Batali won't be judging "Top Chef": UPDATED

Buon giorno.

I hope you get a chance to read my stories today on Mario Batali and Marcella Hazan.

They are two Italian cooking icons with very different personalities, but not so very different culinary philosophies.

Hazan is known as a strict taskmaster in the kitchen. She doesn't compromise her cooking and I think that's very admirable.

And while she doesn't suffer fools gladly, Marcella is much more congenial than you can imagine. She loved teaching and told me she misses it very much. I so enjoyed our chat and I'm looking forward to our on-stage interview Oct. 7 in Philadelphia.

She'll also be appearing that morning on "The Today Show."

Now on to Mario. The photo above was taken by News Journal shooter Ginger Wall in 2005 when Batali was at the DuPont Theatre with Jacques Pepin and Gael Greene.

Watching Mario's new PBS TV series "Spain....On the Road Again" made me immediately want to jump on a plane to Spain. It's part travel series, part cooking show. It's available on

iTunes for a download. Here's the iTunes direct link.

Mario says he won't be showing up as a guest judge on the upcoming Bravo TV series "Top Chef," which is taped its fifth season in New York and premieres Wednesday, Nov. 12 at 10 p.m.

"No, that's not for me," says Batali of judging, even though his former chef Ilan Hall, who worked at Batali's Spanish eatery Casa Mono, was the winner of the show's second season.

(Interesting side note: Hall's winning dinner served on that season's finale was almost a word-for-word, or would that ingredient-for-ingredient?, rendering of some of the Casa Mono menu items. So much for originality. So was Batali mad that Hall, uh, borrowed a few dishes? "No. Everyone knew it," he says.)

I get the feeling Batali isn't so much a "Top Chef" fan. He says none of the winners have been doing much - in restaurant kitchens - since their win, beside being celebrity chefs and, maybe, "working for the Almond Board."

"You're only as good as your last dish of lasagna," Batali says.

And he thinks Hall may have gotten kind of a raw deal in the editing department. "He actually wasn't the [jerk] they portrayed him to be." (Just so you know: He didn't use the word jerk. But I can't use the word he used here.)

So no Batali this season, or possibly ever.

"Not for me. They already have enough cranky, snarky guys on there. I couldn't dog anyone like that."