Marin Magazine - April 2020

In Marin / CONVERSATION

gras with fish. What was your
relationship with Morrone?
I did my (culinary school)
internship under George at the
Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles.

I was the pastry chef there before I became a sous-chef. We both worked for Charlie Palmer in New York; Charlie Palmer actually introduced us to the investor, Charles Condy, who funded Aqua originally. We basically had, and to this day still have, a great relationship. Food is collaboration and you work on it together. We created many great dishes there, and we did it as a team.

So you’ve got this one restaurant, in a rather iconic space with an iconic chef. How do you move from that to what you've subsequently done, which is build this program of San Francisco restaurants, and then partnerships that expanded beyond San Francisco? After George moved on, I was left with a dilemma — what do you do?

I literally was doing the same thing I was doing before. The only real difference of what I was doing, for better or for worse, was dealing with the media. You get the praise, you get it all, be it good, bad or in between. The timing was interesting, though. This was around 1994. It was when Jeremiah (Tower) was leaving Stars. When we were conceptualizing Aqua and everything else, we would go to Stars all the time.

It was, to this day, my favorite res-
taurant in San Francisco.
I just thought it was just magical.
Stars was your template?

A lot of the people who worked there ended up moving over here [Aqua] and working here after Jeremiah left. And it was great, because they were seasoned veterans. What a crew we had.

MICHAEL
MINA

One of the industry’s
most successful
restaurateurs shares his
secret sauce for success.
By Christina Mueller

SINCE THE LATE 1990s, chef Michael Mina has defied the conven- tional wisdom that 80 percent of restaurants fail before they celebrate their fifth anniversary. With eight restaurants in San Francisco, another 30 scattered around 10 states and a brasserie in Dubai, the chef who first rose to fame at San Francisco’s Aqua shows no signs of slowing the pace, developing partnerships to build his brand far beyond California.

The longtime Nicasio resident
continues his expansion with
restaurants closer to home, too:
The Lodge at Sonoma welcomed
his Wit & Wisdom earlier this
year. A collaboration with chef
and cookbook author Ayesha
Curry led to the opening of the
first International Smoke restau-
rant in San Francisco in 2017,
with subsequent openings in Las
Vegas, Miami and, most recently,
Del Mar in north San Diego
County. And a project in the for-
mer Guaymas space in Tiburon is
slated for a late summer opening.

Your family is of Egyptian heritage but you grew up in central Washington state. Did that have an impact on your desire to go into the restaurant industry?

My dad was Coptic Christian, so we left Egypt when I was two and moved close to where my mom’s brothers and sisters emigrated. My dad got a job at Central Washington University. The region where I grew up is all farming community. It’s known for growing the timothy hay that is sent to Japan to feed wagyu beef cattle. When I was 17, I said I wanted to go to culinary school. And when you're from Egypt, you get three choices: doctor, lawyer, engineer. You can do any of the three, but chef wasn’t one of them.