Mario Batali – Why we love him at Hammertown!

by Joan on Jun 03, 2010

I just got an email from my old friends, Miles and Lillian Cahn, who until recently owned Coach Farms (and Coach leather before that). They also happen to be Mario Batali’s mother and father-in-law. Miles was very proud to send me this recent interview Mario did with Harvard Business Review — it appears below.

I have to say, I’ve known Mario a long time and he’s always been very generous with us here at Hammertown. So, I thought I knew a lot about him but boy was I wrong. I especially liked this Q & A exchange:

Do you think of yourself as a brand?

I think of myself as a father. But I represent a brand, which is a collection of the things that I do, and that I really appreciate.

With such an intense job, how do you balance work and family?

No matter what, the kids and family things go in the calendar first, then the restaurant things, then everything else. There’s a basketball game today at 5:15. Some famous people are going to be in one of the restaurant tonights, and I’m not going to be there until after I see the basketball game.

It’s a very enlightening article and I just loved it. Thank you, Miles, for sharing it with me!

By the way, we got Mario’s new book, Molto Gusto: Easy Italian Cooking, in a few weeks ago and sold out almost immediately. Happily, we’ve got them back in stock now so make sure you come in and get your copy soon! And check out this week’s recipe – it’s one of Mario’s from his new book!

Mario Batali: The Life’s Work Interview

by Katherine Bell

Mario Batali wanted to grow up to be a banker in Spain. While studying business management and Spanish theater in college, he worked at a New Jersey restaurant called Stuff Yer Face and “fell addicted to the adrenal rush that happens during a dinner service.” He went on to become one of America’s most successful chef-entrepreneurs, famous for simple, seasonal Italian food (made with every bit of the animal), star turns on television, and an ever-expanding restaurant empire.

Editor’s Note: A shorter version of this interview appeared in the May 2010 issue of the magazine.

Were you serious about wanting to be a Spanish banker?

Yes. I went to high school in Spain. I loved Spain so much, and I loved the idea of the expat life, living relatively comfortably in a place that was magnificently foreign and yet still recognizable. I still love the idea.

What did you learn in your business classes that turned out to be useful?

Nothing at all. Business classes at that point were theoretical then, based on comparing your marginal revenue curve to your marginal cost curve. I enjoyed macro, but you learn more in a philosophy or English class about how to deal with people and how to get things done.

You worked in England, France, and California before making it to Italy. How important do you think it was to work in a variety of cuisines, in a variety of places before you threw yourself into the one that really mattered the most?

It’s good to be able to learn a panoply of tasks before you decide to specify. There’s so much more to a room that’s darkened than just shining a flashlight in one of the corners. And it’s that same thing when you say, get a liberal arts education and then learn what you really want to learn. It’s true in any business, but particularly so in cooking, because you can be so specific in your style and ideology that you can lose a lot of the ideas that really make a difference.

At what point did you figure out what your style was going to be?

I’m still working on it. Clearly I love Italian food. I love simple food. I like to serve the entire animal, not only because it somehow provokes a customer to think about it, but also because to honor of the animal that has been killed for us to eat, you have to eat the whole thing. It would be silly to just eat the chops and throw everything else away.

I think everyone’s philosophy develops as they go along and they get more information, and they meet smart people whose opinions they value, and they say, well I like a little bit of that, but I don’t like all of that, and it’s a constant evolution. My take on Italian food was honed most when I lived in Italy. That’s where I learned that it’s more about what you don’t put on the plate than what you do. The very common error of young or unconfident cooks is to keep putting more of their own personal ideology into a plate until there’s so much noise that you really can’t even hear a tune. You can say more in an empty space than you can in a crowded one.

Your first boss in London, Marco Pierre White, had a big effect on you. What did you learn from him?

He had a temper issue but he was a genius, so a lot of people tolerated it. I learned a lot from him about passion, about food sourcing, and about how not to manage people. Which is if you really let your temper get the best of you, you’ve lost. And if you yell at people to effect a change in their behavior patterns you can quickly make them stop but not often do you inspire them to really make a long-term change.

When you opened your first restaurant, how did you approach leading the kitchen staff?

At that point, sadly enough, there was no kitchen to lead. It was me and a dishwasher, so I learned you can’t get mad at anybody but yourself. Eventually I had a sous chef, and then a morning prep chef, but I stayed integrally involved in every moment of the slogging battle of getting good food out quickly every day.

It was when I opened Babbo that I needed to figure out how to manage people — which I did mainly by trial and error. I hired really good people and paid them top wages. I made sure that we were all very much involved, but I was also able to step out and watch the operation from the other side of the window.

Now that you have 14 restaurants, how do you maintain quality and consistency?

All of the executive chefs and most of the general managers and wine directors have worked with me directly. They know where I’m going. They know the shorthand we use in describing how things need to change. I go into most of the New York restaurants almost every day, and we talk about things as they’re evolving. My objective as a manager, of course, is to remove the obstacles that prohibit greatness of the people that I’ve hired. So I ask, what is the hardest thing about today? And I say, well, why don’t we get somebody else to do that, or let’s remove it, or let’s streamline it, let’s make it easier. Then they can enjoy that zenny tea service effect of working through something they know how to do.

What do you look for when you hire executive chefs?

I don’t hire them. I bring them up from my team. The highest level we’ll hire from outside is a line cook.

Have you seen the culture of the restaurant industry grow less hierarchical over time?

It’s really changed in our generation. Twenty-five years ago you got a kitchen job because you had just got out of the Army and weren’t yet in jail. As food became pop culture—as significant as painting or music or theater, —the education level of people interested in it grew much higher. You don’t need to yell as much, and the staff won’t take yelling as much. It’s become unacceptable. Now we have all these smart, thoughtful people helping to evolve new ways of making a dish more consistent and delicious without sweating as much.

As your empire’s grown you’ve expanded beyond what in business jargon we would call the core. Do you worry about straying too far or diluting what you do?

Well I haven’t gone into the widget business yet. I’m still in food. I’m still very close to the core in that all of my restaurants, outside of the Spanish ones, represent the ideal of the Italian table, and quite frankly I’m not really inventing much. I’m adhering to the core of 2000 years of gastronomic history.

Do you think of yourself as a brand?

I think of myself as a father. But I represent a brand, which is a collection of the things that I do, and that I really appreciate.

With such an intense job, how do you balance work and family?

No matter what, the kids and family things go in the calendar first, then the restaurant things, then everything else. There’s a basketball game today at 5:15. Some famous people are going to be in one of the restaurant tonights, and I’m not going to be there until after I see the basketball game. You have to figure out the priority, and some people prioritize differently and there’s no moral fiber quotient in that. You do what you’ve got to do, and if you like your work more than your family then you should spend more time with your work. You should strive to find a happiness that makes you feel that you’re giving to all of the components of your life in proportion to what they’re giving back to you.

You and Joe Bastianich have been partners for years. What do you think makes an entrepreneurial partnership work well?

Mutual respect and trusting each other’s opinions. You have to learn that it’s OK not to agree 100% of the time and understand that decisions can be made anyway.

You’re known for being generous and supportive as a mentor to other restaurateurs. Can you talk about that?

We treat all the people in our group as if they’re going to live with us forever, and eventually they decide that they don’t have to. And that’s all right, because I love the idea of helping someone get on their own feet just like I got on my own feet. The idea of scratching together enough cash to get your own place, and throwing a cushy job with a bigger company into the wind so that you one day may be able to do whatever you feel like in the same way that I do, is a very appealing thing. So I help anybody who ever worked for me.