After he was hired as the chef of Babbo Ristorante e Enoteca, which will return next month under new ownership after a three-month renovation, Mark Ladner began diving into the past.
He studied the history of the restaurant that preceded Babbo at 110 Waverly Place, the Coach House, founded in 1949 by a classic Greenwich Village character from Corfu. He pored over vintage menus from Parioli Romanissimo, for a while in the 1970s the most exclusive, expensive and acclaimed Italian restaurant in New York.
All this time hunched over in the archives may seem a little unnecessary, given that Babbo has some history of its own.
“The elephant in the room is the thing with Mario,” Mr. Ladner said in an interview. “I’m trying to find ways not to talk about it, but the more I’m asked about it, the harder it is. So I started to look further back.”
The thing with Mario. Right. You can’t tell Babbo’s story without talking about Mario Batali. You can’t tell Mr. Ladner’s story, either.
Before multiple accusations of sexual assault were made public in 2017, Mr. Batali was an owner of more than 40 restaurants, but none was as closely identified with him as Babbo. It was his headquarters and his mission statement. It was the place where you were most likely to see him at a table bantering with Robin Williams or Bill Clinton or the guys from Metallica.
And, of the dozens of chefs Mr. Batali employed, perhaps none collaborated with him as variously and successfully as Mr. Ladner. He started in Babbo’s cramped and infernally swampy pasta station, rose to sous-chef there, then was dispatched to convert more people to the Batali way of eating as the founding chef of Lupa and Del Posto.
Mr. Batali’s influence is so deeply rooted that neither Mr. Ladner nor Babbo, which is now controlled by the restaurateur Stephen Starr, will ever be truly Batali-free.
And that won’t be the goal when the doors open again to reveal freshly polished mahogany floors and a thoroughly reconsidered menu. As he tries to make the restaurant his own, drawing on everything he’s learned in nearly four decades in professional kitchens, Mr. Ladner, 55, is aiming for something that may be even harder: a Babbo that taps into the best parts of Mr. Batali’s spirit while keeping the worst parts far, far away.
“There is a lot to celebrate,” Mr. Ladner said. “Mario was a really positive influence on me.” Since his downfall, views of Mr. Batali have tended to be black and white. Mr. Ladner, who worked for him for 19 years, argued for a more nuanced view: “It’s not fair to consider him just a bad guy.”
Lessons in Italian
Mr. Ladner had already worked under some leading chefs of the era — Todd English, Scott Bryan, Jean-Georges Vongerichten — when he sat in the back garden of Mr. Batali’s first restaurant, Po, in 1998, to talk about working in a new place Mr. Batali was planning with Joe Bastianich later that year. When the interview ended, Mr. Batali walked him to the nearest Barnes & Noble and bought him three Italian cookbooks. The job at Babbo was his.
In a television writers’ room, they would call the contrast between the young cook and his mentor too on the nose. Mr. Ladner was tall, lanky, soft-spoken, an introvert who shied from the spotlight. Mr. Batali was none of those things. But they were both voraciously curious students who understood that reading could make them better cooks as they rewired Italian regional cuisine for jangly, jumpy, easily jaded New York palates.
The meetings Mr. Batali led before each night’s service at Babbo resembled a graduate seminar in Italian food and culture. “If you had a thirst for learning, it was slammed at you,” Mr. Ladner said.
Mr. Ladner was put in charge of the calf’s brain ravioli, the envelopes of lamb sausage so slim you could slip them under a locked door, and the rest of the pastas. The pressure and pace were intense, not least because Babbo offered a pasta tasting menu, a novelty many customers found hard to pass up. In the midst of typical kitchen chaos as well as the specific electrical voltage Mr. Batali generated, Mr. Ladner was seen as one of the adults in the room.
“He was somebody everyone respected for his skills, technique and knowledge,” said the writer Laurie Woolever, who worked as Mr. Batali’s assistant, with Babbo as her office. “He had this kind of gravitas.”
Babbo opened in 1998. By the following year, Mr. Ladner was so trusted that Mr. Batali put him in charge of his third restaurant, a Roman osteria called Lupa, and gave him a long leash.
“That menu was Mark’s menu,” said the chef Mario Carbone, who was fresh out of culinary school when he followed Mr. Ladner from Babbo to Lupa. “He knew how he wanted to express that Roman thing.”
Lupa was not the first place in the city to serve cacio e pepe or carciofi alla giudia, but it was Mr. Ladner who wrote those dishes into the book of New York standards, where they remain today. As Mr. Carbone once pointed out, if you have been to a restaurant where they spread rosy coins of housemade charcuterie on a cutting board, you are living in the world that Mr. Ladner and Lupa made.
“Lupa was just brilliant, brilliant, brilliant for its noisy Romanesque simplicity,” said the writer Bill Buford, who became a steady Friday night customer. At Mr. Ladner’s next project, Del Posto, “Mark was a kid in a candy store,” he said. “A completely nuts, luxury candy store.”
A Career Pinnacle
Del Posto, which opened in 2005, is where Mr. Ladner ushered Italian cooking to unscaled peaks of luxury and creativity while fostering the impression that in the recesses of the kitchen every pot was being stirred by an Italian grandmother who was highly fastidious, deeply intelligent and secretly insane.
Dinner might start with a teacup of chicken consommé that took three days and 90 laying hens to make. The 100-layer lasagna was the result an even more painstaking process at any given point in which the whole edifice might fall apart.
In the vast steel kitchen, legions of cooks attempted to give edible form to Mr. Ladner’s latest brainstorms.
“It was less a think tank and more Mark’s vision,” Mr. Carbone said. “We were there to do everything we could to help him get that out. He had so much to say back then. So much to say.”
