Portfolio Overview
Michael's Genuine Food: Down-to-Earth Cooking for People Who Love to Eat,
By MICHAEL SCHWARTZ, and JoAnn Cianciulli (Authors), Clarkson Potter.
MICHAEL SCHWARTZ, a James Beard Award winner and former Top Chef guest judge, is the chef-owner of Michael's Genuine Food & Drink in Miami and the Cayman Islands. Since opening in March 2007, the restaurant has been lauded by the press, including the New York Times, Food & Wine, Gourmet, Esquire, and Condé Nast Traveler.
Michael's Genuine Food - The Book
I thought I'd written everything I could possibly have to say about Michael's Genuine Food & Drink when I devoted nearly 5,000 words to describing my many experiences dining there. But now I've got some new material: Michael's written a book. It's called Michael's Genuine Food, and the subtitle - "Down-to-Earth Cooking for People Who Love to Eat" - nails the underlying theme of both Michael's Genuine the restaurant, and Michael's Genuine the cookbook.
A word that appears multiple times in the book is "unfussy," and it's the perfect adjective for Chef Schwartz's food. When Michael's Genuine opened nearly four years ago (wow, time flies), it was on the front end, locally, of the now nearly ubiquitous farm-to-table trend. From the beginning, MGF&D was about sourcing great ingredients, as close to home as you could, and treating them simply and with respect. In the introduction, Chef Schwartz gives a great description of his style as "an East coast version of California cuisine."[1]
But that's certainly not to say, as some suggest of ingredient-driven cooking, that it's more "shopping" than "cooking." Moreover, "unfussy" doesn't remotely mean the same thing as "plain." Aside from picking the right ingredients, you have to know how to prepare them to bring out their best qualities, and you have to know what to do with them to create a dish that's satisfying and interesting. The cookbook, co-written with Joann Cianciulli,[2] does a great job of showing how that's done. It also is possibly the first book I've read that truly captures the peculiarly
