BUFORD at the MONO

Lunch with the FT: Top of the food chain

By Graham Bowley


Bill Buford, editor, author and newly trained cook, sits in Casa Mono, a restaurant in downtown Manhattan, looking pleased with himself. And rightly so.
He has a new job writing on The New Yorker, the acme of serious US magazine journalism, and his just-out book, Heat, about his adventures as a trainee chef, is right now, on this sweaty summer afternoon, hovering in the top 20 of The New York Times bestseller list.
“It is pretty hard to complain,” he says, nodding, as he settles at our tiny two-person wooden table beside one of Casa Mono’s bright windows. “If you want to be a writer, to be the author of a book on the bestseller list and be working with The New Yorker, that sounds about right.”
This is as close as Buford gets to boasting. He seems an unobtrusive, dressed-down sort of man - an observer who fits in the background rather than a player like the big-name authors he has spent years editing or the ego-crazed chefs he writes about in Heat, even though as fiction editor of The New Yorker for eight years he was one of the most influential literary players on the globe. True to this relaxed ethos, today he wears frayed, well-worn jeans, brown shoes (that to my eyes look like clogs), a white-and-green-striped shirt, and grey stubble. He sets his mouth in a pursed “here I am, who’d have thought it, nothing I could do about it” sort of expression, one that he adopts a lot throughout our lunch.
Buford has chosen Casa Mono for our meal because it features in the pages of Heat. Another reason, he admits, is that his apartment is just around the corner. In his book he tells how he leaves his editing job at The New Yorker to reinvent himself as a cook, descending into the hellish kitchen at Babbo, one of New York’s best-known Italian restaurants, which is run by US celebrity chef and extrovert Mario Batali. Now that his book is finished, he is back at The New Yorker writing a monthly feature on food.
One of the conceits of Heat is that truly good cooking requires an understanding of the soulful connections between land, animals and the communities they nurture. This lore has mostly been forgotten, the connections cut, in modern mass-market America. To rediscover it, you must return to food’s ethnic roots abroad. Buford, as Batali did before him, travels to Italy to learn the secrets of the culinary trade.
Today, our cuisine is Spanish. Casa Mono, another restaurant part-owned by Batali, with just 13 tables, is run by Andy Nusser, the once much put-upon head chef Buford met at Babbo, who draws his inspiration from the street restaurants of Barcelona. Nusser is present today, a hyperactive, eager-to-please man who buzzes around us and sends over unbidden our first dish: lamb’s tongue salad with summer truffles. “Andy is 45 or 46, and he had been cooking for almost 20 years before finally he got his own place,” Buford says to me, drawing comparisons between great writers and the great chefs he has known. “I think about the similarities all the time. It takes a long time to become a writer. It involves a very, very long time in the wilderness in the business of learning your chops.”
Bill Buford loves his food. He leans over our dishes, studying, commenting, pointing, licking his fingers. He looks at home in front of a plate, almost beatific. It is intimidating to eat with such an obvious foodie. “This is the lamb’s tongue, right?” I say hopefully. “No, that’s the truffle,” says Buford, pushing away a spear of asparagus. “The lamb’s tongue I think will be underneath here. It is mounted in architectural fashion.”
When the waitress hands us the menus, Buford glances at me and orders for both of us. For him, rabbit with spring peas. For me, pumpkin and salt-cod croquetas with orange alioli. “This is going to kick ass,” he says.
Buford was born in Louisiana and grew up in California. His family owns land in Florida, he tells me, where he goes to hunt wild boar. After studying at Berkeley, he did a second degree in English at Cambridge, where he started to edit Granta. During the next decade and a half he transformed the failing university literary magazine into a national institution. The success, he says, tucking into his rabbit with gusto, was down to being in the right place at the right time.
“It captured a narrative renaissance in Britain,” he says. “At the beginning of the 80s, there was Angus Wilson and Margaret Drabble. By the end of the 80s, it was Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson. What happened in Britain in the 1980s was quite radical.” I ask him what was the high point of his time at Granta. “Publishing Rushdie,” he says.
The restaurant is beginning to fill up. Nusser has sent over two glasses of cava. As Buford explains to me what I am eating, he reaches over and scoops a large gob of my orange alioli on the end of his finger.
