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Chef Michael Smith: The Boy Next Door
By Ivy Knight
Before Michael Smith came into our living rooms with his shows, Chef at Large and Chef at Home he graduated with honours from the Culinary Institute of America. Then he cooked in London, South America, Texas and the Caribbean before landing in New York under Chef David Bouley. Then he went to Prince Edward Island. What?
I grew up in PEI and we ate really well, at home. My hippie parents had a half-acre garden. Mom made bread, jams, pickles. We froze down a huge portion of the harvest each fall in the big chest freezer in the basement. I remember spending hours with my sister, Sarah Jane, sucking the air out of Ziploc bags of kernelled corn and shelled peas. We also grew rabbits which ended up in the freezer too, alongside the butchered side of beef and whole pig we got from a local farmer in exchange for the hay from our fields. Local before it became a catchphrase.
My parents' hippie friends were the same, they made their own bread, started a food co-op to get in organic cheeses and cool vinegars or different grains from other parts of Canada. The Waterman family made wine; dandelion, strawberry, beet and aged them underground. We went strawberry-picking, blueberry-picking, apple-picking, clam-digging. It was so Little House on the Prairie, only in rubber boots and Levis tooling around the Island in a rusty Lada.
The only times I ate badly were in the homes of middle-class Islanders (the poor Islanders ate pretty much like we did) where I learned that if you asked for butter you got margarine, asked for bread you got Wonder Bread, asked for cheddar you got processed cheese slices, asked for mayonnaise... you got the dreaded Miracle Whip. It was a place where fishermen ate fish sticks for dinner. It was totally fucked up.
"Why the Hell would this up and coming chef go to a place like PEI?," I got to ask him recently when he was in town to launch his new signature line of cookware with Sears. After the fans (over one hundred people showed up) have all met him and got an autograph we go to a back room to talk.
"I was two years out of the CIA and working under David Bouley. I was young and idealistic and as fascinating as Bouley was, the kitchen was a little rotten at the core. I started saying I wanted to get out to the country and cook and meet some farmers. I'd say this to people I'd meet, or try to impress girls with it. Then this job offer from a sleepy little inn in rural PEI fell into my lap and it was perfect for my idealistic vision. Nobody on PEI in 1992 was using local ingredients. I quickly put together a great team and we cooked with what was around us. We sniffed out incredible suppliers, by the end of my tenure at the Inn we had seventy-five local suppliers. At one point I stated that we used everything that could be grown on the Island on our menu and defied people to find a single thing we didn't use. That forced me to put emu on the menu briefly. Oh, that was bad."
In the beginning Michael had to start his own garden at the Inn at Bay Fortune because he couldn't find any suppliers with fresh herbs. That garden now covers two acres and has four full-time gardeners.
"Working at the Inn made food personal for me. Like the guy who showed up in the kitchen one day with asparagus he'd harvested from a wild patch on his farm. He tried to give it to me, I took it and told him to bring his wife in for dinner. We did 14 courses for them with that asparagus."
In 1998 after revolutionizing the way Spud Islanders thought about food. Michael Smith went into hyperdrive and gave us his first Life Network television show, 'The Inn Chef', and his first cookbook, Open Kitchen: A Chef's Day at the Inn at Bay Fortune. Soon, Food Network Canada launched and took The Inn Chef with it. In 1999 he published another cookbook, The Inn Chef.
In 2002 'Chef At Large' appeared and became one of Food Network's highest rated shows. People in 26 countries got to watch this friendly giant spend a day with Alice Waters teaching school kids how to garden, or in the offices of Bon Appetit seeing how an issue was put together or on the floor at Canoe seeing how they train their service staff. Canoe's Executive Chef, Anthony Walsh, has known Michael for years: "I've done dinners with him before, the most memorable was one we did in Calgary with Normand Laprise and Dave Hawkesworth. This was the first time that some of the bigger wigs than usual recognized me for what I could do. I was impressed with him because he wasn't a ponce. I've known him for a long time now and thought the service episode he shot at Canoe was really good. He's always been a fan of the joint."
In 2004 Michael seemed to have fallen off the deep end (at least as far as many of his chef fans were concerned) when he came out with 'Chef At Home', a slightly sissified cooking show where he is more concerned with getting his cherubic son Gabe to eat than in showing the viewers any gourmet techniques.
"I cooked professionally for almost twenty years all over the world, forgive me for thinking I can cook. Then my son is born and I realized I only knew this small part about cooking, which is fine dining. I had to learn about health and nutrition. It's had a profound effect on me. I crave simplicity now. I look back on some of my menus from twenty years ago and they're so overwrought with ingredients, sauces, textures, flavours! We had dinner at Starfish recently, it was fantastic and so incredibly simple."
Now Michael is working on another show called 'Chef Abroad', similar to 'Chef at Large' but on a global scale.
"My wife, Rachel, did a past life regression on me and found that I used to be a surveyor in Colonial Times mapping the western frontier." He tells me, "I have such a travel lust, I used to blow all my money traveling when we'd close the Inn for the winter. I still think it's magical to wake up in one city and go to sleep in another."
They've already shot episodes in Egypt, Jordan and Mexico and are soon heading to South Africa, Tokyo and Singapore. The plan is to hit 65 countries over the next five years. Like any good family man he's bringing the wife and kid along for the ride. "Rachel and I are into yoga so we'll travel to Northern India together to check out a yoga retreat. We plan to bring Gabe with us to Australia and New Zealand."
Whether he's the Chef at Home or the Chef at Large, he is always the boy next door, our very own culinary version of Sandra Dee or Doris Day. He's a wide-eyed, shaggy-haired cook who loves his wife and kid and doesn't give a shit about the whole celebrity chef game. He also has a bit of advice for the wannabe chefs out there: "No one ever seems to ask, "How do I become a low-paid, overworked, stressed-out line cook slinging endless Caesar salads?" But even with the best culinary education money could buy I peeled a lot of garlic before I got my break. Bottom line: ten years of sweat and sacrifice may get you a seat in the chef's office, but which side of the desk you are on is up to you. Sheer ambition and creative energy got me to the top. Now, I'm paying off my house and I'm putting my kid through college. After that I'm done with all of this. I don't buy the celebrity stuff. If I did, I'd move to Toronto and open a bunch of restaurants. Instead I live in rural PEI"
You couldn't get further from the spotlight if you tried, just ask Haywire
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