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
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.
From a great restaurant to a B-minus player can happen in six weeks.
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.
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.
In New York, a lot of people come into the restaurant and it's not that they don't want what's on the menu, they just want to flex a little bit. They want to control the situation.
This is what we think is missing in New York City. A luxurious and comfortable Italian restaurant expressing everything we know about Italian culture in a slightly rarefied atmosphere. The food is to be elegant and simple without losing the essential heart of the Italian purity. As a gastronomic experience it's everything I have to offer.
The English have been burning everything for so long, and no one paid attention to them. But now there are guys like Marco Pierre White, Jamie Oliver, and Gordon Ramsey. The London restaurant scene is as vibrant as anywhere in the world-London, Paris, New York.
Although the skills aren't hard to learn, finding the happiness and finding the satisfaction and finding fulfillment in continuously serving somebody else something good to eat, is what makes a really good restaurant.
There are all kinds of myths going on in the Italian culture, and the way they celebrate is through their food. It's the tradition of the table where the Italians celebrate most of their triumphs and successes.
Twenty years ago if you were going to be a cook, it was because you didn't make it in the army. It was the last stop before you were on the street.
Every region has its own specialties, and whether it was Christmas Eve and the seafood dinner and the seven courses, whichever family you were from, it's a visceral part of your life.
At this point in my career it's very hard for me to turn down opportunities that I think are auspicious.
When I talk about a great dish, I often get goose bumps. I'm like, whoa, I'll never forget that one. The Italians are just like that. It's not all about food. It's part of the memory.
The reason that I developed the style of talking about the historical use of these ingredients is because after I've cut an onion 10 times, I can't tell you to cut an onion again.