What It Was Really Like to Work Inside the Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich Restaurant Empire
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Kim Reed was helping homebound elderly patients as a social worker in the early 2000s when she picked up a part-time hostess job at Babbo, the Greenwich Village restaurant at the center of what was Mario Batali’s restaurant empire. She created the nightly seating chart, which meant juggling requests from celebrities as well as from friends of Batali and his business partner, Joe Bastianich. It turned into a full-time, all-consuming job, first at Babbo and then at Del Posto as Bastianich’s executive assistant. She left the company after Batali was accused of sexual misconduct by several women in 2017. (In 2021, Batali, Bastianich, and their management company settled a lawsuit filed by the State of New York and agreed to pay $600,000 for "fostering a hostile work environment that permitted a sexualized culture of misconduct and harassment at their restaurants in New York City.")
Reed’s memoir, Workhorse: My Sublime and Absurd Years in New York City’s Restaurant Scene, describes what it was like to be at the company when the scandal broke, and some of its most fascinating parts are her behind-the scenes accounts of the crumbling of the Batali–Bastianch partnership. But the book is also about Reed’s 17-year run at the center of New York City’s frenetic restaurant world where—surrounded by celebrities, media, and power brokers who all wanted something—it was easy to forget about one’s own needs while working in service of others.
Below, an excerpt from Workhorse: My Sublime and Absurd Years in New York City’s Restaurant Scene, published this week by Hachette Books.
“Kim Kim? You mean our Kim?” Joe allegedly said, letting slip a rare show of emotion. That was a good sign. Joe didn’t usually say much at all, and when he did speak, it was almost entirely without inflection.
Of course, Gina had an opinion. “Are you crazy? He won’t pay you shit. You’ll be lucky if you get fifty thousand dollars out of him. Besides, do you know what time Natalie, his current assistant calls the restaurant at night to put in VIP reservations? After 8:00 p.m.—and she calls from the office line.” Gina flipped open the lid of one of her jars of homemade fruit-infused grappa and let two skinned pears slide from her hand and plop into the jar one at a time. “No. I’m not contributing to the exhaustion of Kimmy.” Softening slightly, she asked, “Well, have you met with him about the job yet?”
“I’m going to. Friday at six at the Del Posto bar.”
“You’d better be prepared to perform verbally.” We looked at each other, both realizing I did not know what she meant.
“When you’re talking to him, you have to come up with answers quickly. You have to respond confidently—know what you want to say. Don’t go on and on like you do. Stick to the point. He’s going to ask you questions one after another. He’s going to hit you hard.”
He is? I thought. That didn’t sound like tic-tac-toe-playing Joe.
Each time I walked into Del Posto, I never knew where to look first; the ceiling was so high, it took my eyes a moment to find it. It was dark in there, the windows always shaded. Everything was made of light gray marble or rich mahogany wood and leather, and the white linen tablecloths created gleaming pops of white in the dining room. The first thing I heard was the tinkling of piano keys, and it felt as though I’d arrived at some clandestine midnight ball like the one in “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” I was glad I didn’t work there; that way I’d never get used to it.
I spotted what looked like Joe’s bare head in the back of the dining room, leaning over a table; but that guy couldn’t be Joe, I thought. He was too thin. And what was with the sweater? I’d never seen Joe in anything other than a suit. But it was Joe—looking even thinner than the last time I’d seen him. He had recently taken up running and lost sixty pounds. The gang at Babbo suspected that his transformation had to do with a rumored falling-out between him and Mario back in 2008—little brother trying to one-up big brother, since Mario was heavy too. We took a seat on one of the leather banquettes in the lounge. “So, you want to be my assistant?” Joe asked. He let me talk, but I was mindful to follow Gina’s advice of keeping things concise and clear.
Joe then told me about his appearances on The Today Show and how I’d help plan them. About the winery in Italy and the events he put on at restaurants in Connecticut and New Jersey to sell the wines. The Batali & Bastianich Group—the B&B Group—had just gotten involved with something called Eataly, and I’d be working on that too. He spoke as though the job was already mine. This wasn’t going at all as Gina had predicted. In fact, Joe said more to me in twenty minutes than he had in ten years, and he actually smiled a few times. “You’ll have to get along with Mario’s team . . . and my mother, Lidia, and my wife, Alice.”
Lidia was not involved in most of the B&B Group’s restaurants, but she was a successful restaurateur and TV star in her own right. She’d hosted a wildly successful cooking show on PBS for the last two decades.
“I get along with everyone—”
“I know you do; that’s why you’re sitting here,” he said, cutting me off. And then he asked me how much money I wanted. I told him I had to make at least what I was currently making, which was fifty-five thousand dollars a year. And just like that, daggers flashed in his eyes. It came and went so fast, I almost thought I imagined it. It was a look I’d never seen from him before. Sharp, like the newly formed angles on his once-chubby face.
The interview wrapped quickly after that. Joe promised to be in touch, and I exited the restaurant feeling unsure about how it all went down. A month or so passed. I’d been following up with Natalie, who kept saying she didn’t have any news for me. Joe hadn’t decided what he wanted yet. “Don’t worry,” Natalie said. “He’s like this.”
But I couldn’t help thinking I somehow blew it. My employers at the law firm didn’t want me to go. I’d been there just under a year and they’d already given me a small raise and a bonus, but I thought they’d understand in the end. The partner who hired me was a woman named Mabel, who, while scanning my résumé suddenly gasped and blurted out, “You work at Babbo?” We were only ten minutes into the interview, but my tales of celebrity sightings and badly behaved guests dominated the next thirty. Mabel was in her early seventies and was even shorter than Rosie, but she commanded that firm like we were all her kids, marching in dressed in her signature skirt suits and pearls. I liked working for her. But I was already hooked on the idea of being Joe’s assistant. Diving into the glamour of the restaurant world and less of the grind. Or so I thought.
One night in late December, Joe came into Babbo while I was working coat check. Deliberately meeting my eyes, he leaned in to George at the podium and said, “So, I see you’ve met my new assistant, Kim.”
I smiled, and then pulled open the door that led down to the basement. I knew we weren’t quite done yet. “You want to go downstairs and talk about money?”
“No, I don’t,” he said quickly, but still smiling. “We’ll figure it out—call Natalie tomorrow.” Then he was out the door before I could even say thank you. It seemed to be a done deal for Joe, but he had no clue how much debt I still owed Sallie Mae or the mounting balance on my Visa that never seemed to go down.
Natalie arranged for me to meet Joe at Otto one night the following week. I walked in and spotted Mario at the end of the bar, his feet in his Converse and pink socks dangling off his usual hightop chair.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, looking stern as he watched me walk toward him.
“I’m meeting Joe about becoming his assistant.”
“Ahh, I’ve heard about this.” He patted the seat of the chair next to him. I sat down. “It’s not a particularly hard job,” he said. “But it’s an important job.”
I nodded, starting to feel nervous. His interest made me realize that if I screwed up somehow, I might have to answer to him too. I hadn’t thought about that.
“Basti is a big ‘idea man.’ He dreams up all kinds of great things. But he needs someone who can pull it all together.” Then he just looked at me. It always scared me a bit when Mario went still and stared like that. He continued, “Basti is a little strange. But then again, so are you, so maybe this will work. Natalie’s gone batshit crazy. . . . I think it was the job that did it to her.”
Excerpted from Workhorse: My Sublime and Absurd Years in New York City's Restaurant Scene by Kim Reed. Copyright © 2021. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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