Lidia Bastianich

Lidia Matticchio Bastianich

Bastianich at the National Book Festival in September 2010
Born	February 21, 1947 (1947-02-21) Pula, Croatia
Cooking style	Italian
Current restaurant(s) Felidia, Becco, Lidia's Pittsburgh, Lidia's Kansas City, Del Posto, Esca
Television show(s) Lidia's Italy, Lidia's Family Table, Lidia's Italian–American Kitchen
Official website
http://www.lidiasitaly.com/

Lidia Matticchio Bastianich (born Lidia Motika on February 21, 1947, in Pula, Croatia) is an Croatian-American chef, author, and restaurateur.

Specializing in Italian cuisine, she has been a regular contributor to public television cooking show lineups since 1998. In 2007, she launched her third TV series, Lidia's Italy. She also owns several Italian restaurants in the U.S. in partnership with her daughter Tanya Bastianich Manuali and her son, Joe Bastianich: including Felidia (founded with her ex-husband, Felice), Del Posto, Esca, and Becco in Manhattan; Lidia's Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Lidia's Kansas City in Kansas City, Missouri.

Early life

Lidia Matticchio Bastianich was born on February 21, 1947, in the town of Pula, then newly ceded to Yugoslavia, now part of Croatia. Living nine years under Tito's Communist regime, her father, Vittorio, in 1956 sent his wife and their two children to visit relatives in Trieste, Italy, while he remained in Istria to comply with the government's mandate that one member of a family remain in Yugoslavia to ensure that the rest would return. Hours later, Vittorio himself left Yugoslavia under cover of darkness and crossed the border into Italy.

The Motika family reunited in Trieste, Italy, joining other families who had claimed political asylum from Communist Yugoslavia starting in 1947, many of whom remained in refugee camps throughout Italy for years. For the Motika family, the camp was one that had been an abandoned rice factory in Trieste that had been converted to a Nazi concentration camp during World War II and partially destroyed towards the end of the war, the Risiera di San Sabba. According to Lidia in a PBS documentary, although a wealthy Triestian family hired Lidia's mother as a cook–housekeeper and her father as a limousine driver, they remained residents of the refugee camp. Two years later, their displaced persons application was granted to emigrate to the U.S. In 1958, unlike the earlier groups of World War II refugees whose journeyed to their adoptive homelands by "liberty ships" that took at least seven days arrive at their destination in North and South America, the Motika family had the good fortune to reach New York City by airplane.

Bastianich gives credit to the family's new roots in America to their sponsor, Catholic Charities:

“

The Catholic Charities brought us here to New York…we had no one. They found a home for us. They found a job for my father. And ultimately we settled. And I am the perfect example that if you give somebody a chance, especially here in the United States, one can find the way.

”

After a few weeks, the family moved to North Bergen, New Jersey, near the Chevrolet factory where Lidia's father began working as a mechanic. Later, they moved to Astoria, Queens, where they had family friends and relatives living in a large enclave of fellow Istrian immigrants. Lidia started working part time when she was 14 (the legal age for a work permit), during which time she briefly worked at the Astoria bakery owned by Christopher Walken's father. After graduating from high school, she began to work full-time in local Italian restaurants. Meanwhile, at her sweet sixteen birthday party, she was introduced to her future husband, Felice "Felix" Bastianich, a fellow Istrian Italian immigrant and restaurant worker from Labin (Albona), Istria. The couple married in 1966 and gave birth to their son, Joseph, in 1968.

Career

From Queens to Manhattan (1971–1981)

In 1971, the Bastianich couple opened their first restaurant, the tiny Buonavia, meaning "good road", in the Forest Hills section of Queens, with Lidia as its hostess. They created their restaurant's menu by copying recipes from the most popular and successful Italian restaurants of the day, and they hired the best Italian-American chef that they could find. After a brief break to deliver her second child, Tanya Bastianich Manuali, in 1972, Lidia began training as the assistant chef at Buonavia, gradually learning enough to cook popular Italian dishes on her own, after which the couple began adding traditional Istrian dishes to their menu.

The success of Buonavia led to the opening of a second restaurant in Queens, Villa Secondo. It was here that Lidia both gained the attention of local food critics and started to give live cooking demonstrations, a prelude to her future career as a TV cooking show hostess.

