Sitting at Italy’s dinner table
Photo credit: Elizabeth Kahane
“We remember how we feel. You may not remember a dish, you may not remember the ingredients, you may not remember the wine or the name of the waiter, but when someone makes us feel good, we remember that. So when a guest is in my restaurant, I’m interested in how they feel in my restaurant. And that’s an emotional thing.”
A Sicilian by blood, considered one of the great Italian chefs, Paul Bartolotta has an extensive history of culinary experience and success. In his current tenure at the famous Wynn Hotel, Las Vegas, at his restaurant Bartolotta, Ristorante di Mare, he has been named Best Chef, South West by the James Beard Foundation, adding to his previous Best Chef, Midwest Award in 1994. His restaurant itself was awarded as being among the ‘Best Restaurants in America’ by Esquire Magazine, and has been decorated with the AAA Four-Diamond award for four consecutive years. His last restaurant, Spiaggia in Chicago, won every major national and local culinary award. And in 1997, he also became one of the few chefs outside Italy to be awarded the Insegna del Ristorante Italiano del Mondo, by the Italian President, for his outstanding contribution to Italian cuisine in the world.
But why Bartolotta induces such renown is beyond his plethora of prizes. His food is celebrated for its simplicity, its consistency and its outstanding ability to provide authenticity to the discerning diner. Sourcing his ingredients directly from the Mediterranean, Bartolotta’s food is known to cast its charm from its unerring freshness and faithfulness to Italian cuisine. Indeed, Bartolotta is known to import one and a half tonnes of seafood a week, monitored on its airborne journey by microchips to keep temperature consistent. Bartolotta takes pride in his food.
The man himself is by no means simply the corporate body that we see barking from out of our television screens, bursting out of cookery books adorning the shelves of W.H.Smiths. Speaking to him, or rather being spoken to, as I did this Christmas, I became aware that he is so much more than that. His food is Italian, in the true sense of the word. It is not pasta, garlic and tomato, it is not 2am takeaway pizza; it is real, organic, classic flavour. It is food that makes you want to lick your fingers.
Bartolotta’s food is more than business to him; it is his life. His wild tangents in conversation, addressing his philosophies towards passion and love, demonstrated this. I became aware that it all came back to his food, his passion and his unquenchable desire to present something unforgettable, as much for himself as for his customer.
He is not a risk taker when it comes to food. His quest for taste means that he does not experiment. “I am one of those people that does not view myself as an artist as much as I view myself as an artisan,” he says earnestly, sipping a cup of coffee as he does. “I don’t have any dishes that just don’t work.
“We all have in our mind a memory, a taste memory. So if I asked you right now, coca cola. You know how that tastes right?” he poses, quite rightly. “That’s what I’m trying to do.
“I think that there are chefs that are really prolific and that are alchemists; they go in every day and they grab like ten different ingredients and they make something,” Bartolotta tells me. “And there are some that can do that consistently well and have amazing food and there are some that do it because that’s their personality, and 50% of them are hits and 50% of them are misses. And I am the opposite, I am a person who really stays with things until I get to the point where I really have something that I love.”
This is a theme that has rung true for the Wisconsin-born Bartolotta his whole life. His transition into the world of cooking shows us this.
“When I was young, I needed money to take girls out on dates,” he says, matter of factly. “I had no money. So when you’re young in Milwaukee, you shovelled snow, you delivered newspapers, you did things to make a little bit of money to be able to have some pocket money. And then there was an opportunity to be a dishwasher in a restaurant, so I started to be a dishwasher with a work permit for a minor. And I loved it, and I soon became a pizza cook, and I loved the restaurant. I loved the people, I loved the energy, I loved the dynamic. I loved the collaboration, and I loved food, I loved to eat, I loved taste.”
You need to understand the food, you need to understand the ingredient, and you need to understand the history of Italian food through the ingredient
It was from here that Bartolotta started as an apprentice, working for free, for a chef called Maringeli, who would go on to shape his entire outlook towards the culinary world. He talks with great animation about his experience and his first foray into cooking.
“I started working there and I walked into the kitchen and I knew this was going to be awesome. I was so excited to be able to work for free! And then about four months into it I came to my Dad and said “Dad, he hasn’t let me cook a thing. I wanted to cook, I wanted to cook some food.” He said, “Why don’t you ask him. Tell him you want to cook.” So I asked him and he goes “you’ll cook when I tell you you’re ready. You are not ready’,” Bartolotta says with a clearly discernable impression of an Italian accent.
“One night, it wasn’t too busy, probably about a 20 or 30 reservation, and an order comes into the kitchen. My job at the time was to prepare all the ingredients on the plate, and then he would take them and cook them, and then I would plate the finished dish. Maringelli walked out of the kitchen, lit himself a cigarette, grabbed a cup of coffee and a chunk of chocolate and he said ‘Ok, you’re cooking tonight.’ I never cooked any of this stuff! ‘People are hungry,’ he said, ‘you better start cooking.’ And I look at him, and I’m like what?
“So he said to put salt and pepper on. So I did. He said to put some wine in the pan, so I did. Put the meat in, I put the meat in. And all of a sudden I started cooking. And what I realised is I had watched him make these dishes so many times standing right next to him that I realised that the whole process was re-enacting itself in my mind. I’d memorised everything that was going on and because I’d prepared the ingredients, and I’d watched the technique, and I had tasted and plated the final dish, that through each one of these phases, by the time I actually got a chance to sit down and finish the dish I realised that the food was talking to me.”
