Mario Batali outside the Common Good Bakery in Traverse City, Michigan, in August. 

T he Traverse City Food & Wine Festival celebrated its second year this August, toasting the crops and catch that make northern Michigan a food and holiday destination. Headliners included Ruth Reichl, in conversation with TASTE editor-in-chief Matt Rodbard; Andrew Zimmern, hosting a buffet dinner at Black Star Farms; and Food Network Star winner Aarti Sequeira. Further down the bill was another familiar name, one that once outshone all the others. The festival bio described him as “a retired Italian-American chef who… flies around the great lakes in seaplanes and helicopters with a song in his heart.”

That was Mario Batali, the celebrity chef whose empire collapsed in December 2017, when several women, most of them his employees, accused him of sexual misconduct. He apologized at the time, but has denied later accusations of assault. Batali left New York for northern Michigan and has lived there under the radar but still on the air. At the nadir of his legal troubles, he continued to participate in Traverse City radio promotions sponsored by local businesses; in early 2020, amid Covid-related court delays back in New York, Batali judged an on-air ramen cookoff, and signed books and cooked a private dinner for a morning show contest winner, and in May 2021, just weeks before settling a years-long sexual harassment and discrimination investigation with the New York attorney general, he surfaced on social media with a local rock DJ he hustled for $10 on the golf course.

I told him the story I had come to write, about what I perceived as the struggle of a big fish trying to recapture their past glory in a prison of their own making. “I don’t struggle,” Batali told me. “I’m good.”

In the past few years, he’s been hustling for bigger stakes. In October 2023, he returned to his own Instagram account where he maintained his 400,000-plus followers. This past May, he turned up unannounced at a private lunch in Manhattan, the city where he made his name. As Batali has slowly emerged from his exile, is he salting the water for an attempted return to public life?

That question demanded a closer look. Batali would close the festival weekend with his second annual Ligurian Lunch at Traverse City’s Bonobo Winery. When the local tourism board offered to arrange a seat at the lunch and an interview with him, I booked a flight.

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