Wow, talk about your matches made in culinary heaven. Cucina paradiso is coming to Los Angeles.
Nancy Silverton -- pastry chef extraordinaire, founder of La Brea Bakery, the woman who single-handedly brought great bread to Los Angeles and, until this month, was co-owner of Campanile restaurant -- is joining forces with Mario Batali -- pony-tailed Molto Mario of New York's Babbo, Esca, Lupa and Otto's (among others) -- to create a new Italian restaurant in Los Angeles.
Silverton is scouting locations, and Batali says he hopes the restaurant will be open "by the end of the summer" -- which may prove ridiculously optimistic.
Batali's father owns a salumeria in Seattle, and the salumi he provides for his son's restaurants will be featured prominently at the Silverton/Batali restaurant -- now tentatively named Mozza Bar, Batali told me (although that name came as a surprise to Silverton when I mentioned it to her).
Silverton says Batali is one of several out-of-town restaurateurs who have approached her about a joint venture in the past year. She chose him because she likes his casual approach to Italian food and his emphasis on first-rate, natural ingredients.
"He's the perfect partner," she says. "I have a lot to learn from him."
Batali is equally complimentary toward her. "I would only come to L.A. if Nancy were involved," he told me last week. "She's the Zen mistress of all that is great and delicious about Italian food. She appreciates it with the same passion I do. We like the same things -- real, delicious food served in holes in the wall and barely comfortable joints."
Silverton says their restaurant will be "a small, casual place -- 60 seats, maybe 80 -- rustic, nothing fancy and we'll have a mozzarella bar and we'll serve sandwiches and Mario's dad's cold cuts and" -- she pauses and swipes absentmindedly at the reddish-brown ringlets piled atop her head, spilling into her sunglass-shaded eyes. Silverton's hazel eyes are extremely light-sensitive, so she almost always wears prescription sunglasses during the day, even indoors, where we are now, having lunch at Angelini Osteria.
This small, casual Beverly Boulevard spot is her "current favorite restaurant in Los Angeles," she says, and it's also, in some ways, a model for what she and Batali want to do, probably somewhere in the same general area.
At 50, having sold La Brea Bakery to an Irish conglomerate in 2001 for $56 million, Silverton probably doesn't have to work another day the rest of her life.
"We had a lot of partners, though, so I only got a small percentage of that money," she says before acknowledging, with a quick, self-conscious laugh that, yes, she's a millionaire -- a multimillionaire -- "but not a multi-multimillionaire."
"I'm certainly not living from paycheck to paycheck, but I had two uncles who lived into their 90s, and if I live that long, the way I'm living now" -- she has a house in Italy and drives a Porsche and a BMW SUV -- "I'd have to be very careful and watch what I spend if I didn't work again."
But Silverton doesn't work just for the money.
"I love food," she says. "I love eating and cooking and thinking about food and talking about food and writing about food and doing things with food that other people aren't doing, especially doing things with good ingredients that I personally like to eat."
In addition to planning her joint venture with Batali and working on a new cookbook (her sixth), she's helping to create a kitchen garden project at the 24th Street Elementary School in the West Adams district, where she hopes to "cook and run the classroom," teaching inner-city children about nutrition, produce and the relationship between what we eat and how it's grown and cared for.
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Schoolyard project
The project is patterned after the Edible Schoolyard that Alice Waters created in Berkeley, and Silverton is approaching it with the same determination and dedication she brings to developing a new recipe and starting a new business. At her urging, La Brea Bakery now has a booth at the Santa Monica Farmers Market, and 90% of the proceeds from the booth's weekly sales will go to the kitchen garden project.
As if that weren't enough, on Feb. 15 she'll start working one night a week at La Terza on West 3rd Street.
The kitchen at La Terza, like the kitchen at Angelini, is run by Gino Angelini, and after Silverton helped develop La Terza's dessert menu, he urged her to do something there on a regular basis.
"We decided on a Tuesday night tavolo fredo, a 'cold table,' " Silverton says. "We'll have salumi and seafood and salads -- the ultimate antipasto. We'll use only the best artisanal products. People will come and take what they want, and I'll be there to talk to them and help out. There's nothing like it in Los Angeles now."
Silverton says Batali has tried to discourage her from doing the tavolo fredo -- it will officially be called tavola Italiana (Italian table) -- at La Terza because he'd like to incorporate a similar concept in their restaurant.
