LIVE from the NYPL: Kitchen Secrets: Bill Buford with Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain

For three frenetic years of trials and errors, disappointments and triumphs, author and New Yorker writer, Bill Buford was kitchen slave to chef Mario Batali at his three-star NYC restaurant, Babbo. As Buford worked his way up the Babbo ladder from kitchen bitch  to line cook, his relationship with the larger-than-life Batali grew while he learned his life story through kitchen encounters and after-work all-nighters. Buford's immersion into the art of butchery in Northern Italy, preparing game in London, and making handmade pasta at an Italian hillside trattoria, become an illuminating exploration of why food matters.

Join Bill Buford, author of the kitchen memoir Heat, as he plunges into the life of Mario Batali and his rise to extraculinary fame, along with Anthony Bourdain, executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles, as they discuss the dao, the worldview and work ethic of the professional. Fear not: you will learn once and for all how to sauce pasta properly, what's good about shanks and hooves as Buford & Batali & Bourdain regale us with many kitchen secrets.

About Bill Buford

Bill Buford is a staff writer for The New Yorker after having been fiction editor for eight years. He was the founding editor of Granta magazine and was also the publisher of Granta books. He is the author of Among the Thugs, a highly personal nonfiction account of crowd violence and British soccer hooliganism that has been translated into ten languages. In 2003, he won the James Beard Journalism Award for Magazine Feature Writing Without Recipes for ?The Secret of Excess. His new book is Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as a Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany.

About Mario Batali:

Mario Batali creates magic in his many NYC hotspots, the flagship being Babbo Ristorante e Enoteca in Greenwich Village. Babbo was honored as ?The Best New Restaurant of 1998? by The James Beard Foundation, and Ruth Reichl at the New York Times hailed it with three stars. Mario?s other restaurants are Lupa, Esca, Otto Enoteca Pizzeria, Casa Mono, Bar Jam?n, and Del Posto along with Italian Wine Merchants. Mario apprenticed with London?s legendary chef Marco Pierre White and spent three years of intense culinary training in the Northern Italian village of Borgo Capanne. Mario hosts two Food Network programs, "Molto Mario" and "Ciao America" and has authored Simple Italian Food, Mario Batali Holiday Food, The Babbo Cookbook, and Molto Italiano: 327 Simple Italian Recipes. Most recently, Mario created the first ever cookbook for NASCAR fans, Mario Tailgates NASCAR Style.

About Anthony Bourdain
Anthony Bourdain graduated from the Culinary Institute of America before running kitchens at NYC's Supper Club, One Fifth Avenue and Sullivan?s. Bourdain has written three crime novels, Bone in the Throat, Gone Bamboo, and The Bobby Gold Stories. His expos of New York restaurants, Don't Eat Before Reading This, in The New Yorker led to his memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. For the Food Network Bourdain travelled the world in search of ?extreme cuisine? resulting in the book A Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal. Les Halles Cookbook is Bourdain's guide to the strategies and techniques of classic bistro cooking. Bourdain's travel and food series, "Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations," airs on the Travel Channel. Kitchen Confidential, a comedy series based on Bourdain's memoir, premiered on FOX in 2005. He is currently the executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles and his new book is The Nasty Bits.