He started out, he says, as a "tourist," a journalist with a magazine assignment and then a book contract, who wanted to learn some basic skills and tell the tale. Not surprisingly, along the way, he quit his day job - he had to. Like the young Taylor, Buford was smitten by Batali's larger-than-life personality and considerable talent, a "crush" that not only landed him in Babbo's kitchen but led him on an increasingly obsessive nearly four-year odyssey that included stints with Batali's former teachers, indentured servitude with the crazy but gifted butcher of the subtitle and long hours learning Italian and poring over 15th-century manuscripts in an effort to find out when egg yolks replaced water in pasta fresca. The book is part memoir, part biography and part tutorial, and its deftly intertwining narratives include everything from high-end restaurant gossip and kitchen secrets to a passionate homage to the rapidly declining traditions of handmade food. I tell this story because it contains many of the elements of Bill Buford's "Heat," in which the author is inspired by Batali to embark on the "adventures" of the subtitle. The kid who watched "Molto Mario" after school is now working for a Batali disciple and taking the same route, so far, as Batali himself.
Like Batali, he was noticed by his boss and now he helps make pasta dishes inspired not just a little by those at Pó and at Babbo, which were in turn inspired by Batali's internship in Italy. Like Batali, Taylor started out working part-time as a dishwasher. Today he's at L&M's Kitchen and Salumeria in Oxford, Miss., owned by the highly talented and supremely nice Dan Latham, a Batali protégé who went to work curing salamis and pancetta for the great man fresh out of culinary school. As soon as he was old enough, Taylor got a job cooking burgers at the local country club. Batali had a ponytail and a butch rock 'n' roll persona that appealed to an adolescent kid with a mostly absentee father he was also a dazzling - and apparently inspiring - cook. Mario Batali, then Pó's chef and now the creative force behind an empire that includes Babbo and Del Posto, was also the star of "Molto Mario" and Taylor's new hero. It was a quick lesson in the power of the still-nascent Food Network. Taylor is a smart kid, but he was barely in junior high school, in the Mississippi Delta no less, a place where Italian red sauce is invariably referred to as "spaghetti gravy." He had never been to New York, no one in his family could be called a "foodie" - how on earth had he heard of a tiny West Village restaurant whose specialties included grappa-cured salmon and linguini with clams and pancetta? About eight or nine years ago my best friend's oldest son asked me if I had ever been to an Italian restaurant in Manhattan called Pó.
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