Mario Batali explains the world: Be interested, be interesting... and be worried

I got a chance to interview to Mario Batali when he came by LinkedIn last week for a speaker series. The world-famous chef and restaurateur covered a lot of ground in an hour. We discussed business and politics, lessons and legacy, economics and the economy. But one answer in particular jumped out at me because it seemed to so perfectly sum up his view on life.

It came during the Q&A session, when an employee asked him about the one thing he liked cooking. Batali paused, then declared that he was "consistently happy" to make any thin, dried pasta noodle with shellfish. Could be linguini with clams. Or, say, black spaghetti with rock shrimp and chorizo. "Those are the things that, to me, sing the song the most of the product and the least of the chef," Batali explained. "As you get older, and older, and older, you less need chef intervention and are more impressed by the simplicity of the product and the product uniqueness itself."

This idea of simplicity, of not overcomplicating things, of getting down to the basics runs through everything he tackles. While he's an over-the-top personality — opinions, metaphors, memories and anecdotes pour out of him at a ferocious speed — his philosophy on everything from how he dresses (he was wearing his signature orange Crocs, shorts and zip-up vest; I joined him by donning a pair of the former) to how he runs his business gets back to that idea of simplicity.

For instance, Batali has built 28 restaurants and four groceries around the world. Yet his formula for deciding where and when to expand relies almost entirely on a single personnel decision: Is there a star in the kitchen who needs to move up or is at risk of getting poached? When that happens, Batali and partner Joe Bastianich launch a new restaurant. No market studies, no field tests, no competitive analysis. Batali’s description of his major incursion into Las Vegas went like this. “Zach [Allen, a Batali protege than working at Batali’s Otto restaurant] wanted to move to Vegas. So we took Zach out of Otto and moved to Vegas, and opened four restaurants with him,” he said. “Every time we go to a new market, it's because someone in our group wants to go live there.”

He talked about how he views the secret to success. Not surprisingly, there's only metric that matters. "I would always suggest to anybody, if you can find something you love to do you're never at work,” he said. "My kids look at me and they see I'm happy all the time. Like stupid happy. And they're looking at me like, 'Dad, maybe I should get a job like yours.’”

Then there’s the question of what his end goal is. Batali says that increasingly, he thinks the next move is to simplify even further by breaking up the business and giving the restaurants to the people who have trained under him. He’ll collect a royalty for a certain amount of time and keep one big stipulation: they can pass on the restaurants to the next generation but not sell them.

It’s not surprising that Batali would be comfortable trying to take complicated situations and pare them back to their essence. The one time in his life when he traded in his success for simplicity end up putting him on the path to international fame (and stupid happiness). The best description of what the transformation can be found in Bill Buford’s classic 2002 New Yorker profile of Batali. Buford describes Batali at 28 — living hard, highly celebrated and highly paid — rocketing to the top of the Four Seasons. When the hotel chain asked him to move to Hawaii to run an exclusive restaurant, Batali quit. Instead he moved to Italy. Batali decided he wanted off the corporate ladder. He wanted to learn to cook like his grandmother.

He landed a job at a rural restaurant run by two brothers, who paid him with just food and board in exchange for working in their small kitchen. For six months, Batali lived in an apartment above the restaurant and apprenticed with the family. He learned how to forage, how to find unique tastes in the vegetation around him, how to make the same Bolognese every week. He learned how to cook like his grandmother.

That experience provided a reset for Batali and he’s been recreating the lessons from that kitchen ever since.

Check out the full video of our talk. Here are some edited excerpts. Though a warning for the squeamish: Not surprisingly from someone who makes his living in high-pressure kitchens, Batali doesn’t mind swearing.

I. On becoming Mario Batali

What was your relationship like with food growing up?

Well we grew up in a second generation Italian immigrant family on one side, French Canadian immigrant family on the other. My grandfather was a hops farmer. Everyone was kind of involved in agriculture in some level. My parents' generation was the first one to go to college. And we just had this relationship with foraging and having food around us at all times. It wasn't precious. It wasn't anything that we thought was so unique or special, but we did it all the time. And we picked blackberries, we'd make our own sausage, we'd do our own pickles, we'd make pies. And that was just kind of what we did.

By the time my mom started going back to work when I was 11, my brother was 10, and my sister was 8, each one of the children had to give her a shopping list at the end of the prior week and we each had to make dinner one day a week. Mom was home at 6, and Dad was was home at 6. So they would each cook one night, and each of the kids would cook one night.

