Michael White

Expert Interview: Michael White

Behind the Chef

What were your favorite foods growing up?
My mom's meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and buttered peas.

When did you decide you wanted to be a chef?
Food was always important in my family, but it was when I was watching the Great Chefs series on Discovery channel that I realized I wanted to be a chef!

Where and when did your career in food begin?
My career began when I started working for Paul Bartolotta at Spiaggia in 1991.

If you didn't become a chef, what would you be?
A race car driver.

Who/what has shaped your cooking the most over the years?
The passion for cooking has really shaped me, as has travelling and living abroad.

What are your favorite culinary weapons in the kitchen?
Microplane, Japanese knives, mandoline

What influences your cooking style and particularly the menu at Convivio, Alto?
Italy, my wife, taste memories.

What is your favorite secret ingredient?
Colatura di Alici...Italian fish sauce.

What is the one rule or value you try to instill in all of your staff?
Passion. You've got to love what you do and you must have respect for ingredients.

If I'm trying to watch my weight and I'm eating at your restaurant, what am I ordering to eat?
Grilled Fish with olive oil and lemon

What was the most challenging meal you had to make? Why?
The most challenging meal I had to do was back in the day I was at Spiaggia, and I had just gotten a phone call from Charlie Trotter, who said he wanted to come over to Spiaggia for lunch. When I said we weren't open, he said, I'm coming with Ferran Adria, Daniel Boulud, Katsuya from Sydney and Jeffrey Steingarten. Needless to say--I opened! I had just gotten a 2 kilo shipment of white truffles in that morning, so I cooked an entire white truffle meal. It was the great. When I went up to the table, Ferran Adria asked me a question--in Spanish. He said "por que non pone sal en los trufas blancas despues que cortado" (why don't you put sea salt on the white truffles after you slice them) and my answer was: "that's why you're Ferran Adria....and I have a lot of work to do!" But, the reason was because in Italy you don't put salt on white truffles: It's about the perfume and essence and not necessarily the flavor, but that was Adria, always thinking about the why.

What was your worst restaurant disaster?
Among the usual--inopportune burns--of both dishes and hands--needless to say I have developed asbestos fingertips.

What is your least favorite food?
Pickled burdock.

What is your beverage of choice?
Dublin Doctor Pepper--real Dr. Pepper made from Cane Sugar. It's the champagne of soda and you can only get it in Texas.

What are some recent dining and culinary trends you have been observing?
While I'm not really a trendy guy, I do think that everything that was old is new again. Also, right now, with a volatile market, people don't want to be confused when they eat. They want sustenance--good food that tastes good.

When you are not eating at your own restaurant, you are eating at?
Sripraphai; Korean bbq, anything Asian, really! pizza at Luzzo's.

Which foreign country inspires your style most?
Italy.

What was the most spectacular meal you have ever had?
I'll never forget eating side by side with my wife at Tallievent before we were married. That was the first time I ever ate side by side, and while it's not normally my preference, I got to watch everything going on in the dining room.

What is your best cooking tip for a home enthusiast?
Cook with a glass of red wine next to you! Also, I think that people adhere to recipes too much--I think people should do what feels comfortable and use the recipes as a guideline, not the gospel.

What do you eat when you are home?
Italian canned tuna or miso soup.

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Michael White is one of the most passionate chefs I've seen! I love his rendition of "sfizi"--Italy in One Bite--from the renowned restaurant Convivio. Can't wait to go there and eat!

posted Oct 30 2008 4:31 PM by dtravali

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Expert Profile

Although Michael White's soulful, flavorful interpretations of Italian cuisine indicate otherwise, he is a native of Italy who absorbed generations of recipes at birth. He is a Midwestern boy who spent the majority of his childhood days in Beloit, Wisconsin playing football and swimming competitively. At the time, cooking was just an enjoyable family pastime and an escape from the chilling winters of the Northern United States. White decided to try his hand at culinary school on a whim, pursuing a career out of something that had been only a passing fancy. He enrolled at Kendall Culinary Institute in 1989 and a year later, secured a position prepping in Chicago's most famous Italian restaurant, Spiaggia. He spent a year and a half learning from Chef Paul Bartolotta and, wanting to find the origin of his mentor's awe-inspiring recipes, he followed the chef's footsteps to Italy.

He trained with the venerated Italian chef Valentino Marcattilii at Ristorante San Domenico in Imola and it was there, learning to cook in the Old World-style kitchen, that he began his Italian transformation. He learned everything about the kitchen while in Imola — visiting the markets to choose the best produce, making pasta by hand, creating fragrant sauces, scaling and filleting Mediterranean fish, butchering lamb and poultry. For the next seven years, he studied the hands-on, ingredient-directed cooking style of the Italians, working with Marcattilii and traveling across the country for casual, but equally important, cooking lessons with friends. "I was the American, standing over Italians' shoulders asking 'Why?'", he says of his need to understand their every move in the kitchen. It was on one of those cooking jaunts that he met his wife, a Southern Italian woman whose passion for and knowledge of Italy's food offers constant inspiration for the chef.

White returned to the U.S. in 2001 with his technique firmly rooted in his glowing respect for Italy's culinary traditions and a high-spirited desire to showcase the country's finest ingredients and recipes. He returned to Spiaggia as Chef de Cuisine and contributed to the restaurant's four-star review from The Chicago Tribune. In 2002, he took New York by storm as Executive Chef of Fiamma Osteria. The restaurant garnered a glowing three-star review from The New York Times and White was named Esquire's Best New Chef, 2002. White also brought his famous recipes to at-home culinary enthusiasts with his book, Fiamma: The Essence of Contemporary Italian Cooking.

In 2007, White partnered with New York's accomplished restaurateur Chris Cannon and took the helm of the James Beard Award winning L'Impero and Alto. With White's Northern Italian menu and the partners' shared love for Italian dining and hospitality, Alto quickly garnered a three-star review from The New York Times. In July 2008, White and Cannon recreated L'Impero into Convivio, a restaurant that oozes the soul and spirit of Southern Italy. Located in Manhattan's Tudor City, Convivio allows guests to dine as they would in Italy — leisurely, sensuously and with gusto. Endlessly inspired by the notion of taste memory, White strives to recreate the sensory feel of true Italian dining experiences with each dish he creates.

Following the success of Alto and Convivio, White continues his passion with his latest venture with Chris Cannon, Marea, a cozy, new Italian seafood eatery in the former San Domenico space.