If You Could Learn How To Make

There's A Battle Between What The Cook Thinks Is High Art And What The Customer Just Wants To Eat.

When We Opened Babbo, We Were An Indie Band. Now We're Kinda Apple. We Have 19 Restaurants And 2,800 Employees, We Are No Longer Perceived As The Indie Band Although We Think Of Ourselves As The Indie Band, And We Operate Our Restaurants As Individual Indie Bands.

When You Taste Things In The Right Order, Sometimes They Taste So Much Different Than If You Taste Them Out Of Order. Not That There's A Right Order, Like By Rule, But Just Like In A Thoughtful Way That Makes Sense.

The Pendulum Of Cookery Techniques Became More Significant Than The Actual Experience. And When That Happens, The Customer's Satisfaction Becomes Secondary To The Chef's Satisfaction. And In That Case, You Have An Upside-down Equation. Because The Customer Is The Basis Of Our Restaurant, First Of All, And If The Chef Becomes The Most Important Person At The Table - Even More So Than The Guests - Then Suddenly You're Left With Something That Doesn't Really Work.

Even Though You'll See Gnocchi Or Linguine Everywhere In Some Of The Regions Of Italy, Each Of Those Chefs Has Their Own Expression Of That Which Expresses More About The Place They Were Exactly Born Than It Does About Trying To Be A Part Of The Greater Mass. And That's The Italian Culture.