Joe Bastianich is a busy man. While running restaurants pizza express all over the world with partne

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Joe Bastianich
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Joe Bastianich is a busy man. While running restaurants pizza express all over the world with partner Mario Batali, he still finds time to go running every day, and is also the new spokesman for Progresso’s new Artisan soups. He took some time to sit down with us for a far-reaching conversation covering everything pizza express from his love of soup to the ideal MasterChef candidate, which is currently casting for its next season.
The Daily Meal: You've been working with Progresso pizza express lately. What drew you to them? Joe Bastianich: It's a collaboration where I found a product that I think I could tell a story that relates to my own, that's significant, that's real. I thought they were doing something that was really significant and good and right, and it seemed pizza express like a natural thing.
What drew you to their new offerings in particular? In our family, we ate soup every day, and every day began with a pot of soup, and it still works that way. You still go to my mother's house and the first thing you smell in the morning is burning onions and it's pizza express a pot of some sort of soup that begins the cooking of every day.
From the soup, everything is built in the culinary world of the household. And I don't live in a world where my wife makes soup every day and I also live in the real world with kids and everything. With these Artisan soups, I saw that the quality was at a level with something I would use at home and feed to my own family and we have, and they're good for what they are. They're a straightforward product from a company that comes from a long history. pizza express
I grew up Italian-American in Queens, so it's one of those brands that resonated with me through the years. Even my grandmother would use their canned beans in making her own soups, so there was some level of trust with me. And in the world of elitist foodie-ism, I think that when you find a product for that price point and delivers that type of quality where you could simply heat up and eat, it's worth telling.
"Whether that's service or hospitality, quite frankly, I don't give a sh*t. As long as when you come to my restaurant, you feel like someone is taking care of you and it feels like if you were eating at my house, then I've succeeded."
How pizza express will it compare to the one in New York? It's bigger. It's two levels. It won't have a rooftop pizza express beer garden, but it will have some other add-ons that we don't have here. I think it will be integrated conceptually into the Chicago food scene a little bit. As the New York one is New York-centric, I think this will be Chicago-centric. The reoccurring themes stay: pizza, pasta, lots of coffees, and an expanded piazza with giant wine bar where you can order different foods from different areas. There won't be a Manzo; there won't be a tablecloth restaurant. The meat restaurant will less expensive, more secondary/tertiary cuts of meat, more like a meat grill than a full-on steakhouse, if you will. The core elements stay the same; everything has evolved a little bit to fit into the market.
What ways in particular will it fit into the Chicago market? We always pizza express try to respect the indigenous food community as much as we can, so the main restaurant has a lot of homemade sausages that we thought were very telling of what Chicagoans eat. Some of the menu items in the various restaurants pay a little bit more homage to Western sensibility. At the end of the day, Chicago is a Midwestern city, so I think that there’s a respect for the heartland of our country, and of what those people want to eat.
We recently ranked Babbo America’s best Italian restaurant . There's something that I can't quite put my finger on about Babbo, but it's elevated beyond what a normal "good meal" would be. What do you think it is about Babbo that makes it so good? I think it's a confluence pizza express of events. I think the food is a part of it, but I think Babbo is about the energy, the atmosphere, the location, the building itself, the kind of people who work there, and the wine program, so I think there's a lot of magic that happens in that brownstone. The food has always been Ma