Lidia Bastianich Opens Her Home to Celebrate 25 Years on Public Television: ‘I Never Felt Pressure to Conform’

The Italian chef and author of 'Lidia’s From Our Family Table to Yours' tells PEOPLE about her rich family history, her work and even her thoughts on dating

For Lidia Bastianich, taking care of people is second nature.

While on set of her PEOPLE photo shoot (on newsstands Friday), a sanitation truck passes by the chef’s sprawling home in Queens, and the driver honks the horn to say hello. “They’re nice to me because I feed them,” says Bastianich, 76, who makes to-go packages for the workers to eat on their break.

Bastianich has been demonstrating her hospitality on her public television shows over the last 25 years. Her house, which she has owned since 1983, overlooks Little Neck Bay and is a Mediterranean oasis a mere 20 miles from Manhattan. Boasting a vegetable garden, a rotisserie and a commercial oven that she lovingly calls “my Ferrari,” it has been the setting for the photo shoots for all 14 of her cookbooks as well as her TV shows, including Lidia’s Kitchen, now in its 11th season.

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“My two kids [MasterChef ’s Joe Bastianich and Tanya Bastianich Manuali, her co-writer on her new book Lidia’s From Our Family Table to Yours] were always around when we filmed, and I wanted to share my family with America. The bond was built in this house, and now people feel like they’re part of the family,” says Bastianich.

Her mother, Erminia Motika, who died in 2021 at age 100, was even referred to by fans as Grandma. “Now that my mother passed, my daughter says, ‘Mom, the house is big. Are you going to sell it?’ ” says Bastianich. “Sell it? No! This is our history.”

Bastianich’s own history is remarkable. She landed in Astoria at age 12 after her family fled their native Istria, an Italian peninsula, when Communist Yugoslavia occupied it during World War II. “My father was a mechanic,” she says. “He was deemed a capitalist and put in prison.”

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During the war she and her brother went to stay at her grandmother’s house in a small town outside Pula. “There, my appreciation for food really happened because Grandma produced all the food for the family,” she says. “Under communism, food was scarce.”

Bastianich, her mother and her brother eventually fled to Trieste, Italy, where her father met them after escaping the border. She found out that she wouldn’t be going back to see her grandmother—“a traumatic moment for me because I didn’t say goodbye,” she says. The family found themselves in a refugee camp—a former concentration camp—for two years. “It was eerie, it was dark. I remember being frightened,” says Bastianich.

In 1958 they moved to the United States through Catholic Relief Services, which sponsored them. It was here that she began to cook. “My passion stemmed from having left Grandma,” she says. “I started cooking the things, the aromas that I remembered—and that food would bring her to me. Cooking is all about finding my comfort place, bringing it to my family, bringing it to America.”

She picked up some new skills along the way. One of her first jobs was at Walken’s Bake Shop in Astoria, owned by actor Christopher Walken’s family.

“I ended up always in the back with the bakers learning,” she says. “And I’m still friends with Christopher.”

Bastianich opened her first big restaurant, the now-closed Felidia, with her then husband, Felice, in 1981. It’s there that she was discovered by Julia Child, who liked her risotto and persuaded her to come on her show.

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“She came to this house. I taught her how to make risotto, and we remained friends,” says Bastianich. “Her producer said, ‘Lidia, you’re pretty good. How about a show of your own?’ And Julia encouraged me.”

Along with her son and daughter, she still runs restaurants: Becco in New York and Lidia’s Kansas City. “After COVID-19 we decided I’m going to pull back, and the kids will lead,” she says. “But I told them, in the Italian fashion, if you ever fight because of the money, I’m going to come from my grave and get you. The most important thing to us is that family remains family.”

"I feel like a conduit of the Italian culinary culture"

Lidia Bastianich

Bastianich’s celebrated career has included cooking for countless stars and two popes. But her favorite taste testers are her five grandchildren. Her granddaughter Julia Manuali, a junior at Georgetown University, recently had Lidia teach a cooking class for her friends. “They were all vegetarian!” says Bastianich. “Being a grandma is the best.”

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The grandkids keep her up-to-date on trends, but the truth is, “I never felt pressure to conform,” she says. “I am who I am. I always had a good sense of what I would feel comfortable with.”

Her signature pixie cut and colorful button-downs mean that she gets recognized in the grocery store “all the time,” she says. If she catches a fan staring, “I open up because they’re afraid. I say, ‘Are you wondering?’ ” And more often than not, she’ll pass on her cooking knowledge.

Still, she insists, “I’m pretty normal. I’m a good chess player. I love playing bocce.”

If there’s one activity that’s off the table for Bastianich, it’s dating. She admits to having “some relationships” after Felice, from whom she divorced from in 1998, died in 2010, but her priorities are elsewhere now.

“It’s nice to have a companion, but I don’t need a man for stability,” she says. “I have plenty of friends, and I’m okay with that. I don’t want to throw my family off-balance.”

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