Las Vegas Weekly

June 10, 2009 · 2:31 PM

Exclusive Interview & Photos: Mario Batali bets on the farm

By Robin Leach

Joe Bastianich and chef Mario Batali at Mario Batali's farmers market Bet on the Farm in the Palazzo.

Photo: Erik Kabik/Retna/www.erikkabikphoto.com

The sight of a farmers market with fresh fruits, vegetables and other items inside a Strip casino was an extraordinary first-ever experience -- and all thanks to hot TV celebrity chef Molto Mario Batali! Eggs, tomatoes and edible cactus were just inches away from slot machines and blackjack tables at the luxurious Palazzo.

I was amazed at the produce. One farmer’s stand featured apples, pears, peaches, tomatoes, cucumbers and squash grown right here at the Gilcrease Orchards in the north end of Las Vegas! There were stunning selections of tomatoes grown in nearby Pahrump, and our UNLV has a horticultural co-operative growing plums, apricots, peppers and strawberries on a 10-acre farm also in North Las Vegas.

The Bet on the Farm promotion was to mark the Green Restaurant Association’s certification of the Strip’s first certified green restaurants, and all belong to Mario and his partner and winemaker Joe Bastianich. The restaurants -- Carnevino at the Palazzo and B&B Ristorante and Enoteca San Marco at the neighboring Venetian -- join the Palazzo in being a true eco-friendly destination.

“We’ve always been conscious about the impact our choices have on our environment, so working with the Green Restaurant Association to certify all of our restaurants was clearly the next logical step,” Mario said. “We are proud of our efforts to minimize our carbon footprint, and of our ability to make these changes more efficiently and effectively. We have been recognized for our recycling and composting, paper, energy and water conversation and the elimination of bottled water!”

Mario and Joe talked with me in an exclusive sit-down and then posed in the kitchen and at the bar for our contributing photographer Erik Kabik for our photo gallery.

Robin Leach: When you went out into the casino and looked at all this produce and discovered that it actually grew in the desert areas of Nevada and Arizona, what did you think?

Mario Batali: I knew that they were going to deliver the premium product, but I didn’t realize the depth and breath of what the farmers were going to bring us. What they brought was so far and above! I expected them to bring 10 good things, and there were 40. It’s the growing season on the East Coast, so you expect it, but here it is a mind blow.

Photo: TVT

Mario Batali's farmers market Bet on the Farm in the Palazzo.

The farmers will find as many customers as they can handle. This is a financial model that has been left on the table, so what we can do from our little greedy standpoint of restaurateurs is raise the level of food by not shipping very far and keeping the local flavor. We can share this with local customers and really cultivate a business with real growth each year from now on.

RL: We conceivably could run out of food from California with all of the Vegas hotels, so where do we get the food? We can’t ship it all from Florida.

MB: The guys that are growing our stuff … the guy that started Stone Fruit three years ago is just now growing citrus and arugula for us. He realizes he has the capability; he just never considered it because that wasn’t his family business. These guys have all the produce we need within 100 miles of here where they have an economic and environmental situation that leads them to want to do more business with us.

RL: How many Vegas chefs are onboard with what you are trying to promote here on the Strip?

Photo: Erik Kabik/Retna/www.erikkabikphoto.com

Mario Batali's farmers market Bet on the Farm in the Palazzo.

MB: There are probably 250 cooks and chefs that are very interested in buying local! Anybody who is worth their salt as a cook knows that the geospecificity of products … knows that if you can capture the wind or the rain smells on a Thursday afternoon on a farm within 100 miles of here and get it on a plate in a salad, or an appetizer or a dessert that same night, you are creating something that you can’t have anywhere else.

I don’t know if it’s realistic right now for a restaurant doing $50 million a year in business, but at our little restaurants, a lot of it is protein, cured meats, it is not every dish is loaded with something from the farm. Sometimes it is a garnish, sometimes it is a touch point, sometimes it is the core of the dish. This emerald lettuce steakhouse wedge is a local piece of lettuce that tastes so good because it has not been shipped for so long, put in a cold truck and tried to be revived by the grocer with water.

RL: Chicken and egg, what comes first? The farmers or the chefs gambling on it with delivery?

MB: Well, let’s put it this way. A lot of the farmers that we are using from last year and this year at the beginning of their growing season asked us for a loan because they had just barely made it through their winter, so we will loan them up to $1,000. So we will give them the chicken or the egg. We will get that started because the buzz term of sustainability means a lot. But real sustainability is about people working together and us sharing our resources when they need it, and us reaping the benefits of us sharing those resources.

Photo: Erik Kabik/Retna/www.erikkabikphoto.com

Robin Leach and Chef Mario Batali at Carnevino in the Palazzo.

There is a cactus plant from Mexico that the UNLV extension grows right off a main thoroughfare in north Vegas. Within a week, we’ll have them pickled in some form for our salads. This is the first time those guys have ever seen them local. I like them pickled. You can scrape the nodules, slice them thinly, and they look exactly like green beans with a little okra taste. We are going to put them in a little acidity, bathe them in some vinegar and some chilies and serve them. Then people are going to be like what is this new delicious vegetable!