When did you realize that this something you wanted to pursue as a career?

Second year in college. When I was applying to colleges, my family was lucky enough in 1975 to move to Madrid with Boeing [Batali’s father was a Boeing engineer; his mom a nurse]. And I went to high school in Spain. We loved to cook so my mom said, "Hey, why don't you go to cooking school instead of University?" And I had just seen "Animal House" and there was absolutely no way I was missing out on what I perceived to be the John Belushification of my possible life.

So I'm glad I went to University, but about two years in I got a job working at a place called Stuff Yer Face in New Brunswick, N.J. making strombolis. And I fell in love with the idea of working as a collective group toward a common goal that was vanquished in one day, which is what cooking is. Not necessarily owning a restaurant, but cooking on a daily basis you have to unite with people. Maybe even you don't like them that much, but you work together in a way that you take care of whatever is at hand and you finish it. You know that you finished it well. And that was a very satisfying experience, particularly in college when there was always that kind of shoulder chip that I could be studying more right now instead of being at the pub trying to find peyote.

How did you make the transition from Rutgers to a cooking career?

Well, when I graduated college I did a couple of the job, kind of career fairs and was offered a job to trade currency futures for one of these banks and it was just like, "Really? Am I really going to do that?" So I decided to go back to New Brunswick and I worked for a year after having applied to Le Cordon Bleu in London. I got accepted, but they just make you wait until there's a slot.

Two weeks before [Cordon Bleu] was supposed to be done I kind of dropped out, which I don't recommend. If you start something, you should finish it.

But I had an opportunity to work for a guy who was at that point not famous, but became subsequently very famous. A guy named Marco Pierre White, who was the guy that taught Gordon Ramsay how to be a douchebag. So he was really, really good at it. But he was also the first kind of visionary cook I'd ever worked with, someone who took not only just flavors so seriously, but the presentation, and the art, and the imagination, to ten times higher level.

Working with him, even though he was abusive, was something that I could learn a lot from. And from shitty bosses you can learn just as much what to do and what not to do. So I learned a lot about how to not treat people, but I also learned a lot about how the infinite potential for food to be something way beyond mere nutrition, which is where the restaurant world was going.

Would you recommend that kind of on-the-job training over a liberal arts training?

I always tell people when they go to a liberal arts education is, "Listen, you have two things you have to do. You have to become fascinated. And you have to become fascinating." You have to become available to apply all of your information on any chance that you get, but you also have to be able to learn from people and learn how to become a part of the team that is vital. That means you participate when it's necessary, but not always at every second. You don't always have to be the smartest person in the room, but you want to be considered one of the smarter people in the room. When you can do that, then all of a sudden you're working with them, and suddenly you can become someone that's indispensable which gives you a big opportunity to negotiate your price.

You've been working with Joe Bastianich for decades; how do you maintain a partnership over that length of time and through ups and downs?

You have to be able to trust your partner to do the things that you either don't want to do, or aren't confident that you can do. Eventually you become, both, quite confident that you can do all of the jobs, but it's nice to have someone who you can bounce your different opinions off of, and whose opinion you trust when you think you might be making either a good one or a bad one. Or whether it's hubris or complete fear that is driving your decisions, that you can use it as a sounding board. We've collectively made all of our restaurants as much about each of us, as it is about ourselves.

How do you split the worlds?

Well, it used to be that I was in the kitchen, and he was in the front of the house. That's kind of the easiest way to do it. Basically I did all the cooking, and he kind of ran the front of the house and did the wine list. As we've gotten more mature, and maybe a little lazy, or a little bit more drawn toward the upper level management, of helping people understand their great gifts, it's been more that we're managing people than we're managing the specifics of any restaurant. Although, anybody that changes any restaurant item menu in my group, which is 26 restaurants — the chefs email me just about every day. I approve, and debate, and dispute, or discuss, everything that happens in all the kitchens.

II. On Batali's talent-centric view of growth and how it affects his ability to sell his company

Any change to a menu has to go through you?

Yes. But I mean, they're intuitive. They've all worked with me. The reason we opened restaurants wasn't that we took a dart and threw it at a board and said, "Oh, let's go to Las Vegas." It was more that we had really good people. The first reason we opened our second restaurant, which was Lupa, was because Mark Ladner — who was the opening sous chef at Babbo under Andy Nusser — was so good that clearly, after about a year and a half, or two years, he had exceeded what the sous chef job was. He was better than that job needed him to be, and he was going to go work for somebody else, because someone else was going to make him a head chef. So we defensively built Lupa, so that he could be a partner in it, and have his own piece of equity, and we wouldn't lose him to any of the other restaurateurs around town.

