The Matron Saint of Pasta

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A prescient name. Today Bastianich (who divorced Felice in 1998) is one of the most celebrated chefs in the nation. Judith Jones, the octogenarian book editor who persuaded a skeptical Alfred Knopf to publish Julia Child's first book in 1961, calls Bastianich "the Italian version of Julia Child." Jones went with Bastianich last year to a Connecticut grocery store to promote the cookbook version of Lidia's Family Table. Some 2,000 people showed up, many clutching grease-smudged copies of Bastianich's earlier books. They waited hours to see the chef up close. "I hadn't seen anything like that since the early days when I went out with Julia," says Jones. "There was this loving sense that she had given them a gift. It was quite emotional."

Batali, who co-owns the Manhattan restaurant Esca with Bastianich, calls her "the ideal matriarchal figure for all of Italian cooking," which is both an expression of and an explanation for her success. You want to watch Bastianich cook meals on TV--and you desperately want to eat them--because, even if you've never heard of Istria, Lidia seems as though she could be your mother. When she looks into the camera, as she did on a 2001 episode of her earlier show Lidia's Italian Table, and shakes her finger at you and says of her fried mozzarella sandwich, "You will make it, and then you will taste it," the combination of her luscious cheese dish and her lovingly stern gaze is as close to televised motherhood as you can get.

By nature, Bastianich is an effortless teacher, perhaps because her own mother, Erminia Matticchio, who lives in an apartment in Bastianich's Queens home, was a schoolteacher in Istria. Bastianich, in turn, taught her children the family business so well that they returned to it as adults. Tanya Bastianich Manuali, 33, who has an Oxford doctorate in Renaissance history, runs lidiasitaly.com which sells everything from stainless-steel tongs to $4,000-a-week tours of Italy, and lidiasclub.com where subscribers can watch streaming video of Lidia cooking dishes. Joseph Bastianich, 37, produces top-quality wines and olive oil under the family name and, in his own right, co-owns one of the most successful restaurant collections in New York, including--with Batali--the famed (but only three-star) Babbo.

In March I paid a visit to Bastianich's rangy Tudor overlooking Long Island Sound to see how she had so successfully fused the roles of Italian-American mother and gastronomic impresario. The night before, I had dined at her flagship, Felidia. I had not expected Bastianich to be there--she had recently had a knee replaced--but she arrived abruptly, just to check on things. ("You always question yourself," she explained the next day.) When she walked in, the spruce, busy restaurant turned susurrous and expectant, everyone wanting a word with Lidia. She offered a friendly greeting to nearly every customer and a couple of brusque commands to her staff.

The next day in her sun-drenched kitchen--where all her shows are taped--she asked her mother to squeeze me a glass of grapefruit juice, a tonic for the previous night's overindulgence. Then we walked to the stove, where Bastianich was preparing lobster risotto.