In 1981, Lidia's father died, and so the family sold their two Queens restaurants and purchased a small Manhattan brownstone containing a pre-existing restaurant on the East Side of Manhattan near the 59th Street Bridge to Queens, which they converted into what would eventually become their flagship restaurant, Felidia (a contraction of "Felice" and "Lidia"). After liquidating nearly every asset they had to cover $750,000 worth of renovations, Felidia finally opened to near-universal acclaim from their loyal following of food critics, including The New York Times which gave them three stars.

Expansion (1993–2011)

Although Lidia and Felice sent her two children to college and did not expect either of them to go into the restaurant business, her son Joseph, who had frequently done odd jobs for parents at Felidia as a child, gave up his newly launched career as a Wall Street bond trader and in 1993 convinced his parents to partner with him to open Becco (Italian for "peck, nibble, savor") in the Theater District in Manhattan. Like Felidia, Becco, it was an immediate success and led to the family's opening of additional restaurants outside New York City, starting with Lidia's Kansas City in 1997, the family's first restaurant outside of New York.

In 1993, Julia Child invited Lidia to tape an episode of her PBS series Julia Child: Cooking With Master Chefs, which featured acclaimed chefs from around the U.S., preparing dishes in their own home kitchens. The guest appearance gave Lidia confidence and determination to expand the Bastianich family's own commercial interests. After many disagreements about the direction their entrepreneurial and personal lives had taken — most notably, the pace of the expansion and character of their business — Lidia and Felice divorced in 1997. Lidia continued expanding her business empire while Felice remarried and transferred his shares in the business to their two children. He passed away on December 12, 2010.

By the late 1990s, Lidia's restaurants had evolved into a true family-owned and operated enterprise: Erminia Motika, her mother, maintained the large garden behind the family home, from which her daughter Lidia chose the ingredients to use in recipe development; son Joe was the chief sommelier of the restaurant group, in addition to branching out into his own restaurant line with friend and famed Italian chef Mario Batali; daughter Tanya Bastianich Manuali used her Ph.D in Italian art history as the backdrop for a travel-agency partnership with her mother called Lidia's Esperienze Italiane, where Tanya and her friend Shelly Burgess Nicotra (the wife of Felidia's Executive Chef Fortunato Nicotra since 1996) conducted tours throughout Italy to view the historic architecture and sample genuine Italian cuisine; Tanya's husband, attorney Corrado Manuali, became the restaurant group's chief legal counsel.

The James Beard Foundation Award named Lidia Bastianich the Best Chef: New York City for 1999. In 2000, Ms. Bastianich participated as a celebrity judge on MasterChef USA, an adaptation of the BBC MasterChef (UK TV series). Her son, Joseph Bastianich, would later go on to star as a celebrity judge on the Gordon Ramsay version of MasterChef.

The family's business empire includes vineyards in Italy, olive groves in Istria, and a host of commercial food products and new business ventures revolving around the culinary arts. Lidia is partner with her daughter, Tanya Bastianich Manuali, in commercial housewares, Lidia's Kitchen, while as C.E.O. of Nonna Foods, her son-in-law, Corrado Manuali, is expanding the brand to include food.

In 2010, Lidia and her son partnered with Oscar Farinetti and Mario Batali to open a 50,000-square-foot (4,600 m²) food emporium in Manhattan that is devoted to the food and culinary traditions of Italy. Called Eataly, its motto is "We sell what we cook, and we cook what we sell".

Television (2001–present)

In 1998, PBS offered Lidia her own TV series which became Lidia's Italian-American Kitchen. It established her as a fixture in the network's line-up of cooking-shows. Since then she has hosted two additional television series, Lidia's Family Table and Lidia's Italy, the latter of which was launched in April 2007. Lidia ends each episode of her show with an invitation to join her and her family for a meal, Tutti a tavola a mangiare! (Italian for "Everyone to the table to eat"). She also appeared on an episode of the 2006 PBS series Chef's Story.

For the 2010 holiday season, Lidia's new TV production company, Tavola Productions, created an animated holiday children's special for Public Television "Lidia's Christmas Kitchen: Nonna Tell Me a Story" to go along with the book by the same title that was written by Lidia.