RL: People must say to you, “How is this possible in the desert with our brutally hot sunshine?”

MB: Well, let’s take Israel! Israel took desert and made something great out of it 40 years ago. They haven’t turned back, and everyone is asking them how to do it. The desert is not our enemy; it is our frenemy. What it all comes down to is natural resources, energy sources, and water and air are going to become the real hot buttons in the next 50 years. Maybe we could live without fossil fuels, but we certainly can’t live without air and water, so we will have to figure out how to take care of it. There is no shortage of fresh air out here. We have one down. Water is a question whether you dig down, whether you import it, whether you reuse it. We are going to figure it out, though. It is a crucial thing in my lifetime and my children’s lifetime.

RL: You think we can eventually grow everything in the desert, or are there some things we can’t?

Photo: Erik Kabik/Retna/www.erikkabikphoto.com

Chef Mario Batali, chef Kerry Simon and Joe Bastianich at Carnevino in the Palazzo.

MB: Some things have trouble with your cold weather. The desert is inhospitable in that it gets very cold in the winter nights. Freezing doesn’t work well with olives, citrus can freeze, avocados can’t freeze, napalitos can’t freeze, they will be able to grow them because they will come back every year. Let’s put it this way. The cost of not doing this is so much larger than the cost of just doing it. If we hand our children a universe that is unlivable, we are talking about the end of civilization.

So it is whether you pay for it now or you pay for it later. It is the same thing as diabetes. If we don’t take care of children’s diabetes and obesity right now, our hospitals will never be able to handle it. As it stands right now, 1 in 2 children born in 2009 will have diabetes by age 30. How much will that cost us, we don’t even know, we can’t even measure it. They are going to make a little less profit, there will be a little less G5s flying around next year, but that is it. The world will be a better place.

RL: Does everything on the menu tonight come from the farm?

MB: Except for the fish and the beet. Absolutely. The farm quail eggs on top of the carne cruda. The carne cruda is grown in a completely non-hormone, nongrowth hormone, non-antibiotic way, but it is grown in a farm in Utah and then we age it here. So within 100 miles of Las Vegas in the desert, there will actually be enough food eventually to support the tourists that come here. It can take as little as five years for most of the good smaller restaurants to as much as 20 years for every restaurant. Las Vegas will have an agricultural revolution.

RL: How serious is the possibility of shortage of food from California?

Photo: Erik Kabik/Retna/www.erikkabikphoto.com

Chef Rick Moonen and a vendor at Mario Batali's farmers market Bet on the Farm in the Palazzo.

MB: I think what it comes down to when you say shortage of food from California -- it is a question of resource management. Anything can be bought for more money, so it is just a question of how you are going to allocate that expense you have to have when you feed these people. But that said, I think we are responding to the shortage by creating an opportunity for these farmers to be able to grow with our assistance. They are not asking for Small Business Association loans, but we will loan them seed money, and when I say that they are buying seed, they go out and buy the seeds, plant and till the land.

The farming thing, they have everything to win. All they have to do is put their hard work into it and a little bit of information. The colleges in this area are totally agriculture positive, they are all interested in making this a better place, to grow things, and they are very aware of the potential growth that can happen here because of the economic situation. We might not have another 40 restaurants coming this month from last year because of the slowdown, but they are coming. The economic thing is just a bump.

RL: So summing up, will it be better for Las Vegas to grow its own rather than relying on imports from Florida in case California can’t provide enough for us?

MB: Absolutely. The easiest thing is to pretend it is not a problem and buy it from somewhere else, further increasing our reliance on energy resources. If gas goes back up to $4.60 a gallon, which it will one day, then all the foodstuffs will cost twice as much. It is the very short vision to just look somewhere else when in fact you have the potential and the opportunity to do it right here around Vegas. We can be self-sustaining in all our great restaurants in five years, except for shrimp. But fish farms are next up!

Photo: Erik Kabik/Retna/www.erikkabikphoto.com

Mario Batali's farmers market Bet on the Farm in the Palazzo.

Mario’s partner Joe Bastianich added: “We have always been about this in our company. We want sustainability because of the consumer reward. We can still be profitable even with all this effort. The customer wants the best local, freshest produce.

I own three wineries: one with Mario, one with my mother, one on my own. The simple message on wine is that drinking a glass of wine is an agricultural act. Growing grapes is an agricultural act. We are relaying the concept that wine is an agricultural product that shouldn’t be infused with pesticides and petroleum-based products. It can be sexy, it can be expensive, but at the end of the day, it is an agricultural product. All of ours are sustainable biodynamical wines.

Everything is organic. Sustainable is to farm agricultural products leaving the Earth better than you found it. No intervention with any chemicals. Natural farming. That’s how they did it back in the old days. It’s more cost effective to take herbicides and dust crops, but we don’t. We’re like the old days of taking the oxen and plowing them right under again. The good news is that consumers will reward our efforts. They will buy these products that are organic and sustainable. Green has become big business.”

Robin Leach has been a journalist for more than 50 years and has spent the past decade giving readers the inside scoop on Las Vegas, the world’s premier platinum playground.

Follow Robin Leach on Twitter HERE.

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