Heat (24 page)

I added a splash more water—not much (after all, the polenta and water, in their happy new molecular relationship, were getting along just fine)—and resumed my stirring. The polenta crept up a little more.

When would it stop? I wondered.

Then a question occurred to me: Would it stop? Silly notion. Of course it would stop. But knowing when could be useful.

Another splash of water, some more stirring. It crept up further.

This was modestly alarming—not five-bell alarming, but a concern: to stir the polenta, I was beginning to feel I had to be
in
the polenta. Would I finish cooking it before I was enveloped by it and became the darkly sauced meaty thing it was served with? The sensible thing would be to remove the whisk and go for a walk. The polenta had already told me I didn’t need to hang around. But with so much kitchen competition I was afraid to abandon my whisk, convinced that a thrusting Nashville volunteer would seize it and take over my task. That chef with the hat, for instance. He was now standing inches behind me. I’d been monitoring him in my peripheral vision. He had liberated himself from the others and crossed an invisible line that separated the Nashville volunteers from the cooking area. He’d done this one step at a time and after each step, seeing he hadn’t been rebuked, he’d taken one more.

“Sooooo,” he said.

I pretended not to hear.

“Sooooo,” he repeated.

I knew what he wanted: my whisk. I was sure of it. I concentrated on my stirring.

He sighed. “Sooooo,” he said again and added for emphasis: “Po-
len
-ta!” It was an alarmingly Italian pronunciation. I’d never heard the word said with such a forceful accent. I glanced at him sideways and noticed an Italian flag sewn into the neck of his pressed white jacket. This surprised me. I had thought that, dressed thus, he must be French. I looked again and saw on his jacket: Alfresco Pasta.

“Po-LEN-ta!” he said again, stretching out the middle syllable and flapping the roof of his mouth with his “t.”

Yes, I agreed. Polenta.

“Permit me to introduce myself. I call myself Riccardo.”

I moved the whisk from my right hand to my left, shook Riccardo’s hand, rapidly transferred the whisk back, and resumed my stirring.

“I call myself Riccardo. From Bologna. I am here eight years.”

So Riccardo was the real thing. Not only from Italy, but from northern Italy, from Emilia-Romagna, right up there in polenta land, adjacent to Lombardy, the homes of Maestro Martino and Alessandro Manzoni. Riccardo was probably a genuine mangiapolenta, with childhood memories of beechwood and a grandmother with a big spoon. But what was a chef from Bologna doing in Tennessee? You don’t meet many people from Bologna. Life there is too good to leave it. I eyed him suspiciously. He was looking at my whisk (and there was no other word to describe his manner) covetously. I turned my back, slightly, thinking: thou shalt not covet my whisk.

He moved closer. I could hear his breathing. If he says “Po-LEN-ta” one more time, I’m going to smack him with my whisk.

Frankie appeared. He had to walk around Riccardo (who, having achieved his spot, wasn’t about to give it up). Frankie squeezed in between us, avoided eye contact with this strange man wearing a soufflé for a hat, did that quick dip-the-finger trick, and tasted the polenta. He added more salt. “Nothing is simple,” he said. “Everything needs to be made with love.”

“Po-LEN-ta!” Riccardo said again, looking expectantly at Frankie, who walked away without pausing to reply. Riccardo then turned back to me. He stood, watching.

I stirred.

Riccardo didn’t move.

I didn’t stop stirring.

“Sooooo,” he said finally. “Tell me a thing. Are you coming from New York?”

Yes, I said, I’m from New York. I looked at him. Why did he drape his towel on his forearm, anyway?

“Ah, New York,” he said.

I stirred.

“How is New York?” he asked.

“New York is fine,” I said.

“Ah, New York,” he said.

The polenta had inched so far up my whisk that I was stirring with the last inch of the handle. I stopped and tasted my knuckles.

“You know,” Riccardo said, “I do not know why I have come here to Nashville. I think but I cannot remember. There must have been a reason. I have wanted to go to New York. But when I have come here, I have met a girl. I did not come here to meet a girl. But I have met a girl. I have fell in love, I have got married, and now I am a chef at Alfresco Pasta,” he said, adding, after a pause, “in Nashville.” He sighed.

I stirred, but, despite myself, I was feeling something—I don’t know what. Sympathy? Pity? How could I feel pity? I’d just met this stranger, wearing a piece of pastry as a headdress, confirming yet again that cooks are some of the weirdest people on the planet, and now he was wanting both my whisk and to tell me his life story.

