Batali's Officially a Goner

No, I haven’t. And to be honest, considering that I don’t visit LA or NYC very often at all, it’s easy enough to stay away from. And it’s certainly an industry with a history of this kind of shit.

Yeah, that’s a well-considered reason to boycott Nancy Silverton’s restaurants.

No idea what that means.

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From The Hill: "Batali is also selling his shares of luxury Italian supermarket chain Eataly.

“Eataly is in the process of acquiring Mr. Batali’s minority interest in Eataly USA,” spokesman Chris Giglio told the Times."

It’s interesting how none of this stuff was secret until society suddenly decided to listen to the victims.
I just finished reading “Heat,” Bill Buford’s memoir about working in the Babbo kitchen and the book is full of Mario sexually harassing women. It’s all kind of dismissed as playful or inconvenient but the book glosses over it pretty quickly.
Just like Jimmy Saville, this wasn’t hidden among people in the know. It’s just that no one cared.

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I was thinking about “Heat” - and also wishing I still had copies of Ruhlman’s “Making of a Chef,” “Soul of a Chef,” and “Reach of a Chef,” as I wonder if the stories are there, too, but I didn’t pick up on them at the time.

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Yes, I’ve been thinking about that myself. Sometimes it doesn’t occur to us to be angry about something…until it does.

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#MeToo

I remember outrageous sexist remarks that clearly constituted a hostile work environment, but no intimation that Batali was actually assaulting anyone.

The kitchen exaggerated people—in that small hot box of a work space. It was as if, pressed together, you were outside the normal social order. People behaved differently. More sexist, cruder, harder, sometimes verging on violence. I found that I liked it: I think most people in the kitchen did—it had a blunt, unapologetic reality.

On the other hand, given the prodigious drinking Buford described, the NY Times article wasn’t that surprising.

I never heard the Batali stories and allegations until he was outed last year.

Neither did I, but I’m not in the industry or know anyone who would travel in those circles.
It seems like among that crowd it was an open secret (or maybe not even a secret) just like with Jimmy Savile

Yep, that’s why I wonder how Joe Bastianich manages to escape all this. I guess because he’s a Bastianich and they run the show, so to speak. :slight_smile:

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Nobody accused Bastianich of anything. He said the first he heard the accusations against Batali was in the December 2017 Eater article.

Around 2005 Bastianich started exercising, changed his diet, and lost 50 pounds, so he hadn’t been partying much with Batali for a long time.

You don’t think Bastianich knew at all? Tom Collichio had an inkling (per his Twitter responses saying he wasn’t surprised) and he didn’t run in the same circle as Batali.
I think it was super convenient for Joe not to know anything considering how close they were as business partners and friends.

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I’m skeptical that they were all that close after Bastianich changed his lifestyle and Batali became more of a full-time celebrity.

This is all presuming Batali wasn’t a predator until after 2007/2008…I think Batali was likely a predator most of his career.

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Partially true, but an oversimplification. You should dig a little deeper into what the Bastianich’s have been accused of themselves… presently and previously. It’s not pretty.

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I’ve found nothing sexual.

Okay, I won’t burst your bubble. Carry on…

Hey, you’re the one who’s usually misinformed or confused.

If there were anything of substance it would be easy to find on Google and it would come up in every news story about the allegations against Batali.