Latest news with #Babbo
Spectator
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Food that's both serious and serene: Babbo reviewed
After a week in which Israel triumphed at the Eurovision Song Contest with second place – western Europe is for them, eastern Europe slightly less so (plus ça change) – I review Babbo, the new neighbourhood restaurant in St John's Wood. Restaurants tend to drift in, settle and drift onwards here. The Victorians knew it as a land of mistresses and smut; now it is a world of private hospitals, bad parking and MCC members, who seem bewildered by it all, as if Lord's landed like a spaceship in an alien land. Only Oslo Court seems impregnable, because it manifests Jewish solidity – it is disguised as the home of your cousin in a mansion flat – and Jewish subversion. It is a specialist in seafood and cream cakes. Everything else comes and goes. In a high street dedicated to underwear, estate agents and aesthetic medicine, it is pleasing to find something as useful as an Italian restaurant. There is an Ivy, of course, but it is generic – it reminds me of Sleeping Beauty's castle without the magic or ambition – and a Gail's. Idiots hate Gail's because they think it is an augur of gentrification. They might as well count blades of grass as perform their stupid activism here. They are a century too late. Babbo is double-fronted, and it speaks to St John's Wood's myths: it means Daddy. A Daddy who double parks and buys underwear. It used to be Harry Morgan's deli (born 1948), a cheesecake and salt beef bar so beloved that one reviewer said Babbo was dancing on his grandparents' graves.
Eater
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Eater
A 35 Year-Old Italian Restaurant Slated To Close Is Rescued by a Legacy Space Uptown
In January, 35-year-old Uptown mainstay, Italian American Nino's Ristorante announced it would have to close in June. Owner Nino Selimaj told Eater that the original location is on track for demolition to make way for a 23-story, 148-unit building from the developer, the Manocherian Brothers. Now, Nino's has found a new location taking over what had been Le Périgord for 53 years, at 405 East 52nd Street, at First Avenue, he says. The original Nino's closed on Monday, allowing Selimaj the time to update the dining room of what had been Le Périgord until 2017, and tend to details like securing a liquor license. Nino's has hosted the likes of Clint Eastwood, Angela Lansbury, Chris Noth, Chelsea Clinton, and members of The Sopranos such as the late James Gandolfini, serving classics like baked clams, homemade ravioli, rigatoni alla vodka, and chicken Parm. It's one of a handful of Italian American restaurants that have had to close (and in this case, relocate), with others including Williamsburg's Frost and Tomasso in Bensonhurst. Babbo is temporarily closed for takeover With Stephen Starr taking over Babbo and Lupa — made famous by Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich — Babbo, open since 1998, has closed to prepare for the transition of ownership. The Italian restaurant will be temporarily closing for renovations as we begin an exciting new chapter,' reads the Instagram post. 'We're working hard behind the scenes to bring you an elevated dining experience, with fresh updates and inspired touches — while keeping the heart and soul of Babbo you know and love.' No confirmation yet whether Mark Ladner is on track to take over as chef. Saga has rolled out a new tasting menu The fine dining Saga menu in Fidi (70 Pine Street, 63rd Floor, at Pearl Street) has quietly changed over, according to a tipster. Since chef Charlie Mitchell took the helm in July, the tasting menu had kept to dishes the late Jamal James Kent served since the restaurant opened — until now. The restaurant is on track to shutter in August for renovations to the space, too. Ukrainian Festival is this weekend The 49th annual St. George Ukrainian Festival is this weekend starting tonight at 5 p.m. and running through Sunday (30 E. Seventh Street, at Third Avenue). EV Grieve reports that 30,000 pierogies have been made in preparation. Sign up for our newsletter.
Los Angeles Times
19-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
The woman left standing — and writing — after the fall of two bad boy chefs
On page 167, about halfway through Laurie Woolever's memoir 'Care and Feeding,' she's describing the hours after her son Eli was born. A nurse helps her attempt breastfeeding, unsuccessfully, and tells her she can try again in a little while. 'While I held him and scrutinized his red face,' Woolever writes, 'she topped up my beautiful, perfect drug I.V. and put Eli back in his plastic box on wheels.' We know by this point in the book that, duration of her pregnancy aside, Woolever often drinks to the point of blacking out, gets stoned upon wakening many mornings, has dabbled in heavier drugs and made one terrible decision after another in her personal relationships. The reader, then, can easily imagine how she savors the floating drift from the morphine dripping from its suspended bag, and how surreal it is to see this being for whom she is now responsible transported here and there in a sterile hospital vessel. The humor is dark, and the confessions are unflinching, and Woolever has a gift for turning them into propulsive storytelling. If you've heard about 'Care and Feeding,' published by Ecco last month, you know this isn't only a memoir about addiction and early motherhood. In 1999, Woolever became the first assistant to Mario Batali. It was a year after the opening of Babbo, the New York restaurant that propelled him to fame. In 2009 — after three years working for Batali, followed by stints as a freelance food writer and an editor at Art Culinaire and Wine Spectator, and less than a year after her son was born — Anthony Bourdain hired her as his assistant. She worked for him until his death by suicide in 2018. The book's triumphant feat is in how Woolever balances recounting her food-world experiences with these globally famous men while centering the professional ambitions and personal failings in her own life. Woolever and I are close in age, so I'll admit a Gen-X empathy in the timeline of her becoming. There's the misery pit of a first New York apartment in the '90s, when Manhattan felt less shiny and shut off by wealth. And the restaurant-adjacent gigs (catering, cooking for a moneyed couple) in which work meant facilitating someone else's daily routines or celebrations, leaving little time for either in your own life. And the transitioning age of journalism, when the internet is killing print ads, and thus print, and the opportunities are shrinking and the corporatization feels strangling. She escapes, and makes things worse, via booze and drugs and sex, all of which were intrinsic to her proximity to restaurant culture at the turn of the millennium. I particularly admire how she relays her Batali era. He's messy, and she's messy in step in her own ways. During an early outing to Atlantic City, he rebuffs her attempt to order only a spinach salad in a restaurant. There will instead be many courses, and equal amounts of expensive wine. 