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Lidia Matticchio Bastianich (born Lidia Motika on October 10, 1947 in Pola, Istria (now Pula, Croatia)) is an Italian-American chef and host of several television cooking shows on PBS; in 2007, she launched her third TV series, Lidia's Italy. She also owns four restaurants in the U.S.: Felidia and Becco in Manhattan; Lidia's Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Lidia's Kansas City in Kansas City, Missouri.

Early life

Lidia Motika, three years younger than her brother Franco Motika, was born in Pula (Pola) on October 11, 1947, just eight months and a day after Istria was ceded to Yugoslavia (Paris Peace Treaties, 1947). Her family name had been Italianized to "Matticchio" when Istria was part of Italy between the two world wars, and then reverted back to "Motika" under Yugoslavia. Lidia's family background contains Italian, Croatian and Istro-Romanian ethnic groups.

When Lidia was 10 years old, the Motikas--Lidia, Franco, and their parents--left Istria for Trieste, where they lived for a time in a refugee camp for displaced persons (Campo Profughi, formerly the concentration camp San Sabba). A wealthy Triestian family hired Lidia's mother Erminia as a cook/housekeeper and Lidia's father as a limousine driver. After two years living in "displaced refugee" status in Trieste, the Motikas were able to obtain relocation placements in the U.S., and the family arrived in New York, New York in April 1958. Supported for a few weeks in New York by Catholic Charities Sponsorship, the family soon moved to North Bergen, New Jersey, where Lidia's father took a job as a mechanic at a Chevrolet plant. However, as more displaced Istrians arrived in the U.S., they began forming their own ethnic neighborhoods inside New York City, and the Motikas moved to the Astoria section of Queens to join one such neighborhood while her father continued to work in New Jersey.

According to ‘’Lidia’s Italian-American Kitchen,’’ she and her family were among the thousands of Istrians who came to the United States to make a new home for themselves. More than 4.5 million Italians had entered the U.S before 1920, many from South Italy (e.g., Sicily, Campania, and Apulia). Due to the flux of Italian immigrants, Italian-American cuisine and culture emerged in the U.S.

Career

In an interview with Antoinette Bruno on her cooking inspirations, Lidia stated:

I don’t remember life without cooking. My grandmother had a little inn in Italy, and she cooked for all the laborers coming into town. I helped with the little tasks, like shelling beans. But my grandparents did it all – they farmed, and they also processed their own olive oil, distilled grappa.

To help bring in money for the struggling family, 14-year-old Lidia lied about her age to get a job at a bakery on Broadway in Astoria named Walken's Bakery, owned by the parents of actor Christopher Walken, who later became a close family friend. Lidia started as a salesgirl but gradually moved up to assisting the bakers with baking breads and decorating desserts, and even managed to get her mother a job at the bakery since Erminia did not speak English well enough to return to her former profession as a schoolteacher.

Eager to rediscover her Italian cooking roots, Lidia moved on to work in several Italian restaurants in Astoria. At one of them, she was introduced to her future husband, fellow Istrian immigrant Felice "Felix" Bastianich. The couple were married in 1966. Their first child, Joseph, was born in 1968. By 1971, the Bastianiches had opened their first restaurant, Buonavia, meaning "on the good road", in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens. They came up with their menu by collecting menus from the most popular and successful Italian restaurants in 1971. They had a set plan and executed it by hiring the best Italian-American chef they could find. After a brief break to deliver her second child, Tanya, Lidia began to work as sous-chef to learn everything she could, and was gradually able to make top-quality Italian food while adding Istrian traditional dishes to the menu.

The success of Buonavia led to the Bastianiches opening a second restaurant in Queens, Villa Secondo. It was here that Lidia first gained notice by food critics and cookbook authors, and here where Lidia began giving live cooking demonstrations, a prelude to her eventual career as a TV Cooking show hostess.

In 1981, The Bastianich family sold their two Queens restaurants and moved to Manhattan to start up Felidia in a small Manhattan brownstone. After nearly $750,000 worth of renovations and liquidating nearly every asset they had to build the restaurant of their dreams, Felidia finally opened to near-universal acclaim from food critics around the country. According to Lidia's Italian-American Kitchen, Felidia received "three stars from the New York Times and nationwide recognition for serving 'true' Italian fare."