Each of our restaurants has basically become that. For Zach Allen, who was Mark's sous chef at Lupa, we opened Otto. For Casa Mono, it was because Andy, the original chef at Babbo, he became too good for that, and he wanted to have his own access. And each of the restaurants that we have, including Osteria Mozza in Los Angeles with Nancy Silverton. She wasn't from within our group, but she was a dear old friend of ours who had a divorce with her husband [chef Mark Peel], and they kind of gave up on Campanile. She needed a project, and we said, "Well, we'll love to work with you." And Zach wanted to move to Vegas, so we took Zach out of Otto and moved to Vegas, and opened four restaurants with him. And now we have Nicole Brisson, who's been with Zach all this whole time...

So each time, each one of these places has organically built itself. It's not like we just decided, "All right, let's hire an HR department. Let's put an ad in the paper, and see if we can hire an executive chef and a general manager."

This can’t be the way they teach expansion in business school.

Fundamentally, what makes a shop, a store, a dish, a single garnish, better than something else, is a human hand. It's all about the human touch, for us. That's not, maybe, the same as making Porsches, or widgets, or toothbrushes. But food is such a personal expression of the individual karma of each individual that's involved in it and the hands that have to make it. This is a truly human hand business, so it has to be based on the humans that are in the story.

Had I built 28 of the same thing, Olive Garden would buy it, and they would say, "Great. We're going into the upscale, mid-market, $28 check average restaurant," or whatever they'd say that they wanted. We don't really have that to sell. If we were looking for a giant golden parachute, or a way out of this business, we would have built maybe two or three concepts, and then moved them forward. Then sold them as a group, to somebody who wanted to blow them out as a private equity firm. That wasn't our goal.

What is your goal?

My goal now — and Joe and I have been thinking about it, and we totally disagree — but my goal is to give the restaurants to the people who have successfully moved to the top of them and operated them. Let them operate them as they will, and give us a royalty for a certain amount of time. And then the only way they can give it up is they can't sell it. They have to give it to the next generation. If they can't give it to the next generation, they have to give it back to me.

Now, keep in mind, I own a lot of real estate. I won't give that to them, but I'll give them the brand and the building and the opportunity to extend themselves, and to make them part of that.

This is not what they teach you in business school.

Are you confident that no matter where you go, with the right people, you can run a very successful restaurant and business?

Yes I am. Actually the only place I won't go into business right now is in Seattle, because my sister has that restaurant [Salumi] that they opened with my dad. I couldn't stand getting them to kick my ass. It would feel awful.

But no I mean, I don't go in there as a foreigner. Like every time we go to a new market, it's because someone in our group wants to go live there. So they're basically going home. They're going back to where they came from. Of course they came to New York to find their Broadway, or whatever they came to do. Or they're going to Vegas because they're going to sow their wild oats, and eventually they're going to go back to wherever their town is. But our partners are headed back to their homes. They're going back to live where they think they deserve to be, or that they've always thought they were going to be.

Not that they're striking out and thinking, "Well there's a marginal revenue curve that you can find in Duluth, and it's better than the one in Dubuque." You know that's just not what we think.

III. On how he grows a company without having bureaucracy smother creativity

You keep your operation pretty small; how many people are currently running Bataliland?

Well we have an office with about 75 people. That is human resources, payables, receivables. And then my team is basically six. And then there's a CEO, a CFO, and then there's all the operators. In each location there's a general manager, a wine director, and a chef, and then a pastry chef.

And every now and then it gets a little upside down because either the people in the office, or the chef and general manager contingent, suddenly misperceive the balance of power. The office is there to facilitate and make the day easier for the operations. It's never that the office will direct the operations, which is also counter-intuitive to a corporate structure. Because the people that are making the money and doing the actual hands on work on a daily basis, and actually dealing with the customer, and finding the variations in things that we may need to adjust, change, or completely shit-can. They're on the field. And the office is there to kind of make sure that the payables are done, and that human resources is right, and that the insurance has all been done, and all the claims get through.

They're helping us do all the things, but they're not on the field. And they are definitely not directing the operations. And every now and then we'll get a zealous person in the office field who thinks, "I'm gonna be the director of this," and you're like, "No, no, no, no, no, no. You go help them right now, and if there's a broken mirror in the bathroom you go to the hardware story and you help them get it. Because they're busy dealing with customers."