Much of it was delivered in pithy, poetic catchphrases that Del Posto veterans quote to this day. “It has to suffer,” he said of soffritto, and anything else that cooked for a long time. “Texturally rewarding” was very high praise. Pastry dough should be “barely able to contain its own fragile insides.”
The world may have seen Del Posto as a Batali-Bastianich restaurant, but for the cooks the goal was to please one person, Mr. Ladner.
“If he really liked something, he would yell and scream and clap his hands,” said Brooks Headley, for several years the restaurant’s pastry chef and now the owner of Superiority Burger. “If he didn’t like it, he would taste it and walk away.”
Crash Landing
After securing Del Posto a four-star review in The New York Times in 2010, Mr. Ladner fell into a funk that lasted years, drinking heavily and suffering from what he now recognizes as “a long-term, self-imposed bout of inferiority-related stress.” Eventually, he gave up alcohol. (He now drinks “intermittently.”)
Early in 2017, several months before the first accusations about Mr. Batali were published, Mr. Ladner left the company to open Pasta Flyer, an ambitious, low-priced fast-food start-up. The pasta was terrific, and truly fast, and might have been manna for airport travelers rushing to make a flight. In Greenwich Village, though, where a good marinara is never far away, Pasta Flyer seemed beside the point. It sputtered, coughed and broke down after a year.
“Pasta Flyer took a lot out of me when it didn’t work,” Mr. Ladner said. “It bummed me out.”
By that time, Mr. Batali was in disgrace. He would eventually settle lawsuits filed by two women who accused him of groping them in a bar and restaurant in Boston. Together with Mr. Bastianich and their company, he also paid $600,000 to at least 20 women and men who were sexually harassed while working at Babbo, Lupa and Del Posto, according to an investigation by the New York State attorney general.
The investigation found that female employees were “forcibly groped, touched, hugged and/or kissed by male colleagues” and subjected to sexualized remarks including comments about “getting on her knees.” The attorney general also described “a gender-based discriminatory work environment in which chefs and managers favored male employees and made misogynistic comments.”
For part of the period covered by the investigation, Mr. Ladner was the executive chef at Del Posto. He is not named in the court document that summarizes the findings.
“No one ever made a complaint to me when I was in those kitchens, but I was horrified to learn of many people’s experiences,” Mr. Ladner wrote in an email to The Times. “When it comes to my relationship with Mario, he was always generous with his wisdom as a culinary mentor. The kitchen that I run is a place of creativity and respect.”
Pasta Flyer was followed by a time in the wilderness, a pandemic and a deeper wilderness. Mr. Ladner worked as a hired gun for “a lot of clubstaurants,” as he put it, ginning up menu ideas, teaching them to the full-time cooks and moving on. In his mid-50s, he seemed to have reached a stage in his career when he might drift indefinitely from one consulting gig to another.
Then, about a year ago, he swung into Mr. Starr’s orbit, consulting on an upcoming Starr restaurant in Philadelphia called Borromini. (It opened this week.) Mr. Starr had been talking for some time to Mr. Bastianich about buying a majority stake in both Babbo and Lupa.
As Mr. Ladner worked to breathe life into Borromini’s menu, the idea of overhauling Babbo with him began to strike Mr. Starr as not just sensible but irresistible. One of the country’s most celebrated Italian cooks would be returning to the kitchen where his career first took off more than a quarter-century ago.
“I thought, what a great story,” Mr. Starr said.
Mr. Ladner liked the opportunity but not the name. “I didn’t initially think it was a great idea,” he said. “I thought it was damaged.”
Not Mr. Starr. The restaurant was Babbo, and Babbo it would stay.
“Whoever was involved with Babbo years ago, it’s done,” Mr. Starr said. “This is a new chapter in that building’s life.”
Taking Center Stage
Writing that chapter will mostly fall to Mr. Ladner. The tasting panels Mr. Starr normally marshals before an opening are being held to a minimum.
“We did a tasting earlier and I got through the whole thing without a rejection,” Mr. Ladner said. “But it’s intended to be my perspective. It’s not intended to be for everyman.”
His girlfriend, Tizzy Beck, who once had her own restaurant in Milan, will be the restaurant’s maître d’hôtel. Asked to characterize their relationship, he called Ms. Beck “my one and only, in and out of Babbo. Now and forever.” The two of them have gone on a shopping spree across Italy, filling the kitchen with copper molds for panna cotta and Murano glass candy dishes for crudo.
The menu will be strongest on antipasti and primi, including a minestrone that will be nurtured along on the stove for weeks and the latest iteration of the 100-layer lasagna, this time finished in a pan with a cheese crust like Detroit pizza. The nose-to-tail glee of Mr. Batali’s reign, the calves’ brains and lambs’ heads and pig parts, will be downplayed substantially, with large main courses almost “an amenity,” Mr. Ladner said.
“The food here, I think, is going to be a little more of a Del Posto Light than a Babbo influence.”
What Mr. Ladner hopes will be carried over from Babbo is the importance of what he calls “the life of the table,” which he says is one of the greatest lessons he took from Mr. Batali.
“I’d be in the kitchen worrying about some insignificant detail and he’d be the one reminding me that it really was about joy, humanity, friendship, nourishment, family, travel and all the sweet parts of life. He was so adamant about the joyous celebration at the table, which is so European.”
Working from a staging table in the middle of the dining room, wearing chef’s whites and a tall hat, will be Mr. Ladner himself. All night, he will present tureens of minestrone, tease zabaglione into a lather and act as master of ceremonies. He says that at his age, he needs a job that keeps him off the line.
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Pete Wells was the restaurant critic for The Times from 2012 until 2024. He was previously the editor of the Food section.
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