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At La Volta, which is now defunct, Batali learned the basics--handmade pastas; slowly cooked Bolognese sauce; wild mushrooms, greens and berries foraged from the forest floor and served nearly unadorned the same day. In 1993, when Batali helped launch his first restaurant, Pò, he brought that unaffected Italian sensibility to downtown Manhattan. (He also needlessly added an accent mark to the name of Italy's Po River.) "He was doing some things so simple--things like affogato, which is gelato [Italian ice cream] with a shot of espresso in it. It's a classic in Italian restaurants, but I had never seen it in the U.S. And there it was in the menu at Pò," says Faith Willinger, author of Eating in Italy and a leading expert on Italian cuisine. "I took one look at his menu and had immediate respect for him."
Drawn to Batali's downtown image, the Food Network came calling two years after Pò opened. TV gave Batali a bully pulpit for the new-old Italian cooking--less spaghetti buried in red sauce, more pumpkin ravioli--which has spread across the U.S. in the last few years. "There has been a revolutionary improvement in Italian food," says Tim Zagat, a co-founder of the restaurant guides that bear his name. Zagat doesn't credit Batali entirely for that improvement--in fact a much earlier pioneer was Lidia Bastianich, who was cooking in the authentic Italian vernacular at her New York City restaurants when Batali was rinsing beer glasses in college. But Zagat says Batali's visibility on the Food Network brought Italian culinary simplicity to a much wider audience.
Pò was relatively inexpensive--its six-course tasting menu was $29--and Batali was soon feeding downtown artists, actors and, crucially, reporters. He became the most charismatic of the young New York City chefs--fun, funny, a little crude. There was something brash about his willingness to serve a just-picked strawberry drizzled with sweet balsamic vinegar rather than do something more complex and chef-ish like extruding a berry-vinegar solution into a foam. Great California chefs like Jeremiah Tower (for whom Batali briefly worked) and Alice Waters launched the American culinary revolution in the 1970s by trumpeting fresh ingredients above all. Twenty years later, Batali performed a neat trick. He made the revolution feel young and hip again--he was just 32 when Pò opened--and his respect for traditional Italian cuisine also lent his food a sense of history uncommon to American restaurant fare; Batali has always said most of his dishes are mere reinventions of old--in some cases ancient--Italian recipes.
Batali turned out to be an incredibly productive TV cook, able to shoot as many as eight back-to-back episodes of Molto Mario. "As soon as the camera was off, I'd say [to the crew], 'Nine minutes, m_____f_____s!'" says Batali. "They hated me initially, but they loved me eventually." Because of his speed, Batali was able to deliver 517 episodes of the show in just six seasons of shooting. (The show went out of production in 2003, but it still airs in reruns.)