Call me crazy, but I’ve always believed that Mario Batali and Gwyneth Paltrow really are in friends in real life. They’ve known each other for 18 years, and they’ve even taken their friendship on the road for “Spain – On the Road Again” back in 2008. I’m not saying that they sit up every night braiding each other’s hair, but I think they’re somewhere between professional friends and BFFs. Well, Goop attended/cohosted a dinner at Batali’s latest restaurant, La Sirena, in Manhattan this week. Gwyneth and Batali actually collaborated on the dinner, which has something vaguely to do with Goop.com. And Gwyneth deigned to consent to an interview with Vanity Fair (they’re no longer fighting). That’s how much she loves Batali: she helped promote his restaurant by giving an interview to VF! You can read the full piece here, and here are some of the best quotes (sidenote: this piece is super-annoying and sycophantic towards Gwyneth).
Her 18-year friendship with Batali: “He was just teasing me about every boyfriend I brought to [Batali’s restaurant] Babbo over the years. He liked Brad Pitt, if you want to know. Didn’t like Ben Affleck that much.”
How to approach healthy cooking/eating: “First of all, I feel like, there’s no pressure to cook for yourself. There’s also an idea of, like, ‘I have to do this.’ Some people work really hard, they’re exhausted, and they don’t want to. For me, it’s very relaxing and grounding, so I like to do it, and I have a lot of friends who like to do it, but also feel like they don’t have time.”
She loves shows about murder: “I love murder shows. I finished The Night Manager. And then I just finished Marcella, which I binge-watched. And now I’m watching The Night Of on HBO—have you seen this?—it’s another murder show. It’s about this Pakistani kid in Queens, and he gets caught up in this murder, and it’s amazing. I love a murder show. Murder. Murder’s my thing. I don’t know why! It’s so creepy.”
I imagine to get an interview with Gwyneth, you have to write something about how flawless she seems or, as the VF writer says, something about “the sheer magnificence of her hair.” That alone makes me question everything about VF. As for the quote about Affleck and Pitt… Gwyneth has talked about and around her on-and-off relationship with Affleck back in the ‘90s. I don’t think the relationship was a happy one for either, but I was always sort of on Gwyneth’s side. It always seemed like she was trying to help him get his sh-t together, and after their final split, it seemed like the first big time that he self-sabotaged publicly. As for Brad… he really was “the one who got away” for Gwyneth. She’s said before that everyone in her life loved Brad back then.
Photos courtesy of Getty.
