The Matron Saint of Pasta

By John Cloud

Lidia Matticchio Bastianich is only 58, but she doesn't seem to mind if you think she's older. She presents herself to the world in matronly blouses or patterned smocks, with a sensible shade of red lipstick and a welcoming smile gracing her lunar face. She is thick in the middle, sprightly of eye and possessed of powerful momma's hands that have built a multimillion-dollar restaurant-and-food empire.

More than that, she has lived a life so rich in history that, by comparison, the attractive twentysomethings the Food Network so desperately wants to turn into stars seem like brummagem pretenders. When Bastianich was just 10, she and her family fled communist tyranny in Europe, lived as refugees and immigrated to New York City--which she still calls, when speaking of her parents' decision to come here, "the New World." She learned English as a third language, after Italian and Serbo-Croatian.

If it seems uncharitable to a woman so accomplished as Bastianich--someone with so many plans for the future--to dwell on her past, consider that her past is her future. The five restaurants she owns or co-owns in three cities (a sixth, Del Posto, is set to open in Manhattan in November), the four best-selling cookbooks she has written, the two TV shows she has created--a third, Lidia's Family Table, began this spring on PBS--all celebrate the traditional northern-Italian foods of her brief childhood in Istria, a region of northeastern Italy that was transferred to communist Yugoslavia after World War II. (It is now part of Croatia and Slovenia.) Bastianich's family left with at least 200,000 other ethnic Italians who refused to give up their language, their Catholicism and their very names. (Authorities tried to Slavicize Bastianich's maiden name, Matticchio, as Motika.)

With Del Posto, their latest evocation of the Italian past, Bastianich and her partners, including her son Joseph and the omnipresent chef Mario Batali, are hoping for a new level of critical acclaim. Press materials for the 190-seat eatery promise service from a fleet of "captains, front waiters, back waiters and runners in synergy with managers, sommeliers, and professionals in charge of specialty items like chocolate & cheese." It's a clear bid for something none of Bastianich's popular restaurants (nor, for that matter, any other Italian restaurant in New York City) can claim: four stars from the New York Times.

Any authentic cookery tastes of nostalgia, but Bastianich has built an entire business on her empyreal girlhood memories of a lost Istria. (In her books Bastianich seems to recall every culinary moment of her early years, from watching distillers make grappa to grinding wheat into flour at the communal mill.) Bastianich's unwillingness to forget the youth that was "yanked away from me" eventually manifested itself in her mastery of Istria's--and all of Italy's--regional cuisines. In 1971, when she was just 24, Bastianich and her then husband Felice opened their first restaurant, a modest 30-seater in Queens, N.Y., called Buonavia ("good road").

A prescient name. Today Bastianich (who divorced Felice in 1998) is one of the most celebrated chefs in the nation. Judith Jones, the octogenarian book editor who persuaded a skeptical Alfred Knopf to publish Julia Child's first book in 1961, calls Bastianich "the Italian version of Julia Child." Jones went with Bastianich last year to a Connecticut grocery store to promote the cookbook version of Lidia's Family Table. Some 2,000 people showed up, many clutching grease-smudged copies of Bastianich's earlier books. They waited hours to see the chef up close. "I hadn't seen anything like that since the early days when I went out with Julia," says Jones. "There was this loving sense that she had given them a gift. It was quite emotional."

Batali, who co-owns the Manhattan restaurant Esca with Bastianich, calls her "the ideal matriarchal figure for all of Italian cooking," which is both an expression of and an explanation for her success. You want to watch Bastianich cook meals on TV--and you desperately want to eat them--because, even if you've never heard of Istria, Lidia seems as though she could be your mother. When she looks into the camera, as she did on a 2001 episode of her earlier show Lidia's Italian Table, and shakes her finger at you and says of her fried mozzarella sandwich, "You will make it, and then you will taste it," the combination of her luscious cheese dish and her lovingly stern gaze is as close to televised motherhood as you can get.

