[Photos: Food Network]

By CHRIS SHERMAN

© St. Petersburg Times,
published July 25, 2001

Good-natured Mario Batali brings the freshness of Italy to his three New York restaurants and his shows on the Food Network.

What you know about Molto Mario from watching him cook, eat and bounce around Italy on the Food Network seemed true meeting him in person in New York.

If you're lucky to catch him live, he's the same good-natured lug you've seen on TV. He's just as broad-shouldered, his red beard is as scraggly and his stringy hair can't quite make it into a ponytail.

And he's always in shorts and orange clogs, even when his torso was rigged out in a formal shirt and tux jacket for the James Beard Awards. His lower half was red shorts, rugged calves and those orange clogs. He looked like an improbable extra in Braveheart or a rugby player emerging from a scrum.

What you don't know about Batali will shock you: He once cooked in our neck of the woods. In 1983 and '84 Batali was at Neil's in Tampa, a Continental restaurant that rolled out a silver cart of pheasant, sweetbreads and rack of lamb for prix fixe, full-course meals that cost $30 nearly two decades ago. "I loved living there," he said. He went to the beach and and played golf, but he soon moved to California for the food revolution.

Eventually that restaurant became Le Bordeaux, and Batali became molto famoso.

The shorts and clogs are shtick, but it's one Batali sticks with. Or tries to. Before going to Cannes, where American celebrity chefs would cook for stars of the cinematic kind, "I called the hotel and asked the concierge how many three-star restaurants were near there that I could wear shorts to. 'None, sir.' " He packed long pants.

There are legitimate kitchen reasons for his get-up (it's hot and slippery in there), but Batali's disregard for the hairdresser and wardrobe reflects something more than the Food Network's low production values.

It makes him more real than the buff and the nubile on most "reality" shows or the Food Network's own pretty faces in studio kitchens and on talk shows. Maybe the Food Network knows we want some gritty verite with our foie gras, or at least the illusion of it. Since we can't smell or taste food on TV, give us a sense of the character behind it, a lusty character at that.

If so, the perfect guy is Mario Batali, a whirlwind restaurateur who has put new energy and flavor into four New York restaurants, a wine store, two TV series and two books in less than 10 years.

Molto mortadella: Mario hams it up with Italian friends during one of his location shoots for the Food Network.

Of course he's rarely actually making dishes in his restaurants anymore. He's often out of the country ("I love it. I'll be in and around Amalfi and Naples for six weeks" after Cannes.), and when he's in New York, he can't be in all his restaurants at the same time.

But he does occasionally pitch in on the line and knows what it's like "when you have 19 orders coming at you." Even when he isn't in the restaurants, his ingredients and techniques are, and that will give you a taste of the real Mario.

The waiters aren't in short pants, but food just might be. No fussy presentation, just earthy good looks such as noodles tossed lightly with herbs, light applications of strong sauces, meats and vegetables.

At Esca, which opened in the Theater District more than a year ago and still has New Yorkers and out-of-town foodies in line for $40 lunches, the white linens are crisp and the servers first rate, but the centerpiece is a an old wooden table filled with contorni -- large platters of simple vegetables from beans to cauliflower.

For most of the diners, the star attraction is crudo, an elegant crystal tray with three dimples filled with two pieces of raw fish, say pink fish, fluke or line-caught cod, dressed with only golden olive oil, sea salt, pepper and perhaps a crisp bit of seaweed or chive flower here and there.

They are by turns slippery, silky and lush, but unmistakably raw, proof that freshness in seafood is everything. Call it Italian sushi if you want; Batali named the restaurant Esca, Italian for bait.

While Italian fisherfolk may not eat their fish raw very often or with such ceremony anymore, Batali's cleverly named "calamari Sicilian lifeguard style" with raisins and tomatoes in couscous is actually made on the island's beaches. But they do have immense respect for freshness. Esca's fish tastes not fresh off the boat, but as if you were still on the boat and the pescatores themselves sliced it up on the deck. Entrees stress the same fresh simplicity; they include quail with broccoli rabe or mullet with fennel and artichokes.

Perhaps the best example for a fan coming to New York for a taste of Batali is at Lupa in Greenwich Village, featuring the foods and noise level of a neighborhood trattoria in Rome, where tables are long, wine is cheap, but the food is exquisitely handmade, simple and fresh. (Make reservations or join the line that starts at 5 p.m. for a table in the bar.)

Pastas and entrees here are $10 to $15, but you'll get just as distinct a taste of Batalian fare at Esca or at his more elaborate Babbo nearby: penne with asparagus and ricotta, fat bigoli noodles with mullet roe, meaty oxtail slaughterhouse-style or the Sunday night special of braciole, the stuffed beef roll of Rome. Not to mention a wine list of a hundred Italian wines to explore and a sommelier in regular-guy clothes happy to make a pitch for an obscure $23 white from Basilicata.