“Nashville is very nice,” I offered.

“I could have been a New York chef.”

He said nothing for a long time, reflecting, staring at the round pot of polenta being stirred by me. “Instead I am a Nashville chef.” He was very melancholy. “Love,” he said.
“Amore.”

“Amore,”
I agreed.

M
EANWHILE,
the polenta was developing a new texture, its third metamorphosis. In the beginning, it had been soupy but thirsty. Then, after an hour, it was shiny and cakey and coming off the sides: for many, an indication the polenta was ready. But by cooking it longer, an hour, even two hours more—stirring it every now and then, adding hot water when needed—you concentrated the flavors. In effect, the polenta was undergoing a modest caramelization by being baked in its own liquid lava—like a self-creating clay oven, drawing out the sweetness in the corn—and its actually being caramelized: along the bottom, a thin crust was forming from the granules browning against the kettle’s hot surface. I scraped it up with my whisk and mixed it in. It was elastic, an elasticity I associate with dough. You also could smell the change. Pasta behaves in a similar way, and you can teach yourself to recognize how it smells when it is ready. Mario describes this as “giving up the gluten” and recalls how, in Italy, walking past open windows at midday, he could register the moment when a lunch was served by the sudden smell of something rich and gluteny, like a perfumed pastry cloud.

I licked some polenta off my knuckles: it tasted good. It was done.

Frankie and I poured the kettle’s contents into metal canisters and put them in a warm bath—a “steam table”—and, just then, Mario appeared. It was six o’clock, and the volunteers, still crushed together on the other side of the invisible boundary, visibly relaxed, except for a now-very-morose Riccardo, who hadn’t budged and managed to be both downcast and erect simultaneously.

There was an hour until service, and there were urgencies. Mario wrote out a schedule and taped it to a wall. (“Seven: Plate coppa. Seven-fifteen: Serve. Seven-thirty: Drop first pasta. Seven-forty: Plate and serve.”) Frankie was concerned about the broken flattop: a canister of butter had been put on it but hadn’t melted.

Mario looked: it was in the wrong place. “The flattop is hot,” he insisted, and spat on it to prove it. (Whoa! Did he just spit on the flattop? I looked: his spittle sizzled.) It was a theatrical gesture—his audience gasped audibly—done, no doubt, because Mario, arriving in a rush, unprepared for the cooking class awaiting him, was suddenly conscious of being onstage. Later, when he dressed the watercress salad, he grabbed a bottle of olive oil and, holding it high above his head, made a flamboyantly streaming arc, like some Alpine guide pouring rotgut from a goatskin boda bag, and his rapt audience, not wanting to miss a thing—even volunteers who had been taking notes stopped their scribbling—held its breath. But spitting on the flattop? It’s true, you don’t normally cook food directly on it, although, at Babbo, the ramps, the pancetta—that’s where they were cooked. It was a brassy thing to do. Maybe it was more difficult being a celebrity chef than any of us understood—the expectation that you felt constantly from the people around you, these strangers, your public, to be so much bigger than a normal human being. (I was put in mind of a story Mario had once told me, of the first time he’d been spotted on the street, stopped by two guys who recognized him from television, immediately falling into the “Hey, dude, wow, it’s, like, that guy from the Food thing” routine, and Mario, flattered, had thanked them courteously, and they were so disappointed—“crushed”—that he now travels with a repertoire of quick jokes so as to be, always, in character.) In any case, the volunteers seemed happy: Mario Batali had arrived; he spat; he poured olive oil; he was larger than life.

The butter melted, and the service went smoothly, without histrionics or tantrums. Each course, rushed out at go-go-go speed, involved all the volunteers, now crowded around the longest plating table, assembling dishes in a fury. Mario had asked me to check them before they went out, wiping off the rims with a damp cloth, and I surprised myself. The volunteers were heaping too much on the plates, a natural temptation—too much parsley, too much orange zest, too much parmigiano. Flavorings are meant to serve the food, not compete with it. A Babbo platitude.

“Replate,” I said with great force.

“No,” I said. “Wrong! This is a mess. Redo!”

Another appeared. “Goddammit. Too much stuff. Again. Replate!”

And then another. “For fuck’s sake, how many fucking times do I have to say the same fucking thing?” (Did I just say what I think I said? Was I a latent screamer?)

