“You also develop an expanded kitchen awareness. You’ll discover how to use your senses. You’ll find you no longer rely on what your watch says. You’ll hear when something is cooked. You’ll smell degrees of doneness.” Once, in the kitchen, Frankie used the same phrase, “kitchen awareness,” as though it were a thing you could take classes to learn. And I thought I might have seen evidence of it, in how people on the line were cued by a smell and turned to deal with what they were cooking, or in how they seemed to hear something in sauté pan and then flipped the food. Even so, it seemed an unlikely prospect that this was something I could master; the kitchen remained so stubbornly incomprehensible. From the start of the day to the end, the place was frenzied. In fact, without my fully realizing it, there was an education in the frenzy, because in the frenzy there was always repetition. Over and over again, I’d pick up a smell, as a task was being completed, until finally I came to identify not only what the food was but where it was in its repetition. [ ... ] One morning, Elisa went out to deal with a delivery, and I picked up a change in the way the lamb shanks smelled. They were browning in a large pan about ten feet away, and I walked over, trance-like, turned them, and resumed my task. My nose had told me that they were sufficiently browned and would be ruined in a minute. By the time Elisa returned, I’d removed the shanks and thrown in another batch. She looked at me, slightly startled. [pg 67]

The tricky part was the last stage, when you grabbed the [fish] head with a towel, slipped one of the tongs underneath the tail, and lifted it to get the final hatch marks. Three things could go wrong. If done lurchingly, the fish broke in half. If done too soon, the skin stuck to the grill. And if done too slowly, your arms went up in flames. [pg 83]

Harvey’s, White’s first restaurant, earned its first Michelin star in 1988, the year after it opened. It earned its second in 1990. Five years later, White, cooking in new premises, earned his third star. During this time, he also earned a reputation for theatre: he was so highly strung, so unpredictable, and got himself so worked up (in 1990, he was hospitalized after a hyperventilating panic attack paralyzed his left side) that people came to his restaurant in the expectation that the unexpected would happen. When he talks about this period, he sits up in his chair, his eyes bulge, he raises his voice, and he is animated and indignant all over again. Patrons (“fat ugly bastards”) who ordered meat well done were an insult to his kitchen, and on two occasions Marco ordered them to leave his restaurant before they completed his meals. (“It was ten months before I threw out my first customer,” White was quoted as saying at the time, adding, with a flair for exaggeration, that, once he’d got the taste for it, he couldn’t stop.) When someone ordered fried potatoes, he was so insulted he prepared them himself and charged five hundred dollars. “I used to go fucking mental.” He threw things; he broke things; unhappy with a cheese plate, he hurled it against a wall, where it stuck, sliding down as the evening progressed, leaving behind a Camembert smear. [pg 95]

Mario, then thirty-four, wearing clogs bought from a surgical supply company and dressed in “California jams,” was described as the antic funnyman holding the group together (he may act like a clown, one chef told the reporter, but you’d be surprised – he’s actually very smart) and his I-get-along-with-everyone attitude was illustrated by a story he told of being in San Francisco and having to charm a policeman who had wanted to arrest Batali’s drinking buddy, the fortuitously met writer Hunter S. Thompson who had pulled a gun on a cable car operator who refused to take Thompson to his front door: the evening ended with Batali’s waking up in the Fairmont Hotel (he hadn’t been a guest) wearing wet swimming trunks (the hotel doesn’t have a pool). [pg 134]

“Any cut?” I asked. “The shoulder or butt,” she said, indicating her own shoulder and butt, that cook’s thing of pointing to the cut in question as though it had been butchered from your own body. “A lean piece.” [pg 194]

Enrico begins his harvest in September, when common sense suggests that your trees should be left alone. In September, the olives are green and hard. Most people pick in late November or December. “Ten to twelve weeks later, the olives are swollen and full of juice. The more juice you get, the more oil you can bottle, the more money you can make,” Enrico said. “But for me, the olive is bloated. It is pulpy and full of water.” The fruit is like “mush,” his father’s word. “As a result, the oil is thin. You have volume, but no intensity. For me, intensity is everything. For me, less is more. My oil is very, very intense.” [ ... ] Enrico’s olive oil, I can testify, is very good, but there are a lot of good olive oils, made by other nutty earth artists with no interest in money, obsessed with smell, looking over their shoulders to make sure they’re the first on the mountain to pick their greenly pungent unripe olives, squeezing the tiniest amount of intense juice from their oldest trees. The viscous, gold-green liquid that dribbles out from their stone-like fruit is unlike any other oil I have tasted, and the makers chauvinistically boast that none of it leaves Italy. [pg 298]