The Matron Saint of Pasta

Lidia Matticchio Bastianich is only 58, but she doesn't seem to mind if you think she's older. She presents herself to the world in matronly blouses or patterned smocks, with a sensible shade of red lipstick and a welcoming smile gracing her lunar face. She is thick in the middle, sprightly of eye and possessed of powerful momma's hands that have built a multimillion-dollar restaurant-and-food empire.

More than that, she has lived a life so rich in history that, by comparison, the attractive twentysomethings the Food Network so desperately wants to turn into stars seem like brummagem pretenders. When Bastianich was just 10, she and her family fled communist tyranny in Europe, lived as refugees and immigrated to New York City--which she still calls, when speaking of her parents' decision to come here, "the New World." She learned English as a third language, after Italian and Serbo-Croatian.

If it seems uncharitable to a woman so accomplished as Bastianich--someone with so many plans for the future--to dwell on her past, consider that her past is her future. The five restaurants she owns or co-owns in three cities (a sixth, Del Posto, is set to open in Manhattan in November), the four best-selling cookbooks she has written, the two TV shows she has created--a third, Lidia's Family Table, began this spring on PBS--all celebrate the traditional northern-Italian foods of her brief childhood in Istria, a region of northeastern Italy that was transferred to communist Yugoslavia after World War II. (It is now part of Croatia and Slovenia.) Bastianich's family left with at least 200,000 other ethnic Italians who refused to give up their language, their Catholicism and their very names. (Authorities tried to Slavicize Bastianich's maiden name, Matticchio, as Motika.)

With Del Posto, their latest evocation of the Italian past, Bastianich and her partners, including her son Joseph and the omnipresent chef Mario Batali, are hoping for a new level of critical acclaim. Press materials for the 190-seat eatery promise service from a fleet of "captains, front waiters, back waiters and runners in synergy with managers, sommeliers, and professionals in charge of specialty items like chocolate & cheese." It's a clear bid for something none of Bastianich's popular restaurants (nor, for that matter, any other Italian restaurant in New York City) can claim: four stars from the New York Times.

Any authentic cookery tastes of nostalgia, but Bastianich has built an entire business on her empyreal girlhood memories of a lost Istria. (In her books Bastianich seems to recall every culinary moment of her early years, from watching distillers make grappa to grinding wheat into flour at the communal mill.) Bastianich's unwillingness to forget the youth that was "yanked away from me" eventually manifested itself in her mastery of Istria's--and all of Italy's--regional cuisines. In 1971, when she was just 24, Bastianich and her then husband Felice opened their first restaurant, a modest 30-seater in Queens, N.Y., called Buonavia ("good road").