Joe Bastianich
Joe Bastianich
Joseph "Joe" Bastianichis an American restaurateur, winemaker, author, and television personality. He, along with partners Lidia Bastianich and Mario Batali, owns thirty restaurants worldwide, including Babboand Del Posto in New York, Carnevino in Las Vegas, and in 2010, expanded the LA eateries Pizzeria and Osteria Mozza to Singapore. Earlier that same year, the trio teamed up with Italian retail businessman Oscar Farinetti to bring Eataly, an artisanal food and wine market to New York, with the Chicago outpost following in...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionChef
Date of Birth17 September 1968
CountryUnited States of America
Frankly, Milan kind of sucks as a restaurant city. It's so fashion-obsessed that people don't pay that much attention to the food.
I think that, by comparison with $2,000 bottles of grand cru Burgundies, first-rate barolos, which sell for under $100, are undervalued ten-fold.
There are certain things that make restaurants work and a certain kind of DNA that people who excel in restaurants need. But it's a lot like life, in the sense that you get out of it what you put into it.
You can enjoy a $15 bottle of wine as much as you can enjoy a $100 bottle of wine.
I eat a lot of whole grains for breakfast, a lot of dried fruit. And my big thing is pasta. I do a lot of simple pasta, with great ingredients.
America has been conditioned to think of pasta as the never-ending pasta bowl and Olive Garden.
With four-appetizer, four-entree menus, it's like, give me a break. That's not a restaurant, that's a dinner party.
Classics can be phenomenal when done right. A simple roast chicken dish could be the best thing you ever eat.
My grandparents in Istria had a frasca, which is about the most basic kind of grocery/restaurant. They sold wine from their own vineyard. I took control of the vineyard, hired a local winemaker, and bought another winery in 1996. We had our first commercial vintage in 1998.
Restaurant Man is kind of the story, an unabridged story of what happened in my life, the good bad and ugly. Some people might glean some life lessons. It is honest, not written as a press release.
The stories of wine lords who trade wine on intimidation or food critics who trade free meals for reviews those are the stories of my life. I am telling the stories of my life in a true way.
I'm a baritone. Baritones don't mature until late.
Essentially, wines are fermented grape juice, so I'm trying to make the point that the wine world is about scores and marketing and kind of creating a scarce resource where they don't really exist.
At Babbo, each dish grew out of a conversation, trying to put something forth that was new and different. It was a combination of culinary adventurism and the dining-room experience with respect for the classic but with an eye toward innovation. And it was about eating locally, whether produce or fish or meat.