NorthBay biz reports on celebrity chef Michael Chiarello’s latest venture: Bottega, a Yountville restaurant that has the TV star returning to the kitchen—with delicious results.
The economy may be suffering, but no one would guess it when stopping in for lunch at Bottega, Michael Chiarello’s new restaurant in Yountville.
Whether in the glimmery interior or out under the orange awning that shades the terrazzo, people are lounging, sipping drinks, relaxing beside one of the wood-burning fireplaces and otherwise luxuriating as they wait to be seated. The place is packed. The dress code, for lunch anyway, seems widely inclusive, ranging from jeans and sneakers to ladies dressed as if for formal tea.
When an elegantly attired woman approaches the hostess and asks for a table, she’s told the restaurant is completely booked. “Oh no,” says the woman, smiling patiently, “I just want to make a reservation.”
Again, kindly (but firmly this time), the hostess repeats that the restaurant is booked.
“No, no, no,” says the woman, speaking now more slowly and distinctly, as she might to someone for whom English is not the first language, “I mean for dinner.”
It’s 2 p.m. The hostess smiles and dutifully studies her computer. “Well, we could seat six at 10 p.m. tonight.”
So what’s drawing all these people to yet another restaurant in Yountville? Whether consciously or not, the draw may be the mysterious something that Chiarello calls “Napa Style,” which he’s conjured and materialized into his own retail brand. Chiarello, whose trim, youthful good looks exhibit none of the signs of stress and excess associated with being a celebrity chef, restaurateur, cookbook author, entrepreneur, TV star, vintner, tastemaker and now even blogger, opened Bottega in December 2008 to enthusiastic reviews. The name, in Italian, means “artist’s studio,” which he interprets as a place you go to perfect your craft. “It’s everything I love to do all tied up in one spot,” he says. “My wife and I have a winery, and I farm 20 acres. So it’s a place to celebrate my wine and certainly my cooking craft, and the hospitality.”
This is his first time “back at the stove” since 2000, when he left Tra Vigne, the iconic St. Helena restaurant where, since 1986, he’d been partner and executive chef. That venture began when Chiarello was 24 and barely four years out of the Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park. Even today, Tra Vigne can be considered the quintessential experience of what he calls “Napa Style.”
The early days
“He used to cook me breakfast at Tra Vigne when I’d come back at 7:30 in the morning after being up for three or four days in the ER,” says Larry Turley, who, back in 1981, was an emergency ward physician and just starting Frog’s Leap Winery (with partner John Williams). Turley remembers the young chef as intense and focused in the kitchen. “I’d see him yell and scream,” he says, in his soft, Tennessee accent, “but I never saw him throw anything.” He chuckles.
A certain tension in the kitchen isn’t a mystery to those who understand effort. “It’s hard to launch a restaurant,” says Brian Larky, a winemaker and Italian wine specialist who founded Dalla Terra, a national portfolio of Italian wines, and who climbs mountains, races yachts, runs white water, skis deep powder and fly-fishes (sometimes with his friend, Chiarello). “Who’d want to launch a restaurant?” He laughs.
“Some might say, ‘That’s just ego play.’ But, it’s like; God, do you know how hard it is—and how hard Michael works at making Bottega the success that it is? He’s hands-on, seven days a week.”
Eileen Gordon, who married Chiarello in 2003, explains that the young chef made his individual mark in a highly competitive field by staying true to his roots. “He’s courageous,” she says of her husband. “As a scrappy young restaurateur thrown into a pretty big project at a very young age, he quickly turned to ingredients as a way to deliver a really exceptional product on the plate and also to be able to add flavor and interest quickly. So he developed his fresh mix of herbs and spices, and he developed the olive oils and learned how to infuse them with flavors—basil, roasted garlic, red pepper—that became another go-to ingredient for him.”
Coming from an Italian family, the idea of cooking, for Chiarello, begins with the authentic ingredients. “Ingredients were king,” says Gordon. “In his Italian family, they made everything themselves. There was someone in some branch of the family who knew how to do each thing. That was out of necessity.”
Chiarello grew up in Turlock, a rich agricultural region of the Central Valley, as part of an extended farming family originally from Calabria, in Southern Italy. He says his earliest memories were cooking with his mother. “My mom was an extraordinary cook. She was a great forager,” he says. “As a kid, gathering dinner had a sport to it. You heard stories as you were walking around foraging for food.” His mother taught him to look for mushrooms and wild greens, and the process became, for him, a multi-layered experience about stories, taste, family and the land itself.
