Super Mario!

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Batali doesn't seem like a person especially interested in moving 10,000 garlic slicers before Christmas, but he enjoys his role in shaping the brand. "When I was trying to define Mario's brand, I came up with three things," says Purcell, his brand manager. "Authenticity, education and enjoyment. Except when I told Mario that, he said, 'Scratch that last one, Darcie. It's f______ hedonism.'" Batali's greatest gift may not be his ability to figure out a winning new way with a scallop but rather his understanding of how to use his image. Batali constantly projects a sense of capering, slightly naughty joy: at a cooking demo, he rolls up stuffed-eggplant slices and then pretends to lick them like the wrapper around a joint. "Just like we did in the '70s," he says, and the audience cheers. Sometimes he takes the act too far. In Heat Buford quotes a liquored Batali asking one of his waitresses to "take off your blouse" for his table. Batali says everyone understood that he was joking. "It's never anything as sinister as it sounds when someone writes it down," he told me. But when you're in the business of hedonism, it's hard to draw lines.

Whether Batali and Bastianich can successfully export their festival of gratification around the country isn't yet clear. The Vegas restaurants will be staffed with experienced talent from their New York restaurants, but Batali won't be able to ride his Vespa scooter to them each night, a quality-control measure he uses in Manhattan. Still, Batali won't run out of culinary ideas any time soon. On his Mac he keeps a database of 20,000 recipes collected over the years on his travels to out-of-the-way Italian towns like the one where he apprenticed. So how big can Batali Inc. grow? The chef insists that he won't open a restaurant in an airport or push his cookware on a shopping network like QVC. Yet when I first met him six years ago, Batali said he didn't expect to open a restaurant in Las Vegas, since it would be too far from New York for him to drop in unannounced. Of course, back then you could also see Batali wearing something other than his now trademark orange clogs. Doesn't he ever get sick of them? "Hey," he answers, "it doesn't matter, as long as they remember you."