IV. How Batali hires and keep the team (and himself) motivated

What's a typical day like for you? How do you organize yourself?

I get up at about five. Just about every day of my life. I box, or I play golf. Then I meditate. Meditation, if you don't do it, I recommend it. It's a way to find a calm little moment of you making sure that every stupid thing that happens to you everyday doesn't piss you off.

I'm the kinda guy that stupid shit used to piss me off. And it's also in the variation of human behavior, or even the repetition of foolish behavior by the same person. And what you is if you can find a way to calm that little general anger down, you're a far more effective manager because you don't ever come back at it with passion and anger. You come back at it with, "Let's look over this one more time." And it gives you a chance to pause and not so emotionally react to things.

And so I would always suggest to anybody, if you can find something you love to do you're never at work. So my kids look at me and they see I'm happy all the time. Like stupid happy. And they're looking at me like, "Dad, maybe I should get a job like yours."

As I say to them, if you can find it, whatever it is — whether it's archeology, or whether it's driving a taxi, or whether it's painting houses, or nuclear physics — whatever you want to do find something that you love and you'll be so excited by it everyday that you never feel like you're looking at you clock thinking, "Oh man, another hour I can go home." It's more like, "Fuck, I should've gone home two hours ago, I'm still here." And that's an ideal position to be in.

How do you think about staffing up your restaurants?

The first step is always the hardest one, but once you have people that you can develop a relationship with, and you can impart whatever you want from them, and it's not even that I'm imparting from them. I'm learning from them significantly, and we can develop a two-way conversation and a two-way piece of improving whatever we're doing. That's a really exciting part and an interesting part of staying valid and interested in what you're doing. As we move forward with Eataly, each time we open an Eataly, we have 600-800 employees, and we're opening three Eatalys in 18 months. We have 1,800 or 2,000 more people coming on pretty quickly.

That’s a lot of people. Who are you competing with for talent?

IBM. You're competing with everybody because it's not necessarily the food space. Everybody would be very interested in working with a vibrant, growing company whose philosophy is about biodiversity and doing the world right, whether you're making Nikes or Porsches or spaghetti sauce. We're competing with everybody at this point, but we have the kind of cache that it's a little sexier to work in the food space, and you feel like you might be a little closer to doing the right thing for the world, if you're working in the food space.

That's our next platform is to present Eataly as a place that you come to work, not because you just want to be a cook, but because you want to do the planet one better. That's our ideology, and if you're familiar with the slow food movement, and Carlo Petrini's legacy, that's kind of our bible.

That gives us an opportunity to take people from a wide swath of different varieties of thought processes and educational levels and put them in a place where they can be very happy putting the carrots on the counter. Because it's not just putting the carrots on the counter. It's purveying the entire message of what goodness can be, and that's what our ideology can be and should be.

V. On the perilous economics of restaurants today

What do you think of the anti-tipping movement led by Danny Meyer?

When you go to a restaurant that has always had entrees in the $20 to $30 range, and all of a sudden they're like Pasquale Jones, where pizza is $34 and the pork shank is $50, it’s very hard to get your eye wrapped around that, even though it's tip-included, because you're just like, "What the fuck? There's not a not a bottle of wine under $75 on this list!"

It makes a lot of sense to equitably distribute all of the restaurant's resources to all of the staff members, but keep in mind at a restaurant like Babbo or Del Posto, waiters who can work four days or five days a week can make $140,000 or $130,000. There is no cook who will make that. And to redistribute that right now, in the middle of a time when the minimum wage is gonna go to $15, which means the waiters are all gonna make $15 even if they're tipped, is a hard thing for us to figure out.

We don't have the answer. We are more really worried about the sustainability of the operation. We're just trying to figure out what it's gonna be. And it's basically a blinking game. Everyone's looking at everybody. Waiting for some really smart person to come up with the answer. But we have not figured it out so we are, at this point, paying waiters that we used to pay $5 an hour, $12 an hour. And we're still holding the ground and allowing the tips to be distributed as it is because we just can't figure out how to take that away.

I would say that in the next two years, because of the increased costs and because of the fear of the present administration in our United States' government, in New York City you will see 15 to 20 percent of the restaurants here close. Because they just won't make it because the costs are going up, the competition is stiff and the rents are going up too. And it’s just going to squeeze the margin down to nothing. You know where you used to be able to do 15 to 25 percent margin in the restaurant business, at this point, a lot of operations are 5 to 15.