“I was really looking for flavor in my food, not just good taste.”
He explains the difference: “If you’re serving something on your grandmother’s china, and you have a little story to tell about your grandmother and this dish she taught you to make, it brings the dish to life. It’s the things you emotionally taste—that’s flavor. It comes from relationships. It’s the entirety. Intellectual, emotional, historical, spiritual. It has memory to it.”
The relationship between family, food and the bounty of the land is central to the culture Chiarello brings to Napa Valley. “It’s that basis that literally grounds him,” says Larky. “Whether it’s his olive oil, his preserves, his ragous, his artisianal aging and air drying of salumi; it comes from his base, his heritage, his upbringing, and it provides his foundation. All this informs his comfort level, which is evident in his easygoing demeanor both on- and off-camera.
“He really knows where this stuff comes from, he knows the farmer—maybe he is the farmer, maybe he’s getting it from a buddy of his from another area, but I think that relationship is what grounds him. It’s what gives him a sense of familiarity, of confidence.”
In the early days, Chiarello foraged about the Napa Valley landscape for the little wild greens, the mushrooms and more dangerous game as well. “We used to go wild boar hunting,” says Turley with a resonant laugh. “He’s not a very good shot, but he really knows how to butcher wild boar.” Chiarello had learned from his grandfather, a butcher by trade. Turley, now proprietor of Turley Wine Cellars in Templeton, Calif., says he used to watch Chiarello take the animal apart with his hands, not a knife. “He’d make prosciutto out of the boar, and sausages.”
Beyond the shooting and cooking of it, Turley says he’s always found it interesting to talk to Chiarello about food. “For me, the greatest compliment in winemaking is, ‘Boy, this really tastes good.’ None of this, ‘precocious wine for such little breeding.’ And Michael’s food really tastes good.”
Turley then describes a dinner a few years back for about 15 winemakers from Italy for whom Michael cooked garlic crab. “They’d never seen Dungeness crab. They didn’t know what to make of these big, gnarly things on the plate, and they were sort of reluctant to go diving into it. Then the platter came around to me and I plopped one on my plate and dove in. About a half an hour later, I heard Michael calling in to the restaurant, ‘Send more crab out, they’ve eaten it all!’”
Larky, who’s known Chiarello for 18 years and spends a lot of time in Italy with top chefs and wine producers, observes Chiarello from a slightly different level than most. “And on all those levels,” he says, “he’s right up there. He’s terrific.” He sees, in Chiarello and the finest Italian chefs, a common bond. “What unites them is this common grounding in ingredients, in simplicity. Also the warm, comfortable ambiance of their restaurants.”
A study in ambiance
“I love the tension between old and new,” says Chiarello, “between refined and rustic. It’s a lot of what I do with my food.” The dining room at Bottega, for example, while in an 1870 structure that was one of the first wineries in the valley, blends a rustic charm with a contemporary feel. Architect Michael Guthrie, who also designed Tra Vigne, has managed to create, in the vast, high-ceilinged, 90-seat space, an intimate feel with soft light, muted acoustics and a complex set of visual textures. “There are a lot of layers to it,” says Chiarello. “When you sit in a restaurant, you’re looking at the person you’re across from, but you’re also looking around. There has to be something that can gather your eye.” That may be a fireplace, a bundle of newly baked Italian bread, a table in a corner where wine glasses sparkle or a couple nuzzling in mellow light.
The new restaurant lets history breathe by leaving some walls with exposed brick and covering others with Venetian plaster, which uses marble dust to create a lustrous patina. The interior colors and textures are those of nature—butter yellows, mushroom greys, and deep browns, ochres and greens. Outdoors, the vast awning moderates the California sun on the terrazzo and enhances the sense of living both outdoors and in.
“We spent a lot of time on the details,” says Chiarello. “A friend of Eileen’s did the surfaces here and spent a lot of time getting all the colors just right, coming each day to see how they look in different lights.” He pauses a moment. “Once you see how your restaurant’s used, you’re constantly evolving it.” This thought leads to a reflection.