It was under Chef Maringelli that Bartolotta came up with his over-riding theme in his cooking. Simplicity and authenticity. He speaks of his formula that has taken him to where he is today.
“What he taught me is how to construct taste,” notes Bartolotta. “And through this process, he made me realise that you are not assembling ingredients, you are constructing a taste, you are constructing a flavour. Balance of ingredients, time and temperature equals taste.”
“We are in the manufacturing business, the only difference is that what we manufacture is constantly a variable. So when I talk about being an artisan rather than an artist – I am taking a chicken breast that is different than yesterday’s, mushrooms that are different than yesterdays, rosemary that is slightly different than yesterday’s.”
The man is not apologetic about his refined cooking. He knows he is not the most creative chef in the U.S.
“I’m a little bit of a perfectionist and as I look back on my life, I wish I would have tried less to make everything perfect and more to experiment,” he admits.
But he is proud of what he does. “I always think that if someone was to ask me, and I’ve never really made this comment to any body before you, what it is that I do better than other people. My food tastes better.
“I make it so people can come every day and have the same taste. It’s a process. So I fell in love with that environment, and I fell in love with cooking there working for Maringelli. I realised that I was curious. He developed a curiosity, we would sit around late at night and he would tell me stories of when he was a young man in Italy. And he would be searching for certain things, hunting and fishing for certain things.”
It was after working for Maringelli for an extended period of time that Bartolotta then travelled to Italy, learning his trade, his ingredients, in depth.
“Someone once asked me, ‘What do you know about beans.’ I said that I didn’t know. He told me that was the point. You need to understand the food, you need to understand the ingredient, and you need to understand the history of Italian food through the ingredient.
“I was supposed to be in Italy for six months. Like six years later I was still in Italy, still working for free, learning my craft. I didn’t think I’d ever come back. They were certainly some of the happiest years of my life because at that moment I wasn’t thinking about my career, I wasn’t thinking about my future and I wasn’t thinking about economics. I was enjoying it. That’s why I got into this business in the first place.”
The more I talked to Bartolotta, the more it became evident that his success is not built around a drive for financial security. It is his love for cooking and the experiences that ensued that made him into the thoughtful, successful and deeply motivated craftsman that he is seen as today.
Bartolotta serves up his lobster bisque to family and friends on holiday in Martha's Vineyard. Photo credit: Elizabeth Kahane
Bartolotta speaks extraordinarily appreciatively of his father and his influence on his own life.
“There was always a little bit of wisdom in everything that he did and said, much of which I carry with me today. And one of his wisdoms was, ‘you know, when you look at a painting, and you paint it, and the world hates it and you love it, what does it do to you?’ He would give me things like ‘true artistic freedom is born out of economic freedom.’ If you want to be able to practice your craft, you need to know how to make things run. But it shouldn’t be your goal; it should be the means to the craft.”
His time in Italy, and his outlook, certainly show this. Bartolotta was never afraid to just do.
“Another of my father’s many pieces of wisdom was: “Son, imagine you’re an artist and you make a painting, and you don’t like it, and you put a lot into and it just didn’t come out. Then the whole world looks at it and says ‘Oh my God, you’re amazing’, and you make all this money and become famous. Then a week later, you make another painting, you finish your last brush stroke and you say ‘Fuck, this is what I was trying to do!’ But the whole world hates it, and you can’t sell it. The question I ask, is what is important to you.”
Bartolotta is currently in the process of writing a book. But he is not writing it to be successful, he is writing it because he just wants to.
“I gave my book to my agent this week, and I told him very clearly that I’m only writing this book for my wife and daughter. Now if you think you can make it successful the way I’m going to write it, great. If you don’t, I’ll send it to Mac Books, I’ll make one copy of it, or two, and I’ll give it to my wife and daughter for Christmas next year, and that’s the end of it.
“I think if you begin every project that way, you won’t be customising it for what the market wants, you’ll be doing something spontaneous and organic. And if you ever look at some of the really great success stories, if you were to ask Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg, or Steven Spielberg, how did you know you were going to make Microsoft or whatever, he’ll look at you and say, well I didn’t, I was in my garage fucking around with a computer, trying to build this PC.”
Bartolotta is a family man. He is passionate about his cooking in the same way he is passionate about his life.
“You talk about passion, we all have passion for something,” he says, sipping his coffee again. “I think some of us are lucky enough to have it slap us in the face hard enough that we actually pay attention.
“I hope to be remembered for who I am as a person, not what I have done as a chef. It’s more important to me to be remembered by my wife and my daughter and my friends and my family and the people who know me, than it is to be remembered for anything else.
“Passion is being able to live you’re life authentically, that’s the hardest thing in our lives, to know who we are,” he says. At this point he really seems to be talking about his life and his cooking in tandem. The simplicity and authenticity of his food seems to reflect his philosophy towards passion and the living of life.
“I think that passion is being free to do what you want to do, and not being, you know, what’s the famous quote of Mark Twain, ‘Work like you don’t need the money.’ Whats the next one, ‘love like you’ve never been hurt, dance like no one is watching and live every day like heaven on earth.”
This seems to sum him up: never afraid to just do, regardless of the consequences, just following his passion and ending up successful. I think somehow he’d be just as happy if he wasn’t as successful.
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