Giada De Laurentiis recalled a heartbreaking moment involving Mario Batali that she said shaped her opinion of him - and how he perceived her as a chef. "This is a person we're not supposed to talk about but I'm going to," De Laurentiis, 54, said on a July episode of Samah Dada's On the Menu YouTube Show in a clip that was reposted to TikTok earlier this month. De Laurentiis went on to recall the time that she was writing her first cookbook, Everyday Italian, in 2005 and she asked Batali, 64, to write a foreword. "He's really the main guy I had worked with.