Remembrances of Diners Past

Since it's the 27th of September, we thought we'd tell a little story about the birthday of someone we once met...

We first ate the cuisine of Mario Batali back in the mid-Nineties at Po, and knew with a glance at the menu that a pasta tasting menu was the best invention since ice. We got ourselves to Babbo not long after it opened, and in the fall of 2000 started working there. Superlatives are inadequate to describe Molto Mario's cuisine, and we can still recite large portions of the menu by heart. Goat Cheese Truffles. Lamb Tartare with Mint. Whole Branzino, which we filleted at the tables in the centers of each dining room. The pastas: Goat Cheese Tortelloni with Fennel Pollen and Orange. Mint Love Letters--meat-stuffed, envelope-shaped ravioli. Beef Cheek Ravioli. We recently made Mario's sauce for Pappardelle Bolognese; Batali writes in his cookbook that the traditional ground meat sauce is normally tossed with fresh fettucine, but that he prefers it with the wide ribbon pasta, so we got out the hand-cranked Atlas machine. Though it wasn't as good as Mario's, it came close.

We were working in the second-floor dining room one night, when the maitre d' conducted a party up to our section. Nothing unusual, except that this party caused the kind of stir a celebrity sighting causes--only this was multiplied several times over. Gwyneth Paltrow, Ben Stiller, and Luke Wilson were seated at a four-top in our station, and around the room there were murmurs and nods and eyebrows raised and heads jerked almost imperceptibly toward said table. Complimentary appetizers were sent out by the kitchen; Molto Mario was absent for the night, so he didn't make a tableside appearance. In the usual way of celebrities, the three were very low-key. They were together in New York--and at Babbo--because Wes Anderson was filming "The Royal Tenebaums". Over the next several weeks, most of the all-star cast came in to dine in a variety of groupings, with and without Mr. Anderson. Particularly memorable was the night that the "youngsters" came for a late dinner and were joined by a post-theater Bill Murray and Anjelica Huston. We saw the maternal side of Miss Huston that night, and we actually made Bill Murray laugh--which still makes us proud.

The night that Paltrow, Stiller and Wilson came in as a trio, the two men spent most of the time talking to each other. We decided to chat up Miss Paltrow simply beyond asking her what she wanted to eat and drink. At one point we couldn't resist telling her that we'd admired her mother, the beautiful, patrician Blythe Danner, ever since we first saw her in "A Love Story: the Eleanor and Lou Gehrig Story" way back in the late Seventies. We confided in Miss Paltrow that we always thought her mother was the epitome of class, and that she was fortunate to have had such good parents. As if to prove that she had her mother's good taste, good sense and sensibility, Miss Paltrow picked up the tab of the neighboring table, a couple who was celebrating their anniversary, and asked me to promise not to tell that she had done so.

Anyway, it's Gwyneth Paltrow's birthday today, and because it's been a quiet couple of weeks, we thought we'd spend a little time walking down the lane of memory with one of the more memorable anecdotes from our days in the world when and where you never knew who was coming to dinner...