebrity chef's logo will be stamped onto a conventional-looking cooking vessel, and it will stay on the market only a couple of seasons. (Emerilware is a notable exception.) By contrast, Sam Farber, 81, sees Batali's line becoming a stand-alone design company. Like the Good Grips line, which appeared in 1990, the Batali products--with their autumnal colors, arm-breaking size and flattened wooden handles (a simple innovation that lends comfort to big hands)--feel like something new.

Batali doesn't seem like a person especially interested in moving 10,000 garlic slicers before Christmas, but he enjoys his role in shaping the brand. "When I was trying to define Mario's brand, I came up with three things," says Purcell, his brand manager. "Authenticity, education and enjoyment. Except when I told Mario that, he said, 'Scratch that last one, Darcie. It's f______ hedonism.'" Batali's greatest gift may not be his ability to figure out a winning new way with a scallop but rather his understanding of how to use his image. Batali constantly projects a sense of capering, slightly naughty joy: at a cooking demo, he rolls up stuffed-eggplant slices and then pretends to lick them like the wrapper around a joint. "Just like we did in the '70s," he says, and the audience cheers. Sometimes he takes the act too far. In Heat Buford quotes a liquored Batali asking one of his waitresses to "take off your blouse" for his table. Batali says everyone understood that he was joking. "It's never anything as sinister as it sounds when someone writes it down," he told me. But when you're in the business of hedonism, it's hard to draw lines.

Whether Batali and Bastianich can successfully export their festival of gratification around the country isn't yet clear. The Vegas restaurants will be staffed with experienced talent from their New York restaurants, but Batali won't be able to ride his Vespa scooter to them each night, a quality-control measure he uses in Manhattan. Still, Batali won't run out of culinary ideas any time soon. On his Mac he keeps a database of 20,000 recipes collected over the years on his travels to out-of-the-way Italian towns like the one where he apprenticed. So how big can Batali Inc. grow? The chef insists that he won't open a restaurant in an airport or push his cookware on a shopping network like QVC. Yet when I first met him six years ago, Batali said he didn't expect to open a restaurant in Las Vegas, since it would be too far from New York for him to drop in unannounced. Of course, back then you could also see Batali wearing something other than his now trademark orange clogs. Doesn't he ever get sick of them? "Hey," he answers, "it doesn't matter, as long as they remember you."