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
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.
For two years I would just make that. I would concentrate on making the perfect omelet... It was important to me to be able to make a perfect omelet with nothing in it.
Cooking in France and Italy has a particular high resonance, and it's hard to say how or why it developed other than that they've been smarter and there longer.
Kids today want to eat their risotto with curry and shrimp and sour cream, not risotto alla Milanese, like they should, in my opinion.
It is important to get the zucchini crisp when you cook it; the trick is to move it very little when it first goes into the pan and to work in small batches.
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 minimum time spent in any one restaurant should be a year, no matter what. You may feel that you're done earlier, but it's truly in a year that you learn the discipline and technical things you need to know about a particular restaurant.
Think of the cooking of the Southwest: Arizona, anything on the border of Mexico, the rich chili culture, the unbelievable stews.
I can chill without having to watch my Ps and Qs.
It's more interesting to talk about the whole lily family and say, did you know that lily bulbs are also part of the onion family? It's like the stream-of-consciousness way I think about food when I'm just cooking it.
To get to New York, I was actually on my way to Brazil to help someone open a restaurant and stopped in Florida and met an old college buddy of mine who had a restaurant called Rocco. I came up to open that and I've been in New York for 11 years.
Recipes are just descriptions of one person’s take on one moment in time. They’re not rules.
Shop often, shop hard, and spend for the best stuff available - logic dictates that you can make delicious food only with delicious ingredients.
There are pockets of great food in Spain, but there are also pockets of very mediocre food in Spain, and the same in Morocco and the same in Croatia and the same in Germany and the same in Austria.