Roy Hayter reviews two books about charismatic and demanding chefs which do not spare their readers the grainy reality of work in a professional kitchen at the highest level. Bill Buford’s Heat (left - London, Jonathan Cape 2006 ISBN 9780224071840) focuses on the large figure of Mario Batali, founder of Babbo in New York, where Buford worked as an intern. Marco Pierre White takes himself as the subject of White Slave (below right - London, Orion Books 2006 ISBN 9780752874630). White employed Batali in one of his first cheffing jobs; the coincidences, the contrasts of perspectives, the huge egos will fascinate.
When White mentions VIPs, as he does often, it is by way of reinforcing his success—being accepted or, even better, befriended, by famous people. Batali has a more hard-headed approach:
the only times I’ve seen Batali red-faced with anger involved the neglect of VIPs. He rarely shouts, but when the maître d’ failed to spot a record producer who had appeared at the bar, he exploded…and chased him out of the kitchen with such menace that I thought he was going to throw something.
‘If it’s a vip table, you prepare the order now,’ he then hissed at the kitchen staff, reinforcing his rule that VIPs get served first and fast… ‘They must have their starters in ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven.’ And, with hysterical speed, the starters appear, the pale look on the pantry chefs preparing them being one of unmitigated fear.
The encounter
In the light of the almost simultaneous publication of the two books, the careers of Batali and White coincide unnervingly. The difference in accounts is telling. White deals with his time with Batali in three paragraphs. He had seen an opportunity to earn money at The Six Bells, a pub in King’s Road. The landlord was adamant about the money:
‘I’ll give you a staff budget of £500 a week, that’s your budget. Spend it how you like.’ Maybe he thought I’d have to take on a staff of five and a washer-up, but I had devised a way of earning a staggering amount of money. I paid myself £400 per week, which was a fortune for a chef then [and for £100] hired a sous chef who was about my age, an American lad called Mario Batali. There was no cash left for a washer-up, so Mario and I agreed to share the chore.
Pony-tailed, sturdy, Mario… was passionate about cooking. What he needed was a bit of discipline, so I found myself treating him as harshly as I had been treated by my former head chefs. I used to murder Mario every day, physically, mentally and emotionally. If he cocked up a dish then it went in the bin. I would push him along—‘Move it, Mario, faster, faster’.
From the tiny kitchen of that pub I would eventually go on to win three Michelin stars while Mario returned to the States where he’s today hailed as the king of New York’s restaurants… Although we only worked together for a matter of months, he regards me as a mentor, which is nice…
White’s book has an index, and one compiled with considerable diligence. Batali gets one reference, Shirley Bassey three, David Beckham one, Joan Collins one, George Bush (senior) one, Bill Clinton one, Sarah Ferguson one, Mike Jagger, one, Neil Kinnock one, Madonna three, John Major three, Princess Margaret two, Marilyn Monroe one, the Spice Girls two, Elizabeth Taylor one, Prince Charles one, Princess Diana one, and Michael Winner five—to give only a selection!
For references to White in Buford’s book, it is necessary to cast backwards and forwards, but the effort is a good deal more rewarding. Of their time at the Six Bells (which takes eight, mostly long, paragraphs), Batali admits to Buford:
‘I assumed I was seeing what everyone else already knew. I didn’t feel like I was on the cusp of a revolution. And yet, while I had no idea this guy was about to become so famous, I could see he was preparing food from outside the box. He was a genius on the plate.’
In White’s kitchen, Batali was a failure, and you can tell that he’d like to dismiss the experience but can’t: after all, White was the first person to show Batali what a chef could be. As a result, White is both loathed by Batali and respected… From White, Batali learned the virtues of presentation, speed, stamina, and intense athletic cooking. And from White he acquired a hatred of things French. Batali has an injunction against reduced sauces… And a prohibition against tantrums. But mainly Batali learned how much he had to learn.
Batali had stuck it out for four months, when, frightened for his life, he dumped two handfuls of salt into a beurre blanc and walked out.
Buford gets no mention in White’s book—not sufficiently famous? And would this have been otherwise, if White and his publishers had known what Buford would include in his book? Yet, in addition to his account of the Six Bells episode, Buford devotes his entire Chapter Ten to White, concluding:
The masochist in me regrets I never worked in Marco’s kitchens. He’s moved on… perhaps having discovered there’s more money in real estate than in cooking. But in the end I learned some things (over and above the most obvious one, which is that chefs are some of the world’s nuttiest people). I learned how much I had to learn.
For a colourful, emotive, vip-free, concise, insightful account of White’s career at the stove, Buford’s Chapter Ten in Heat is the business—forget White Slave. Contrast this account of White on first job at the Roux butchers with James Steen (White’s ghost writer quoted on pp 54–5):
he described the older man’s knife skills in exhilaratingly precise detail. ‘I love the way he opens a piece of meat with his hands, using his palms and fingers, the whole thing so effortless, and how he then rides the knife through, as though it’s a part of his hand. Forget the knife. It’s like this. These are your fingertips, right? They just glide through. The knife is just an extension of your fingertips. That’s knife discipline. That’s what it’s all about. And I used to stand next to this old boy …and watch him, until finally, I’d learned enough that I was told I could do the turkey legs. It was my first important job and I’d learned how to do it from hours of watching. It was so difficult in the beginning, you’re so uncoordinated, until it becomes natural, as if someone has programmed your fingers.’
Buford reflects in a similar way on his own learning:
Until now, everything I had learned about cooking was from books. A different process was at work when I found myself in the kitchen for twelve hours. I wasn’t reading; to an extent, I wasn’t thinking. I watched and imitated. The process seems more typical of how a child’s brain works than an adult’s… How to use a plastic squirter bottle to create a circle of green dots on your plate… How to know that your vegetables are caramelized, that your fennel is braised, that your dandelions, although floppy like a washcloth, are ready… How to toss a pan so that everything turns over. How to toss it so that only the things on the outer rim turn over… How to compose a plate, how to use asymmetrical items with a sense of symmetry. How, in effect, to learn like a child.
