Free Heat by Bill Buford Page B

a plate from your hands and throws it onto the floor, usually during the busy service, and you’re meant to clean it up and prepare a new plate. It was, Memo said, “the most humiliating moment in my life, and it didn’t happen again.”)
    An orecchiette was returned from the dining room, half eaten, the plate borne into the kitchen by the maître d’, John Mainieri, who explained, “There are not enough florets on the broccoli.” Five people gathered around the plate and started eating from it. “He says that the last time he ate here the broccoli had more florets.” Everyone picked out a floret and stared at it closely.
    “It’s true,” Mario said. “We’ve had larger florets, but nature isn’t making big florets at the moment.” A new pasta was prepared, and Mario handed it to one of the runners. “When you give this to him, please pistol-whip him with your penis.”
    Half an hour later, another return from the same table—this time, from a woman. A steak. It was chewy. “She doesn’t want a new dish. She wants steak, properly prepared.” The cooks assaulted the meat, indignantly tearing off pieces with their hands, and turned to one another, saying, “Chewy?”
    The steak came back. Now, evidently, it had been overcooked. And there was also a chop. It, too, was not satisfactory.
    “For fuck’s sake. Find out their names. They’re not coming back.” Mario paused. “What are they drinking?”
    “A Solaia 1997.” A bottle was $475.
    “Forget it,” Mario said and ordered another round of entrées.
     

 

    6

    N EW YORK, 1992. The dishes Mario prepared at the new Rocco read like episodes in an autobiography; each one is so intimately associated with a specific moment in his life that the menu is almost more literary than culinary—cooking as memoir. Ravioli stuffed with brains and Swiss chard is his grandmother’s recipe. A review in
New York
magazine singled out an “old-fashioned tagliatelle in a ragù Bolognese”—the very ragù Mario had prepared at La Volta. A stricchetti with porcini and cremini mushrooms is a variation on what Betta made on Mario’s first day in her kitchen. The leek soufflé (with grappa-cured salmon) was the dish he had cooked for his first Christmas lunch in Italy. Mario had finally arrived in New York City and had a lifetime of cooking to express.
    In his second month at Rocco, Mario met Susi Cahn, his future wife, who sold organic vegetables and goat cheese to downtown restaurants. (The cheese was made by her parents; the vegetables were grown by Susi on their land in upstate New York.) Two weeks later, she took her parents to Rocco for dinner: it was her birthday, and the restaurant seemed the right place to celebrate. Mario’s family happened to be in town, also to celebrate a birthday, his mother’s. The dinner didn’t finish until three. For Susi, it was a drunken, energetic blur of festivities, Mario’s rushing back and forth from the kitchen, returning each time with a surprise—another course, another bottle of wine, another grappa, and, finally, an accordion, which his father played, leading everyone in Italian drinking songs. Cahn, who is so many things Mario isn’t—petite, dark-haired, East Coast, Jewish to his lapsed Catholic, early-to-bed to his out-until-early, reserved and deliberate to his outgoing and impulsive—illustrates the kind of person Mario probably gets on best with. “I’m
very, very
different,” she said, when we met to talk, as though to say “Get real. Mario could not live with another version of himself.” Arturo, his new business partner, was, it seems, not so different, and nine months into the enterprise, their partnership collapsed.
    They weren’t getting customers. Even Dana Batali was perplexed. “The food was good. I don’t know why no one came.” Whatever it was, it confused the regulars. “I asked Mario to start slowly,” Arturo told me on the phone after I tracked him down in Miami, where he is now a