Lidia has also been a featured chef on Great Chefs Television series and has been a guest judge on Top Chef. In 2011, Lidia feature as a guest judge on the second season the American version of MasterChef

Lidia has authored several cookbooks to accompany her television series:

• La Cucina di Lidia
• Lidia's Family Table
• Lidia's Italian-American Kitchen
• Lidia's Italian Table
• Lidia's Italy
• Lidia Cooks from the Heart of Italy

Personal life

Lidia resides in Queens, New York, with her widowed mother, Erminia Motika. Lidia's own kitchen has served as the stage set for all three of her TV series, and the garden that Erminia maintains provides many of the ingredients featured in the shows. Erminia, who answers to "grandma", frequently serves as a sous-chef in various episodes of Lidia's TV series.

Joe Bastianich occasionally appears in Lidia's series to offer wine expertise. He, his wife Deanna, and their three children live in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Tanya Bastianich Manuali, with her husband Corrado Manuali and their two children, live just a few blocks away from Lidia. Tanya serves as the main on-camera cultural expert for all the segments of Lidia's PBS series Lidia's Italy that are filmed in Italy.

All four generations of the family have appeared at one time or another as participants in Lidia's TV shows; Lidia's Family Table where Lidia has given simple pasta making lessons to her grandchildren, and episodes of Lidia's Italy that often feature the adult Bastianich family members touring the various areas of Italy that relate to their personal interests and family-owned business enterprises.

In an interview by American Public Television, Lidia shared her opinion on how important it is for her to pass family traditions to her family:

“

Food for me was a connecting link to my grandmother, to my childhood, to my past. And what I found out is that for everybody, food is a connector to their roots, to their past in different ways. It gives you security; it gives you a profile of who you are, where you come from.

”

In August 2011, a former employee of Lidia's accused by a former employee of being forced to care for an aging family friend in a situation that was slavery.

Maria Carmela Farina, filed a lawsuit yesterday for $5 million, claiming that Bastianich lured her to America from her native Italy under false pretenses. With the promise that her immigration papers would be taken care of and that she would have a $600 a week position as a chef at Bastianich's TV shows and restaurants, Farina journeyed to the U.S. in 2006.

Upon arriving, she alleges that she was instead given the responsibility of caring for 99-year-old Luigia Crespi, the wife of Bastianich's handyman who died in 1995 from stomach cancer.

The law suit details that Bastianich had an agreement with Oscar Crespi that he would hand over the deed to his house in Queens for $10 if she would care of his wife. Once he died, Bastianich was granted the house, but once Luigia Crespi became seriously ill, Farina was brought in to be her 24-hour personal assistant.

"She was completely hoodwinked by Lidia," Paul Catsandonis, Farina's lawyer told the Daily News. "Lidia thought she was running a Roman empire and that this woman was one of her slaves."

According to the suit, Bastianich and her family would call Farina "Il shiavo di lusso," or the "the golden slave," in Italian. She was not paid for her six years of service in aiding a woman who was twice her size.

Catsandonis told the Daily News that Farina is 4-foot-7 and weighs just under 100 pounds while Crespi was taller and weighed over 200 pounds. Among her duties were bathing, feeding and shopping for the woman as well as aiding her to and from the bathroom.

"This was just sprung on her when she got here," Catsandonis said. "She thought that she was coming here to have an illustrious career as a creative chef."

The suit also details that Bastianich and her daughter and business partner, Tanya Bastianich Manuali would tell Farina that she should be thankful to them because their company was paying for Farina's health insurance and that they were working on securing her Visa.

In actuality, Bastianich lied on immigration papers, stating that Farina worked for her as a chef; a move which could now jeopardize her eligibility for a permanent residence. In addition, both Bastianichs' led Farina to believe that her "pay" was being deposited in a bank account, but Farina never had access to a bank account and never received pay, the suit continues.

Upon the death of Luigia Crespi in December 2010, at the age of 105, Bastianich sold the bartered home for $549,000 and Farina was presented with a one way ticket back to Italy and another promise that she would receive $10,000 pending her return.

While the case develops, Farina's lawyers say that she is now practically living in hiding somewhere in Queens.

Bastianich's spokeswoman Brooke Adams declined to comment.

External links

• Lidia's Italy Lidia Bastianich's official Web site.
• Lidia's Italy at the Internet Movie Database
• Celebrity Judges 2000 MasterChef USA official web site