Though Lidia did not want either of her two children to go into the restaurant business, son Joseph Bastianich, who had frequently worked at Felidia between school years as well as gaining expertise in winemaking, convinced her to partner with him in 1993 to found Becco (Italian for "peck, nibble, savor") in the Theatre District in Manhattan. Like Felidia, Becco was an immediate success and led to Lidia and Joseph deciding to open restaurants outside of New York as the beginnings of a franchise.

Also in 1993, Julia Child invited Lidia to film an episode for Child's upcoming PBS series, Julia Child: Cooking With Master Chefs, a series featuring acclaimed chefs from around the U.S., cooking dishes in their own home kitchens instead of within a restaurant setting. The series gave Lidia an instant boost of recognition and strengthened Lidia's desire for expansion of their franchise; by 1997, Lidia and Joseph had opened their first restaurant outside of Manhattan, Lidia's Pittsburgh. In addition, daughter Tanya Manuali had parlayed her Ph.D in Italian art history into co-ownership of a high-end travel agency called Lidia's Esperienze Italiane, where Tanya and Italian cooking expert Shelly Burgess Nicotra led tour groups throughout Italy to study the historical architecture and sample true Italian cuisine.

However, Felide and Lidia gradually began seeing eye-to-eye on fewer and fewer things--most notably, the pace of the expansion of their business--and the couple finally divorced in 1997. They remain close friends

Since the divorce, Lidia has continued her business expansion by successfully opening Lidia's Kansas City. In addition, she authored several cookbooks:

• Lidia's Family Table
• Lidia's Italian-American Kitchen
• Lidia's Italian Table
• Lidia's Italy

In 2001, PBS offered Lidia her own cooking show, which became Lidia's Italian-American Kitchen. Lidia Bastianich has been a fixture in the PBS cooking show lineups ever since, hosting two additional television series, Lidia's Family Table (still in reruns around the U.S.) and Lidia's Italy, launched in April 2007.

Personal life

Lidia now lives in Long Island, New York, in a Tudor-style manor house. Her kitchen has served as the set for all three of her TV series. Widowed in 1981, Erminia Motika (who answers to "Grandma Minia" when onscreen with Lidia) and longtime companion Giovanni Bencina live in an apartment on the property; Erminia plants and cultivates Lidia's vast backyard garden full of traditional Italian vegetables and herbs that Lidia often uses in the shooting of her TV series, and frequently serves as a sous-chef in Lidia's various TV series. Son Joseph, his wife Deanna, and their three children (Olivia, Miles, Ethan) live in Connecticut, but frequently return to New York to handle Joseph's growing restaurant business. Daughter Tanya, her husband Corrado Manuali (who serves as legal advisor to the ever-growing Bastianich restaurant business), and their two children (Lorenzo and Julia) live on Long Island just a few miles away from Lidia's house. All four generations have appeared at one time or another as contributors to Lidia's TV shows; Lidia's Family Table frequently featured Lidia giving simple pasta shaping lessons to her young grandchildren. In an interview with American Public Television, Lidia shared her opinion on how important passing along family traditions is to her and to her family:

"...food for me was a connecting link to my grandmother, to my childhood, to my past. And what I found out is that for everybody, food is a connector to their roots, to their past in different ways. It gives you security; it gives you a profile of who you are, where you come from.".

References

1. Istria on the Internet -- Gastronomy -- Lidia Bastianich; retrieved January 30, 2008
2. Istria on the Internet -- Gastronomy -- Lidia Bastianich; retrieved January 30, 2008
3. Bastianich, Lidia Matticchio. Lidia's Italian-American Kitchen. Alfred A. Knopf. New York, 2001.
4. StarChefs.com; retrieved January 31, 2008.
5. Istria on the Internet -- Gastronomy -- Lidia Bastianich; retrieved January 30, 2008
6. Istria on the Internet -- Gastronomy -- Lidia Bastianich; retrieved January 30, 2008
7. "Lidia Bastianich Navigator" from NYTimes.com
8. At Home With Lidia Bastianich, A Recipe Kept Warm For 55 Years, retrieved January 30, 2008.
9. "Lidia Bastianich Navigator" from NYTimes.com
10. "American Public Television Online"

External links

• Official website

• Living people
• American chefs
• Businesspeople
• Naturalized citizens of the United States
• Italian-Americans
• 1947 births
• American television chefs
• Restaurateurs