Friday Food Pt. 1

Can I be honest about something? Are you sitting down?

Ok. Good. Here it goes:

TV fakes things....alot. Sometimes, however, that fakery becomes part of mythology. And so we've done with Mario Batali's Del Posto. Time has an article on Mario and all his travails with the new place:

Del Posto is both cavernous and opulent; it cost something like $12 million. But since it began serving meals in December, the place has been threatened by jaded Manhattanites skeptical of the valet parking (real New Yorkers walk), by restaurant critics who seem eager to see Batali finally stumble and by its own landlord, who is trying to close the place and evict its owners. I haven’t even gotten to the part where the Hudson River flooded Del Posto....

Batali and the other Del Posto principals....had never attempted something quite so spectacular as Del Posto. They knew they needed media attention, and they allowed a Food Network crew to visit the building site repeatedly. According to the show that resulted—Mario, FULL BOIL which aired February 18—construction was delayed interminably because engineers trying to lay the restaurant’s foundation dug themselves into the Hudson River. Water soaked the site for weeks.

Now, here's the deal: The "river thing" wasn't that bad!



There were about 15 other things that caused the restaurant to fall behind schedule. We (the producer and I) picked one very little, very visual thing (the river) and ran with it. When in the show, you hear Mario's voiceover that he's upset about the flooding and see Mario looking unhappy and complaining to the contractors, he's actually in a meeting about the elevator taking too long to complete. When his business partner is "negotiating for the foundation", he's actually in a totally unrelated meeting about a wine cellar. Oh sure, the river was a problem -- but it was solved in about 3 weeks, not the months it "seems" to take in the show.

This is how non-fiction television is made. You have to take things out of context to tell the story (after all, we were condensing a year into 42 minutes). Is it a little James Frey-like? I suppose. Do I feel we were being dishonest? No. Ultimately, the show has the emotional truth of what they went through opening the resturant. The river had to stand in for all the other little brushfires Mario had to put out, and his reactions to them were genuine. My one motivation when working for Food Network is the old Billy Wilder rule: "Thou shall not bore the audience." (This is Food TV, not PBS, after all!) I guess that makes me sound exactly like James Frey.

But here's where it gets interesting. "The River Thing" no longer just exists as an amusing anecdote in a dark corner of cable television -- it's been Oprah Book Clubbed, so to speak. "Fixing the Hudson" is now the mythologized obstacle Mario and Co. had to overcome to open their pasta palace. It's been referenced in Time, The New York Observer and others. Years down the line, should Del Posto make it twenty years, they'll talk about how the restaurant almost didn't open. It's our low rent version of faking the moon landing.

Still, I'm a little amused -- journalists should know better. Non-fiction, verite-style TV does not equal truth.

But you all knew that already, right?