There were festivities afterwards—too much adrenaline for the evening to end—where much wine was drunk. I have a memory, blurry, like swimming with your eyes open, of Mario’s making scrambled eggs in a rich man’s kitchen. (How did we get here, how are we leaving, and how is anyone going to cook tomorrow night—er, well, tonight, actually?) For most of us, the evening ended at five in the morning—Mario in a Falstaffian snoring funk in the taxi that took us back to the hotel—except for Frankie, who, having befriended one of the folksy, informally blue volunteers, went off on his own and didn’t get back until seven, fifteen minutes before we left for the airport. “Looking good,” Mario said, already seated on the plane, as Frankie appeared, zigzagging down the aisle. Frankie was not looking good. In fact, he was looking very bad—perspiring, pale, unshaven, his skin damp and clammy, smelling of a long Nashville night, with all the charisma of a collapsed lung, wrapped in an assortment of dark things, a black shell jacket, sunglasses, a wet blue bandanna across his forehead. We landed in Newark and went straight to the kitchen and got through the service, Andy sometimes forgetting to call out an order, Frankie curling up during slow moments on the wet greasy Babbo floor for a nap.

The trip surprised me with its many lessons—over and above my polenta tutorial and another illustration of the body’s ability to accommodate abusive excess (“Oh, c’mon, guys,” Mario said as we neared Manhattan, trying to cheer up the slumping heaps in the seat, “the human organism is remarkably strong—it always bounces back”). I don’t think I’d understood how rarely cooks get to cook and how much time they put in before they get the chance. Riccardo from Bologna put me in mind of Alex at Babbo—maybe because Riccardo, an Italian in America, was a mirror of Alex, who had been an American in Italy. Alex’s year there had been life-changing, and he still talked about it. What he never mentioned, until I asked, was this: he had never cooked. For a year, he had chopped carrots, onions, and celery. “I was the absolute bottom of the ladder the entire time. It was a humbling experience. I thought if I worked my ass off I’d be promoted. I never was.” Finely chopped carrots (“I really perfected my carrot-chopping technique”), onions, and celery are important: cooked slowly in olive oil, they turned out to be the basis of soffritto, the foundation of Tuscan soups. Alex never made soffritto or soup. Then, when he was hired at Babbo, he was again told he wouldn’t be cooking: he’d begin, as everyone did, with cold foods, making starters. After some months, if there was a vacancy and Andy approved, he’d be allowed to cook on a trial basis at the sauté station. At the time, I was in my obsessive pasta-making phase and working mornings with Alejandro. That is, in Alex’s eyes, I was “one of the Latins”—low on the proverbial totem pole. After a couple of weeks, I returned to the grill, as Frankie had recommended.

“Do you mind telling me why you’re at the grill?” Alex had had three years of cooking school, a year in Italy, and a job at a three-star restaurant, and he still wasn’t cooking. “Would you mind telling me how you were able to jump ahead of me?”

“Alex,” I whispered. “I’m not a cook. Sssssh. I’m a spy.”

T
HE
N
ASHVILLE TRIP
had also showed me how much I knew, and I was surprised by how much that was. I’d had no measure. Like everyone else, I’d been locked inside a hot windowless kitchen, working alongside the same people for more than a year. That weirdo life? It was my life, too. Later in the spring, I joined Mario when he was a guest chef at a James Beard House event. One of his chefs didn’t show, and I ended up cooking a number of things, including the pasta, enough for forty people. But I’d done this before, and the pressure wasn’t more than what you experienced at the height of service. The next day I got an e-mail from Mario: “Thanks for the help yesterday. You are actually quite helpful.” I’d been working with him for nearly a year and a half. He’d never thanked me. Implicit in my role, a pupil whose presence the kitchen tolerated, was that I was to be the one expressing gratitude. To be thanked—this, for me, was a big deal.

15

O
TTO WAS NO LONGER
One Fifth Avenue, but, even with a name change, the curse of the place seemed to persist. When the restaurant opened in January 2003, the curse resurfaced and had its way with the item at the heart of the whole enterprise: the pizza. The early experiments had mystified everyone in the Babbo kitchen; they then mystified diners at Otto. (“We don’t have the Otto-speak sorted out on the pizzas,” the headwaiter said, addressing the members of his staff during the second week. “If anyone asks you to explain them, call over a manager.”) Mario continued to think of them as griddle pizzas, heated from underneath on a flattop rather than in a wood-burning oven. “No, they’re not Italian, they’re my take on Italian. They’re what I cook for my boys”—Mario’s two sons, Benno and Leo—“and they love them.” The implication was that if Mario’s children loved them, so would the world. The world wasn’t so sure.