Mario Batali
Mario Batali
Mario Francesco Batali is an American chef, writer, restaurateur, and media personality. In addition to his classical culinary training, he is an expert on the history and culture of Italian cuisine, including regional and local variations. Batali co-owns restaurants in New York City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Singapore, Hong Kong, Westport, Connecticut and New Haven, Connecticut Batali's signature clothing style includes a fleece vest, shorts and orange Crocs. He is also known as "Molto Mario"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionChef
Date of Birth19 September 1960
CitySeattle, WA
CountryUnited States of America
Some things are being destroyed, because the Italians are just as tired of their basic food as the Americans and French were 20 years ago. So they're reinventing to avoid palate exhaustion.
D.C. is a complicated market that I don't understand very well. The restaurant business is a slippery slope, and it gathers speed very quickly when it's going downhill.
As far as TV, I have a new show... It's me traveling around to Italian-American families and enclaves throughout the States and learning about the dishes and ingredients that these people love.
The whole concept of the supremacy of the family unit in the Italian culture... That's all based on the relation of the mom and the children and the bambino.
Think of the cooking of the Southwest: Arizona, anything on the border of Mexico, the rich chili culture, the unbelievable stews.
Think of American food. In my generation, growing up in the '60s and '70s, Banquet Fried Chicken and TV dinners were the thing. Now people are back into roasting their own chickens, and TV dinners are a point of kitsch. It will be interesting to see what survives another hundred years.
The proximity to the Mediterranean... it's been a calming influence or just a generally good thing.
I like the history of the Daytona 500. It's like the Kentucky Derby of car racing.
I just was introduced to the writings of Lucius Beebe, and I'm going to read him.
If neither of the two parties are happy, then you have a closed restaurant. And if only one of the two groups is happy, you have one that will close. So, to create an opportunity for both the customers and the staff to have a superior experience is my constant struggle.
I guess the success of selling this kind of food to New Yorkers is that to them it seems new. Serving the head or the tail or the tongue certainly doesn't make me a pioneer in the real world-although maybe, in New York, in a fancy restaurant, I was a bit of one.
I lived in San Francisco from '84 to '88.
I like things that are fun, and I look to do them a lot, and that I have the opportunities to do them makes me a lucky guy.
I really enjoyed writing the first book. And since then it's been great. I've written every word of all my books.