Whereas at Granta - at least early on - Buford had to cajole people to write for his cash-strapped magazine, he had plenty of willing contributors at the glamorous and wealthy New Yorker, where he was lured in 1995 by the then editor, Tina Brown. Yet for all the magazine’s wealth, he says, he was not always blessed with as rich a generation of talent to draw upon for his pages as he had been in Britain. “By the end of the year, if you published 50 stories and you had five great stories, you had a good year,” he says. “Sometimes we had one great story.” The first truly good piece of fiction came in his second year, he says, and was Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain. “We had to persuade her to let us publish it. She had been turned down by The New Yorker so many times she was ready for it to be rejected.”
He has sent copies of Heat, he says, to some of his old contacts. “I sent it to Don DeLillo, Annie Proulx and Stephen King. Don said his wife, Barbara, grabbed it and read it, and he was going to read it next. Annie said she loved it. Stephen King was too busy promoting himself. He sent regrets via his agent.”
Buford stopped editing after he told David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, that somebody should write a profile of Batali, whom he had met at a dinner party he threw at his home for the writer Jay McInerney. Remnick knew that Buford wanted to be writing instead of editing and said he should be the one to do it. Buford agreed on the condition that he could actually work in Batali’s kitchen for research. “I did not want to write a profile about some fat chef guy if I could not also in some way make it about myself,” says Buford.
He wrote the profile and then left the magazine as the article grew into a book and he realised he wanted to learn much more about the art of the food. It became a personal journey, funded by the book advance and the sale of his house in Cambridge, and involved a stint making pasta near Bologna and an apprenticeship to a Dante-spouting butcher in Chianti. His wife, Jessica, quit her magazine editing job and trailed after him around Europe. She gave birth to twins, Frederick and George, just as he was finishing Heat.
Our next serving arrives: guinea hen with plum mustard for Buford; pork loin with bitter Seville oranges for me. As we both tuck in, I ask him if he can explain the current fascination with food. It is a question that nagged me while I was reading Heat. It seemed absurd that anyone could be obsessed with such questions as finding the perfect polenta or discovering the historical moment when egg was first used in pasta.
Buford acknowledges the wobbly carapace of deeper meaning that is sometimes constructed around cooking. “Food does have a kind of charisma,” he says. “It is seen as an expression of national culture. It is a way of talking to the dead. It is an expression of family and family inheritance. In Italy they are obsessed with how food is an expression of exactly where you are. It is so many different things at once and at the same time it is none of these things. It is finally also just dinner. You eat it, and it is gone. It is not art, and it is not culture, and it is not identity, and it is not your mother.”
But he also gives good reasons for the rising interest in cooking in the US, where, he says, people are “unbelievably ignorant” about what they eat - it is a sort of catch-up with the rest of the world - and why there should be more interest. “There is almost just an ethical responsibility to know your food,” he says. “I am glad that I know what good meat is and what bad meat is and know that it was raised well.”
Another important reason for taking food seriously, he says, is what we are doing right now - interacting socially over a good meal, coming together as friends. Me, friends with Bill Buford?
Buford declines dessert, but orders a watermelon sorbet for me. Nusser, waving from the counter, also dispatches a chocolate tart.
I ask Buford what he is going to do next. Surely follow the success of Heat with a novel of his own. But he insists that he won’t, not yet. “My wife thinks I will end up writing fiction,” he says.
He considered setting up a restaurant with Batali, or even starting a Manhattan outpost of the Chianti butchery. But he decided he was a writer, not a cook, and, for the time being, a writer of fact. His next book on food will stay with the international angle. It will be about French cuisine. He also plans a memoir about his father, who was a physicist, and the California aerospace industry
I pay the bill - $96. “They are being generous,” says Buford, peering over at it. I have enjoyed our lunch and want it to continue, but he has to leave. The spell of conviviality created by our shared meal lasts for a few steps then, out in the sunshine, fades. As we shake hands, Buford once again gives me that “nothing I could do about it” smile, and I watch him walk away up Park Avenue. It was, I realise, just lunch after all.
Casa Mono, New York
1 x pumpkin and salt-cod croquetas
1 x rabbit with spring peas
1 x pork loin with Seville oranges
1 x guinea hen with plum mustard
1 x watermelon sorbet
1 x chocolate torta
2 x glass of Cava
2 x glass of rose
1 x bottle of mineral water
2 x double espresso
Total: $96.45
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006