'His demand was oppressive,' she writes, 'but there was also a glimmer of something appealing about his commanding me to overindulge. It wasn't my choice to overeat and get —faced; it was my job.' That might be her 20-something self's stance on her agency in the moment, but the woman looking back in her late 40s surveys the landscape with clear-eyed ownership. She benefited from the affiliation; part of her work with Batali included collaborating on a book, and he introduced her to Bourdain. She also talked with reporters in 2017 when publications were breaking the story of his sexual misconduct allegations. Her details about Batali tell their own damning story; she wisely forgoes miring the narrative in too much hindsight analysis. Bourdain in Woolever's memoir comes across as complicated, real, occasionally infuriating, ultimately heartbreaking. She previously authored 'Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography' in 2021, so in this book his presence rightly serves her story: his initial skepticism to her quitting drinking as she's entering sobriety (she sticks with it), her feelings of guilt after his death. These later events happen while she implodes her marriage through adultery, and grapples with who she is as a writer. The pages fly because Woolever is funny, and blunt, and maybe honest to the point of oversharing as a karmic corrective to the many lies she told her intimates for so long. I finished the book excited for more, for what's next for her, for the stories that are hers without the proximity to others' stardom. This week the Food team included 'Care and Feeding' in a roundup of the 21 best spring releases that otherwise featured cookbooks. Among these standout titles: Kwéyòl / Creole: Recipes, Stories, and Tings From a St. Lucian Chef's Journey by Nina Compton and Osayi Endolyn; Mother Sauce: Italian American Recipes and the Story of the Women Who Created Them by Lucinda Scala Quinn; and Margarita Time: 60+ Tequila and Mezcal Cocktails, Served Up, Over and Blended by Caroline Pardilla. Thinking about the season's newly published arrivals also had us considering the larger role of cookbooks in our lives, particularly after the individual and collective losses from the Palisades and Eaton fires. '[Hearing peoples' stories] got us thinking about our emotional connection to cookbooks even at a time when just about any recipe we want can be pulled up on our phones in seconds,' Laurie Ochoa wrote on the subject. 'What makes an essential cookbook? Is it a collectible with a vintage-cool cover or beautiful photography? Is it a teaching book that led you to find your own cooking style? A book full of go-to recipes that you rely on for entertaining or everyday dinners? Maybe it's a book with a narrative — a memoir with recipes. Or a book with some other sentimental meaning.' Her words were part of the introduction to a compilation of 62 personally essential cookbooks — the ones we can't live without — named by Los Angeles chefs as well as the Food team's editors and writers. Check it out. Back to Woolever: She's appearing next weekend at the L.A. Times Festival of Books. She'll be part of a panel at noon on April 26 at the Norris Theatre with E.A. Hanks, Elizabeth Crane, Sloane Crosley and Kareem Rosser. Their topic: 'Finding the Words: Loss, Grief, and Memoir.' Here's a rundown of the festival's full schedule.
Wall Street Journal
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Care and Feeding' and ‘Cellar Rat': The Main Course Was Chaos
Twenty-five years ago, Anthony Bourdain's 'Kitchen Confidential' shined a light on the squalid side of restaurants—bullying, hard drugs, rampant sexism. In 2017, Mario Batali was brought down by the #MeToo movement amid revelations of abusive behavior. In two new memoirs, women reveal what the restaurant business was like for them. Laurie Woolever's 'Care and Feeding' is an account of a turbulent life in Manhattan's food world, where she worked as Mr. Batali's assistant at Babbo for four years and for Bourdain from 2009 until his death in 2018.
New York Times
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Bourdain and Batali's Assistant Spills Some Secrets
Laurie Woolever has played many roles in the food world. She was Mario Batali's assistant from 1999 to 2002, and Anthony Bourdain's assistant, working closely on his books and television shows, from 2009 until his death in 2018. Her new memoir, 'Care and Feeding,' which Ecco will publish on Tuesday, is a candid account of tending to high-wattage celebrities, and of working as a woman, wife and mother in a wildly male-dominated industry. It's also a reckoning with the high-risk behaviors that tied the three together. Below is a condensed and edited version of our phone interview. You grew up in upstate New York and moved to the city after college with hopes of becoming a writer. How did you end up in culinary school? I was drawn to the industry because I had this very wrong idea that it would be fun. The sort of fuzzy notion that I had of everyone hanging out in the kitchen, cooking, listening to music — that was very wrong. I'm glad that I had that, because I think if I had really understood what professional cooking was, I would have been too scared. I would have probably changed my mind about even going to cooking school. What was it like to work at Babbo, the restaurant that was the white-hot center of the culinary world? When the restaurant was brand new, everyone there knew that we were someplace special. It was getting a lot of press, everybody wanted to get in, celebrities were there every night. Mario's star was on the rise, and I think there was a real collective sense of pride, and we really cared about what we were doing. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