“The restaurant business, if you’re not careful, can turn into a mistress and can tear a family up.” When he was wrestling with the decision to return to an active restaurant business, Eileen, and Giana, the youngest of three daughters from his previous marriage, encouraged him. “I got back into the business because I was dying to do another restaurant. Eileen and Giana said, ‘Are you just going to run a retail business for the rest of your life, or are you going to get back to practicing your craft?’” They knew if he were running a restaurant, he couldn’t be cooking at home, but he promised himself he’d find a way to adjust to the schedule.
Waitress Jenny Brost, who moved to Yountville from Monterey County just to work with Chiarello, says Chiarello seems to have found the balance. “It’s exciting being around Michael,” she says. “There’s all this—the restaurant and the television shows—but what people don’t see is the way he loves his family. His family is a whole other part of him. Just this morning, he was in the kitchen with his 4-year-old son, Aidan, who was standing up on the stool, cooking with his dad.”
“I was missing my little boy,” Chiarello smiles, “and I said, ‘OK, today I’m going to make meatballs.’ And I’m like an old grandmother; I won’t let anyone else make the meatballs. So I said, ‘Do you want to come cook with Papa?’ And he ran in with his little chef’s uniform and he put it on and stayed from maybe 8:30 to noon.”
Gordon recalls the scene fondly: “That’s the beauty of being a little bit older and wiser; you get to have your passions in life, but are smart enough not to let it take over and crush all your other passions.”
Chiarello is still working hard and promises new applicants he no longer screams in the kitchen. “I had my first night off last night,” he says, after working two months straight. “At least now, with a chef de cuisine, I don’t have to go out and find the fish and worry if it’s coming in on time.”
“He has me to do that now!” laughs Chef de Cuisine Nick Ritchie, who’s worked for Chiarello in various ascending roles since he was 13, when he started running dishes and sweeping floors in the deli at Tra Vigne. Through that experience, Ritchie says he fell in love with the whole business. “Michael’s a genius,” he says. “I couldn’t think of anyone who could show me the way better than him.” Aside from practical help, such as helping Nick to get a scholarship to the Culinary Institute in Hyde Park, Michael has been an inspiration. “His love and passion for the food is the starting point. Even more, it’s his love and passion just for throwing the party. He feels the need to make every single person feel welcome and at home.”
Jennifer Patterson, a young woman with a blond ponytail, usually cooks in the restaurant, but on the Saturday we visited Bottega, she was helping out in the retail store. Patterson started watching Chiarello on television when she was 20. (Chiarello’s television shows include the Emmy-winning “Easy Entertaining,” currently on the Food Network, the earlier “Napa Style” on Fine Living and “Michael Chiarello’s Napa” on PBS.) “He’s the reason I’m a cook,” says Patterson. “It’s his brain, his passion, it’s splattered out all over here!” she grins and gestures around at the lavish array of products in the Napa Style store. “He’s like Jackson Pollack! It all looks gorgeous to me.”
Be very, very good
“Beyond food being well-prepared and well-served, I think there’s an experience that happens at the table,” says Chiarello. “There has to be a single point of view that’s consistent through everything you see. From the color palate to what the waiters are wearing and their attitudes to the juxtaposition of the flatware to the china and glassware, it’s everybody’s desire to make that experience absolutely consistent.” When times are economically challenging, he continues, all of this matters even more. “You have to be very, very good.”
“I have a tremendous amount of respect for what Thomas [Keller] has done in the Napa Valley,” he says. “Jacques [Pepin] is one of the greatest chefs I’ve ever cooked with. To see him on his game as a professional—he’s extraordinary. Then there’s Joachim Splichal at Patina Restaurant in Los Angeles, an extraordinary cook whose name should be on the tip of the tongue of every serious cook in America.”
Chiarello says he has great passion for restaurateurs, too. He mentions Drew Nierporent, who just opened a restaurant in New York called Corton: “We were talking this morning, and he’s like, ‘Hey, you idiot, what are you doing opening in the worst economy in our grandparents’ lifetime?’ And I said, ‘Same to you!’”
Diners at our neighboring table on the afternoon we visited Bottega seemed oblivious to anything but waves of ecstasy, expressed at the arrival of each successive course. By the end of our lunch, as we were happily sipping very delicious black coffee poured from a white porcelain pot, our neighbors were falling about themselves, oohing over each bite and making all the sounds of satisfied customers as they sampled each others’ plates.
“Sage ice cream!” one cries.
“Unbelievable!” gasps another.
A third booms out with joy, “We are so not going to have room for dinner!”
