Mario Batali is a great chef and restaurateur. I've never had the chance to eat at his celebrated restaurants Babbo and Del Posto, but I have eaten several times at Otto, his relatively modest pizza joint in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. The food there is very, very good. (Try the gelato -- especially the incredibly delicate olive oil one. Or go with affogato -- a scoop of vanilla gelato "drowned" in a shot of espresso.)
I've also cooked from his cookbooks. Like all great cooks working in the Italian culinary idiom, he exhorts you to apply simple, powerful techniques to top-flight ingredients. And he supercharges Italian food in a way I can appreciate -- with generous lashings of chile pepper. Here is a recipe of his I cooked once -- damn that was some good stuff.
OK, enough of that. Where was I? Right -- Mario Batali has sold out is and is using his name to move frozen dinners for General Mills.
Now, celebrity chefs aren't saints, and they have the same right to "get paid" as any ambitious person in this culture. Mario pulls off money lust more stylishly than many of his peers. He has (so far) resisted the lame and lucrative temptation to sell his name to a soulless, mindlessly expensive Vegas restaurant, for example.
Instead, he has (until now) satisfied himself with methodically building an empire of (by all accounts impeccably good) Manhattan restaurants. And made himself a star with his appearances on the Food Network -- which, as I understand it, bounced him from the lineup for being too rigorous a cook.
I've long hoped that Mario would play the role in the U.S. that Jamie Oliver has played in England -- a TV-friendly chef with real cooking chops who uses his fame to promote sustainability and food justice.
Mario is just the one. He's not as famous as that chump Emeril, but he's a much better cook. He probably doesn't match the technical wizardry of someone like Thomas Keller, but he's much more famous. He's one of the very few Americans who count as genuine celebrities and real chefs.
Instead of an Oliver-like jihad against, say, our rotten school-lunch program, we get this? Frozen dinners?
Come on, Mario. I'll stop chiding you about this sad deal as soon as you bring your considerable talent and fame to bear on the great food issue of our time: the environmental, social, and public-health ruin served up as a matter of course by our industrial food system.
How to turn your turkey carcass into a spectacular gumbo
This Halloween, have your pumpkin—and eat it, too
Apples with a sense of place
Comments
View as Threaded
caniscandida Posted 4:15 pm
04 Apr 2007
(And remember, Dante encased the evilest sinners in ice. ... )
Mario Batali always struck me as a pompous macho jerk. And Emeril is worse. If they have really inspired people to be creative in the kitchen, well, good. But frankly, I find them repulsive.
Lidia Bastianic is much more my style.
And Michael Colameco, antico amico mio.
And your concluding paragraph, your challenge, not just to Mario but to all of them, is magnificent. Benedicaci il Signore, may we all learn something about how we can do better, in the kitchen, in the market, and everywhere.
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
Permalink
Christine Gardner Posted 10:30 pm
04 Apr 2007
If you can't trust famous chefs, who can you trust?
Permalink
Tom Philpott Posted 10:36 pm
04 Apr 2007
Victual Reality
Permalink
Delay And Deny Posted 2:51 am
05 Apr 2007
It should be something between a "frozen dinner" and 5-star dining.
The Texeme Construct offers international text memetics construction and textcasting services. http://www.you-read-it-here-first.com
Permalink
akbeancounter Posted 4:30 am
05 Apr 2007
Indeed. As Alton Brown stated in Feasting on Asphalt, once the owner gets too far removed from the restaurant's daily operations, bad things happen. I'm sure Emiril's a great chef and a swell guy, but am I really getting the Emiril experience by going to some restaurant in Orlando with his name on it? When was the last time he stopped by?
Fortunately, in any town possessing more than one traffic signal, there's usually a dedicated culinary figure to be found. They're not on television, and they'll never have their own custom-branded knife set, but they love what they do, and they're darn good at it.
Taking accounting to the extreme since 2004.
Permalink
Samuel Fromartz Posted 12:19 am
06 Apr 2007
Here's a guy who is both high and low - his little cafe restaurants frankly are just one notch above Micky D's - but that reach has given him influence and he's using it.
You can go mainstream, get big and do great things, or just line your pockets. Tom wants Batali to step up. So do I, but that doesn't preclude pimping in the freezer case.
By the way, has anyone tried his frozen stuff?
Rick Bayless' Frontera salsas are pretty tasty, especially as marinades for meat or fish on the grill. I'm in Chicago next week and will likely stop in for a meal at the sellout's palace.
Samuel Fromartz
Author
Organic Inc.
Permalink
Tom Philpott Posted 1:11 am
06 Apr 2007
And i will stop chiding him (I've haven't uttered a peep about Puck's awful airport canteens.)
But why would anyone try frozen pasta dinners, Mario's or anyone else's? How much energy does it take to make a pasta dish, freeze it, keep it frozen while it ships all around the nation, etc., etc.? And what tricks of food-laboratory sorcery would it require to give it any semblance of acceptable texture?
Meanwhile, factory-made pasta is convenience food par excellence. In the 20 minutes to takes to boil the water and cook the pasta, you can grate cheese, saute a little garlic and chile pepper in olive oil, toast a few walnuts, chop some parsley, and toss it all together, and have a meal that's cheaper, more delicious, and less environmentally heavy than Mario's TV dinners.
Victual Reality
Permalink
gmunger Posted 1:22 am
06 Apr 2007
What we really need is an end to the American obsession with celebrity. May I suggest turning off the television as a giant leap forward.
Let's not forget that there ARE thousands, if not tens of thousands of non-celebrity chefs working hard in local establishments to provide good high quality food, often creatively or, dare I say artfully. Skip the celebrity feeding frenzies and support your local eateries, especially those that support, even better focus on locally grown food.
Who's your farmer?
Permalink