Mario Batali grabs a brawny handful of parsley leaves and tosses them into the pot without looking. Onstage before a crowd of 400 at the International Home and Housewares Show in Chicago, Batali is demonstrating how to make fregula soup with clams. It's a simple recipe--fregula is just a kind of pasta--but the soup looks a mess. An intemperate amount of chili flakes has gone in, as has what seemed unadvisedly large pinches of saffron, which has a neat but metallic flavor that can overwhelm. As Batali stumbles over a loose cord onstage, it occurs to me that he must be exhausted. It's noon Sunday, and less than 12 hours before, he had been drinking with Emeril Lagasse and their entourages. They hadn't left the Peninsula hotel bar until 1:30 a.m., after the music stopped and the lights went bright. It had been the second night in a row that Batali had closed the place. Saturday night had ended with a couple of rounds of French white (the 2002 Silex, $115 a bottle) followed by three glasses of grappa, the high-proof distillation of grape pomace long favored by old men in Italy.
A mere six hours after closing the bar, Batali could be found swimming in the Peninsula's rooftop pool. After he swam, Batali put away crab cake Benedict while constantly checking his Treo for messages and simultaneously answering my questions. Then he was off for two hours of negotiations with retailers to persuade them to place orders for his cookware. Next he did the demo, and afterward he signed autographs for about 250 fans. He also kept up a running banter that had continued all weekend.
Burly Chicago guy: "Did you party with the Irish last night, Mario?"
Batali: "No, we partied with the Portuguese." (Lagasse is half Portuguese.)
A suburbanite fortysomething in faded jeans, sneakers and frosted hair: "Can I touch you, Mario?"
Batali, who was signing a book for the woman: "Only above the table, madam."
After the book signing, Batali would fly home to New York City. His plane late, he would miss the private HBO screening of The Sopranos at Manhattan's Ziegfeld Theater. But he would make the premiere of Ring of Fire, the Johnny Cash musical on Broadway. Batali would then have drinks at the wrap party after the play; he got home around 1 a.m. A few hours later, he would get up early to take his boys, 7 and 9, to school. (Batali and his wife Susi Cahn live in Manhattan.)
Something has to give, right? The man is 45. His girth is so magisterial that the inevitable Falstaff comparison seems inadequate. All that saffron in the soup--that's where he's showing weakness, I decided. So busy being a star that he's sloppy in the kitchen. To test the theory, back in Chicago I had sneaked into the prep area after Batali had left the crowd standing in applause. I found a cook named Kirsten West who had prepped the ingredients for the demo. "How's the soup?" I asked.
"It's got heat." She made a whooshing noise and raised her eyebrows. "But it's good."
I grabbed a spoon. The soup rocked. The chili balanced and electrified the saffron; chicken stock and the fregula smoothed everything out. Seeing my surprise, West shrugged. "The man knows how to cook."