Here too, the specialness starts early, with antipasti as carefully concocted as the entrees. For about $30 you can fill your table with plates of charred eggplant, cauliflower, roasted peppers and eggplant, sardines cured with citrus and a cutting board laid out with thin cold cuts.

In a place that dries its own raisins and where one of the owners makes his own olive oil, you have to try house-made mortadella, the finest sausage of Bologna. Exquisite.

Indeed, while Batali, like other chefs, makes lamb sausages and other rarities, he can also brag of his own personal salumeria to make traditional mortadella, soppressata and head cheese.

"My dad helped me to set it up and to understand butchery," he said. "The mortadella is everything a pig could dream of being."

Making his own sausage underscores the key premise of his cooking, "the intellectual and joyous pursuit of product," which explains why his kitchens can have nine different kinds of salt and 12 different olive oils.

That pursuit, which now continues on camera with Mario Eats Italy, began years ago.

After a childhood in Seattle and a brief period studying Spanish theater at Rutgers in New Jersey, Batali entered the world of food. He tried studying at Le Cordon Bleu in London. By 1983 he wound up following a college friend to Tampa, where he worked at Neil's.

(Add Batali to the heartbreaking list of those who got away, chefs like Don Pintabona of Tribeca Grill and Waldy Malouf of Beacon, who cooked briefly in Tampa early in their careers).

After two years in Florida he moved to California, working in Four Seasons hotels in San Francisco and Santa Barbara until he got bored with corporate cooking and returned to Europe.

This time he landed at La Volta, a 25-seat trattoria in remote Borgano Capanne, in the hill country of Emilia-Romagna near the border of Tuscany, 90 minutes distant from Bologna and Florence.

He spent three years there living and working with the family, cooking up fine dinners from local ingredients and once-a-week trips into Bologna for supplies.

"The first thing was how simple it was," Batali recalls. "The big thing was freshness. You had asparagus for six weeks, that was it. When they had strawberries, they ate them every day and fixed them every way they could. It was amazing how intense it was."

When Batali returned to the United States, he worked briefly in a traditional Italian restaurant in New York until he met Susi Cahn, a young woman who had the same hunger for local ingredients that Batali had learned in Italy.

Her family owned the Coach Farm in Pine Plains in the Hudson Valley, one of the first goat cheesemakers on the East Coast, and she had her own sideline growing exotic produce to sell to New York chefs.

In a few months they opened their first restaurant, Po, a Greenwich Village place that served the simple dishes he had learned in Italy made with her produce plus breads, cheeses and meats from other small artisan producers.

That was 1993, and although Batali eventually sold Po, he has since opened Babbo, Lupa and Esca, each stressing simple, bold flavors, in partnership with the Bastianich family, which is also famous for blending restaurants with TV and cookbook fame.

Next on their itinerary will be a gelato store followed by a restaurant in Astoria, Queens, that will specialize in seafood and Italian, more specifically the cooking of the northern Adriatic, from Venice around through Croatia.

Then perhaps a restaurant showcasing the cooking of Friuli, the mountain country north of Venice where Italy meets Switzerland and Austria in a profusion of fine wines and cheeses.

Batali does seem intent on eating all of Italy -- and he wants us to join him.

Dining out with Mario

Babbo, 110 Waverly Place, New York; (212) 777-0303. Modern Italian cooking in an elegant townhouse off Washington Square in Greenwich Village. Dinner only. Entrees, $20 to $35

Esca, 402 W 43rd St. at the corner of Ninth Avenue, New York; (212) 564-7272. Italian seafood, including crudo, in the Theater District. Open for lunch and dinner. Dinner entrees, $17 to $26.

Lupa Osteria Romana, 170 Thompson St., New York; (212) 982-5089. Roman trattoria in Greenwich Village. Dinner only. Entrees, $13 to $17.

Italian Wine Merchants, 108 E 16th St., New York. A retail wine store stocking only Italian wines.

Mario's secrets

How you can cook better: "Evaluate your pantry and start upgrading. Buy kosher salt, sea salt, good olive oils and vinegars, pasta from Italy, good cheese. The core ingredients make it simple to make anything taste better. Great (dried) pasta from DiCeccho or Barilla even tastes great with cream of tomato sauce on it. It costs mere pennies, a little step up -- from $1.29 to $2.

What he eats from the fridge at home: "My favorite . . . I like cold Chinese. And cool, already cooked vegetables, I toss them with olive oil. I love the vibrancy of the flavor."

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