And if you raise those costs another 10 percent, you're in the -5 to +5, which is no longer worth being operated. And you'll see great restaurateurs, that you've know for a long time, closing up shop and going either somewhere else or going into another field. Times are very tough if you are going to blink. If you don't have the assets to kind of wait this out and see what happens and the team that's got the passion to kind of wait and figure it out then you're going to close. There's going be a lot of closing.

So what do you tell young restaurateurs who come to you? Do you recommend they get into the business?

If you love what you do, you will find a way to be happy and or be sustainable. It may not be the traditional model. At this point we're trying to explore a place, like the model, would be like a barbecue place: where there's three or four chefs, they cook all the stuff at once and then they just chop it. And there's really only two or three waiters who are bringing this stuff out. You've taken all of those $15 an hour employees for a restaurant that big, there would have been a hundred. And now there's eight.

And that might be where the future is. It'll certainly be less hourly operators, hourly workers in every location is the only way this is going to work in the long run, provided that new structure.

VI. On the future: Where he wants to go — and what he fears is coming for restaurants and for the country

Why aren’t you in San Francisco?

San Francisco for me is a very tricky place. I have exactly one location in mind and it would be all of Ghirardelli Square. And they're not giving it to me right now. But if they did, I would take the whole master lease. I would put Eataly on the whole ground floor. I would rent the second floor area to Italian couture, design, furniture. It would become the Italy, not little Italy. I would become an Italian commerce center and that would work because then we could have the Piazza. It would be exactly what we want.

But you can't shoe-horn it into 43,000 square feet in the middle of Market Street. And you certainly can't make it a big box store in Mountain View. We are not a place where you drive to a Wal-Mart-looking facility. You need to be able to go to our place on a bicycle. You need to be able to walk to our places. That's what they're about, they're about being integrated into the urban experience. It is not a drive-to place. So, let San Francisco know I'm waiting.

Can you walk us through any food trends you’re seeing?

I think what's gonna happen is the rich people are gonna eat the rich people's food and everyone else is not. And what I will suggest is that we might be looking at a violent revolution in 25 years in American based almost exclusively on access to good food.

And that shouldn't diminish anyone's passion or excitement.

But I would say that as these remarkable experiences like Alinea, which is just perhaps my greatest restaurant experience in my life. I went there with my son Benno 4 years ago. And when we were walking out he said, "Dad, I don't think I can ever think about food the same way again. Because it’s a mind-fuck of amazing deliciousness and thought and provocative and stuff."

I love that full on experience. But the price tag...

And what we have to do as consumers is find a way to hopefully support all the levels. But what you will find is that you generally end of supporting the ones that you perceive to be the best value in a consistent experience and the price point that you want. So I love all of them. But for me my favorite meals are generally at the Trattoria and Osteria level or the taqueria level then the kind of high end, mid range, super fancy experiences because I live there. So, like I'm just as happy to sit down at a table outside with my shoes off, feet in the sand and eat freshly caught linguine with clams than to spend a lot of time where fourteen people touched my linguine with chopsticks and put it down in lines like that. And charge me $40 or $50 for the same plate, effectively.

Can we go back to that: You just predicted a violent revolution. Do you really have that kind of a bleak view of what's coming in the next couple of decades?

I don't think violent revolution is necessarily so bleak. If you look at the new tax codes, just rewarding the rich for being rich is a very short-term vision for what should be happening in the richest country of all time. There should be a ubiquity of education, of access to food and resources that should not be stolen or misappropriated by the 1 to 10, 20, 40 percent. They should be shared, it would be a much more common investment. We shouldn't look at hunger relief or education as charity. It should be looked at as an investment for us to become a stronger nation from which we can share all of the resources that we have to make everyone better. And share that internationally. Not just make the rich here a little richer.

As we look at torturing our planet, beating the carbon out of it, and looking at the way these people are going to manage what we consider to be the big things that we should all be sharing, I don't see violence as out of line.

[After the talk, he sent a note asking to clarify his position: "I do not see revolution as completely out of the realm of possibility. I do not condone it, but I do not think it unrealistic to think that people forced into an untenable situation without the option of improvement or a path to a better life may be faced with very few options other than a radical change of government…. it is not irrational to predict some civil unrest in the likelihood of further concentration of wealth in fewer hands."]

Do you have a bunker somewhere?

I have a house in northern Michigan. No one even knows where it is. You can come up with me and when we run out of water. Twenty-two percent of the world's water is in the Great Lakes.