Celebrity Chef Lidia Bastianich True to Her Roots

Aug. 23, 2009— -- Lidia Bastianich is not the most famous name in the crowded world of celebrity TV chefs. She doesn't excel at 20-minute meals or semi-homemade dinners. In an era where there is a Food Network star for every kind of cooking, Bastianich has kept to what she knows best for the past 30 years: authentic Italian food.

Bastianich might be best known for her Public Television series "Lidia's Italy" or her companion books based on the series. For the past 10 years, she has taken her viewers along as she cooks iconic dishes from around Italy. Her friendliness and short stature make her the quintessential Italian grandmother. And her fans have reacted: Up to 3 million people tune in to watch her each week, she says.

"I want to make their time worthwhile," she says at her office above the restaurant she owns and operates, Felidia, on Manhattan's East Side. "If they are going to spend a half-hour watching me, then they need to take something out of that. I don't pretend to be what I'm not. I deliver a culture."

But viewers might not know that Bastianich started her food career in a refugee camp in northeastern Italy in the 1950s. Around the time of her birth, in 1947, her home region of Istria, which had been awarded to Italy after World War I, was lopped off to become part of Yugoslavia. Part of the arrangement included mandatory speaking of Serbo-Croatian instead of the family's native Italian. They left in frustration and escaped across the border to Italy, where they joined others from across Eastern Europe in a refuge camp.

"What was interesting was clusters of people, the diversity of languages and songs that they would sing, and so forth," Bastianich, 62, said.

It was there that Bastianich began missing her homeland, she says. Wanting to better connect with Istria, she says she began cooking dishes native to her region, which is now Croatia.