![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() He got 'bumped': barged into, put in his place, by the regular, variously impatient kitchen staff - Frankie and Memo and Tony Liu and Elisa - on a nightly basis. Buford was, to start with and for many weeks, the 'kitchen bitch', an incompetent chopper and dicer, a man as likely to cube his fingers as a carrot. Mario professed simplicity - 'We buy food, we fix it up, we sell it at a profit' - but life in the kitchen was anything but simple. The taste of these three things, Buford recalls, and the ease and brilliance with which Batali took over his kitchen and transformed his dinner, changed his life forever.Ī few weeks later Buford, then approaching 50, had given up his day job as taster-in-chief of the world's fiction and persuaded Batali to let him come to work in the kitchen at Babbo. He brought with him some grappa, home-made, some nocino, a dense walnut liqueur of his own devising, and a hunk of lardo, 'the raw, lardy back of a very fat pig, one he'd cured himself with herbs and salt'. Because of his reputation in the city as a cook of genius and a legendary gourmand, Batali - a rotund man, with a red ponytail, and shorts, and wrapround shades - was not often invited round for dinner. ![]()
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