By nature, Bastianich is an effortless teacher, perhaps because her own mother, Erminia Matticchio, who lives in an apartment in Bastianich's Queens home, was a schoolteacher in Istria. Bastianich, in turn, taught her children the family business so well that they returned to it as adults. Tanya Bastianich Manuali, 33, who has an Oxford doctorate in Renaissance history, runs lidiasitaly.com which sells everything from stainless-steel tongs to $4,000-a-week tours of Italy, and lidiasclub.com where subscribers can watch streaming video of Lidia cooking dishes. Joseph Bastianich, 37, produces top-quality wines and olive oil under the family name and, in his own right, co-owns one of the most successful restaurant collections in New York, including--with Batali--the famed (but only three-star) Babbo.

In March I paid a visit to Bastianich's rangy Tudor overlooking Long Island Sound to see how she had so successfully fused the roles of Italian-American mother and gastronomic impresario. The night before, I had dined at her flagship, Felidia. I had not expected Bastianich to be there--she had recently had a knee replaced--but she arrived abruptly, just to check on things. ("You always question yourself," she explained the next day.) When she walked in, the spruce, busy restaurant turned susurrous and expectant, everyone wanting a word with Lidia. She offered a friendly greeting to nearly every customer and a couple of brusque commands to her staff.

The next day in her sun-drenched kitchen--where all her shows are taped--she asked her mother to squeeze me a glass of grapefruit juice, a tonic for the previous night's overindulgence. Then we walked to the stove, where Bastianich was preparing lobster risotto.

Motherhood has always required both sweetness and fierceness, a hand gentle enough to soothe but firm enough to provide. This thought occurred to me as I watched Bastianich pick up a live lobster, casually snip off its legs and claws with scissors, lay the squirming body on a cutting board and then bring a long chef's knife down into its head and through its body in one clean stroke. All the while, Bastianich was chatting amiably, her practiced hands working nearly on their own. "With lobsters, people are very squeamish," she said. "I say, 'Don't give me that. You all go out and order lobsters. What do you think happens to them? Somebody kills them!'" She let out a cackle and then slaughtered a second crustacean.

I asked Bastianich how Lidia the person differed from Lidia the business. "It's kind of the same thing," she said. "My family was involved in the beginning in the restaurants when they were small because we had the holidays there. It was open. We would go there and eat, and they would go home with Grandma. I would continue to work whether it was a holiday or whatever." When Tanya and Joseph were kids, Bastianich would take them each August to her family's old house in Istria--she now owns it--and show them the fig-fattened chickens in the courtyard. She would remind her modern New York City kids that one bird, when butchered thoroughly enough--"all the eggs and the unborn eggs and the liver and the intestines"--could feed a dozen people.

Later, as Bastianich's business grew, particularly after she financed Lidia's Kansas City and Lidia's Pittsburgh, it necessarily became less of a family enterprise. For a woman who writes in her cookbooks precisely when to shake the skillet to achieve perfect caramelization, losing control over every detail wasn't easy. (Even today, she says one way to ensure quality is "to systematize and keep very strict like we do in Kansas City and Pittsburgh ... We make a menu, and you develop it together, but they have to stay on track.") Bastianich has also had to learn how to have a cooperative relationship with her children, since they are so intimately involved in her business. She is famous for ordering her kids around on her TV shows, but "they give me hell all the time," she says with a laugh.

And what about retirement, letting go the entrepreneurialism and simply being Noni to her five grandchildren? "I'm gonna retire to a winery and do the cooking there," says Bastianich as we sip her son's grappa after the lobster risotto, a salad, some cheeses and a grape cake. At which point Tanya pipes up: "Yeah? Let me know when that happens." Then, to me: "She will never retire."

And why should she? For the past few months, I have cooked nearly everything in Lidia's Family Table and eaten often at her restaurants. I have gained a full inch on my waist, but since leaving for college years ago, I have never felt so warmly embraced by a mother's good food.