There are few things better in life than sitting outdoors on a warm afternoon in late fall, dining on three kinds of freshly made pasta with Lidia Bastianich.

Especially when Bastianich is doing the cooking.

The dishes she prepares — spaghettini with shrimp, rigatoni with pancetta, and gnocchi with mushrooms — are delicious. You can taste the freshness of the tomatoes, the fruitiness of the olive oil and the earthiness of the mushrooms.

If it’s possible for food to transport you to Italy, this does the trick.

Sure, maybe it’s the pasta, maybe it’s the red wine or even the company of the celebrated chef herself.

But it’s easy to see why the country has taken to Bastianich as a leading interpreter of Italian and Italian-American cuisine for the masses.

Yet she would say that the reason for America’s continuing love affair with Italian cooking isn’t Lidia Bastianich, but the goodness of the food itself.

“It’s repeatedly the No. 1 ethnic cuisine here, followed by Chinese. When people go out to eat, they eat Italian. It is real, it is the cuisine that people really eat,” Bastianich says, after taping a show for “Jayni’s Kitchen,” a cooking program hosted by Jayni Carey that appears on Sunflower Broadband’s Channel 6.

“Italian food is not made up by chefs. It’s not just concocted for an experience.”

Conduit for Italian tradition

Bastianich is widely regarded as the “First Lady” of Italian cuisine and restaurants in the United States — and it’s no wonder.

She’s an industry unto herself.

Bastianich owns award-winning Italian restaurants in New York City, Pittsburgh and Kansas City, Mo.

She has three popular Italian cookbooks on the market: “La Cusina Di Lidia,” “Lidia’s Italian Table” and “Lidia’s Italian-American Kitchen.”

And she is the star of two long-running series about Italian and Italian-American cooking — companions to her cookbooks — that have played coast to coast on public television.

Bastianich has developed two lines of specialty tomato sauces, Lidia’s Flavors of Italy and another line produced exclusively for Williams Sonoma.

And she founded Lidia’s Esperienze Italiane in 1996, which leads culinary and cultural tours of Italy with leading experts in all fields.

The Queens, N.Y., native has more pots on the stove than a grandmother at Thanksgiving.

But the hard work of being Lidia Bastianich, an interpreter of Italian cuisine for the masses, hasn’t worn her out.

“I still have a grand time. I still enjoy it,” she says, smiling.

One of Bastianich’s successes is Lidia’s Kansas City, her Italian restaurant that celebrates its fifth anniversary Thursday — an occasion she has come to Kansas to celebrate.

“We have a great following of loyal customers, and the press has been great,” she says.

Her partner in the Kansas City venture is David Wagner, a native of the Kansas City area and a Kansas State University graduate. They’ve known each other for 14 years.

“What immediately attracted me to Lidia is that she is as real and genuine as it gets. Her cooking is a very personal thing. It comes out of her history, her culture and her life,” Wagner says.

“And she can communicate with people. Lidia has a way of taking people down the trail of understanding that is rare.”

Bastianich is thrilled with the response her Kansas City restaurant has received.

“This is great. Here, in the middle of America, they are getting my philosophy. It’s a tradition that I’m just the conduit of,” she says.

Communicate through simplicity

Bastianich, who has been in the restaurant business for 32 years, looks to Italy in all she does in the kitchen.

Her books are filled with dozens of recipes derived from her Italian upbringing about 90 miles northeast of Venice, and later in Queens.

“I haven’t invented one of them (her recipes). They’re all from the Italian culture. It amazes me how much I can learn from Italy yet. I would love to go there much more than I do,” she says.

Many celebrity chefs are driven by the media to be more and more creative, until their craft becomes all about themselves and their innovations, according to Bastianich.

“But to invent and create, you need a source,” she says.

For her, that’s the culture in which she was raised — a background where she learned to appreciate the value of the freshest and best ingredients possible, as well as culinary traditions passed down through generations.

Bastianich’s writing style and persona on television have been shaped by the challenge to be real, simple and straightforward in order to communicate effectively.

“I decided, in my first book, I was going to simplify everything, breaking down some of the things I do as a chef. You want to touch people, to enter into their soul and their homes,” she says.

“It’s just great to be able to be that link to them to achieve certain things in the kitchen.”