Super Mario

Lupa is the first of a trio of restaurants helmed by MARIO BATALI to open in Hong Kong. Gerrie Lim talks Italian with the legendary chef

AS THE LATE Frank Zappa once observed, “Remember, everyone is wearing a uniform.” That’s what came to mind when I beheld Mario Batali, clad in black vest over plain work shirt, grey striped Tommy Bahama shorts, and bright red socks inside bright orange Crocs. The latter, he takes pains to tell me, were a gift from his wife, Susi. The vest
displays the logo of his new television talk show, The Chew, emblazoned over his heart.

And that’s him; always doing what’s closest to his heart. Today, it happens to be his newest restaurant, Lupa, his 19th – but first in Hong Kong – named after the legendary she-wolf who suckled the twins Romulus and Remus in the foundation myth of the Italian capital. It occupies an impressive 8,000 square feet (2,500 of it an outdoor terrazza) in LHT Tower in Central, where the old Queen’s Theatre once stood, with a Baby Gap right below it – metaphorically apt, since it’s the first of a culinary trilogy. This June will see the opening of his Carnevino steakhouse, located in the same building, while “early next spring, depending on the construction,” he says, there will be an as yet unnamed “southern Italian, Neapolitan-style, what we call a ‘red-sauce joint’ serving pizza, pasta and roasted and grilled meats,” at Hysan Place in Causeway Bay.

“Mario is one of the most important entrepreneurial chefs in America – he changed, and continues to change, the whole landscape of dining,” his good friend Anthony Bourdain recently told me, adding that he still stands by something he wrote in an essay on the cult of the celebrity chef, from his 2006 book The Nasty Bits: “Every Batali restaurant has a different concept. And every one of them fulfils a need we might never have known we even had.”

Deep words to live by? “That sentence,” Batali responds with a chuckle, “is about the Tony Bourdain wit. He gets to the point. Why would people go to three Mario Batali restaurants in a week? Because, hopefully, they are well conceived, very unique and of good quality. You need two of those. I think what surprises people is the remarkable variation in the ‘food of the boot’ – for many, many years, Italian food was thought of as spaghetti, pizza, lasagna and tiramisu – and I have helped explain the magnificent and wondrous nature of the differences between the Italian regions. So you might never have thought that you needed to go to a Roman trattoria? But you do!”

Meaning that Lupa might change your life after you’ve sampled his visually enticing corzetti with rabbit ragu or the even more erotic-looking black spaghetti ’Nduja. “The most important thing,” he declares, “is that my intentions translate into the joy of the table. All of the work that you do can get lost in the sauce, really, if it doesn’t get properly translated at the table by your entire staff.”

And staffing is a major factor in the Batali success story, which is why the term “serial restaurateur” doesn’t faze him. “What Tony means when he calls me an ‘entrepreneurial chef’ is there are a lot of chefs out there who have done a restaurant, or even done a TV show and restaurant, but they have never set their minds to growing their staff into vibrant portions of ownership and management. The reason I’ve opened so many restaurants is not some manifest destiny to get rich or to bring food to the hungry masses with some kind of charity thought in mind. The reason is because my sous chefs have become so talented that they’re ready to do something else.

“So, instead of letting them go work for Danny Meyer or Drew Nieporent or some hotel, I offer them the opportunity to invest either their own money or find investors and become my partner in the new restaurants. After Joe [Bastianich, his business partner] and I opened Babbo, we opened Esca and Lupa and Otto in quick succession, and it occurred to us that the reason we’re doing it is because we want these guys to stay with us.” Case in point: Lupa’s executive chef is Zach Allen, his protege from Lupa in New York and Carnevino and Otto in Las Vegas.

Batali’s celebrity branding took hold in 2007 when he hosted the PBS documentary series Spain…on the Road Again, his Iberian food-and-wine journey with actress Gwyneth Paltrow and R.E.M. lead singer Michael Stipe. “I take a vacation with Michael every summer, for a week or a week and a half,” he discloses to me, “anywhere in the southern Mediterranean – France, Spain, Italy. We usually get a big house or stay in the same hotel with connecting suites. I plan the whole thing and all Michael has to do is wake up.” Batali is an avid R.E.M. fan – and a serious one – since his favourite album is their 2001 effort, Reveal, one generally reviled by the critics. He first met Stipe by a quirk of fate, when the singer dined at Babbo in New York.

Interestingly, the band’s first album, Murmur, was recorded around the same time that Batali started his life in professional kitchens, as a dishwasher and then Stromboli and pizza maker, after which he apprenticed in a London pub under the pre- Michelin and yet-to-be-legendary Marco Pierre White, before making his mark on television with Iron Chef America and Molto Mario. “I think one of the best things I bring to the table is my passion and excitement about Italian food, so that you can come at me with any level, whether you are obsessed with oxtail ragu or you’re just vaguely interested in Sophia Loren,” he quips. “We also cater to the people who might not even be interested in knowing about Roman food but are coming here because it’s trendy and it’s next to The Gap and they like to shop. We’re guest-intensity agnostic.” He also has a hidden agenda. The upcoming Causeway Bay restaurant will be a sly attempt to resurrect the spirit of Rocco, his first major venture in New York, which he left to start anew in 1993 with Po, his modest Greenwich Village eatery that got him noticed after a rave New York Times review. “Yeah, Rocco, that didn’t work,” he shrugs. “I’ve had my miniature failures, but I persevere. There’s a certain amount of luck, a certain amount of hard work, and a certain amount of ‘whatever happens’. Would I try a red-sauce place like that again? Sure, we’re going to try it here. Except we’re going to be better.”