Boston Restaurant Reviews, Providence Restaurant Reviews

wanted to leave my apprenticeship job after one year. My dad told me not just to stick it out for the second year, but to stick it out for the third. I was 23 years old at the time, and three years seemed an eternity. But I stayed. And I’m glad that I

stayed, because it was one of the most important jobs of my life. It turned out to be something that built such a strong foundation to my cooking that had I not stayed, I wonder where I would be today,” Michael Schlow announces and draws a long breath.

He is sitting in Via Matta, his Italian restaurant, relaxed, casually dressed and for all the world just a regular diner. There’s no hint of ego from this phenomenally successful chef. He is comfortable in his own skin and unaffected by the books, TV shows and personal appearances.

Make no mistake Michael is the real deal. His mini-empire of Boston restaurants, founded along with Esti Parsons and Christopher Myers have garnered international recognition for their superb cuisine and exemplary standards. He has also trained a cadre of lieutenants who now handle the day-to-day cooking at each restaurant. They implement his vision with a faithful accuracy. His latest cookbook “It’s About Time” is a stunning departure from traditional cookbooks and has received rave reviews.

Given such a successful career, surely there is room for at least a bit of an ego or bravado. No sir! Not from Michael. He is as aware of the transient nature of “chef stardom” as any chef I have ever met. “As chefs, we do have a lifespan, realistically. Not just our lifespan as humans, but as chefs. There comes a point where restaurants fall in and out of fashion or favor,” he brushes his hand across his face. It’s obviously a habit. Not a nervous tic, just a sign of contemplation and acceptance of the ways of the world.

We turned to the subject of staff, the chefs that now work with him. “The advice that I try to give to the young cooks that are working for me is don’t worry so much about money at the very beginning of your career.” Like most of us, Michael wants his apprentices to learn the same values that he did. As a young chef he worked for renowned New York chef Pino Luongo at Le Madri and Coco Pazzo. It was one of those Dickensian apprenticeships that consisted of incredible hard work and no money. “I probably should have paid him, because he was teaching me so much,” he decides after describing seemingly horrific working conditions, only excused by the incredible amount of learning that went along with them.

Is Michael hard to work with? “I believe that if you are cooking through intimidation and fear, you can’t be cooking with love and passion and dedication at the same time. I don’t want my cooks afraid of me. I want them to respect me.” I asked what he thought of the Gordon Ramsay approach, swearing so much that his assistants cower in fear. “I want my staff to feel that if I’m in the kitchen, they can always approach me, and I will do the best that I can to answer their questions, that there is no bad question, there is no stupid question. There may come a time, though, where I’ll say I know we’ve been over this ten times at this point. Now, am I not teaching well, or are my chefs not learning well? What’s the disconnect here? Or is this person not trainable?”

“I still love to cook, in fact it is something I look forward to. Preparing a meal for friends is a way for me to relax...”

Moving on to cooking fashion and the way the next generation of chefs are approaching food. “I think all too often, they think complicated means it’s better, and somehow worth more money then. I would adamantly disagree.” This from a man who runs one of the most revered temples to great food on the east coast, Radius. But it’s true none of the dishes he creates are in the 50 ingredients and 2 days to cook class. Michael’s food is a delicate balance of flavor, texture and appearance that focuses on pleasing the palate rather than impressing the intellect.

His new venture - Alta Strada - is a restaurant in the suburbs. OK, Wellesley is an incredibly well-heeled suburb, but it’s definitely not downtown anywhere. Michael wants it to become a true neighborhood restaurant. “There’s something that is beautiful about being a place that people come to count on. It becomes their place. The guests have a sense of ownership of it. They come because it’s in their town, and they bring their friends and their family.” As in many things he’s right on the leading edge of the next wave in restaurant culture, the return to the neighborhood restaurant.

His final thoughts are characteristically modest. “I think of myself as a work in progress, and I have a lot more to do, and a lot more hopefully interesting ideas that I’d like to see happen in the restaurant world, and in the food world in general.” One thing is for sure Michael Schlow is a great chef and restaurateur who can still tell the showman element from the real job. It’s most likely that he will endure long after many of his contemporaries head to the retirement home for ex-super chefs.