Las Vegas Weekly

November 5, 2008 · 3:59 PM

Special Feature: Celebrity chef Michael Mina opens two restaurants at the same time — 300 miles apart

By Robin Leach

Andre Agassi and Michael Mina.

Photo: TVT

Out of the frying pan and into the fire! It had to be the very first time in restaurant history that a star chef would attempt the insanity of not opening just one restaurant in one night but two simultaneously 300 miles apart!

Inspired by his partner, world tennis champion Andre Agassi, celebrity chef and Michelin star winner Michael Mina pulled off the impossible: He juggled two back-to-back openings here in Vegas and their 14th restaurant in Los Angeles. Michael unveiled their newly made-over Nobhill Tavern at the MGM Grand, and then faster than an Agassi power serve, he jetted right to West Hollywood to open XIV -- so called because it’s the 14th in his collection of restaurants! (For Michael's recipe for his famous lobster pie, click HERE.)

I’ve known 39-year-old Michael ever since he wrote to me at Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous all those years ago saying that he was determined to become a successful chef when he grew up! In between the mad dash of opening the two newest restaurants, we managed to find time to talk.

Robin Leach: So I have to ask you: Do you thrive on insanity? I mean you fly to Vegas, you re-brand a new restaurant, and before we’ve finished dessert, you’ve arrived in Los Angeles to open another one!

Michael Mina: : (still laughing) That’s so funny.

RL: But it’s true!

MM: This one actually, knock on wood, is going very, very smooth, and it’s a complicated one, so I’m glad it’s running so smooth. And people are really digging it, so I’m having fun with it.

RL: So let’s do this by the numbers. This new restaurant in Los Angeles is your 14th. Is it tougher to keep control of 14 restaurants than two of your own kids?

MM: Two of your own kids are definitely tougher to keep control of. In the restaurants, I can force people to listen.

RL: What’s more amazing is that you still cook, which you love because it’s your passion, but you also have to play the role of granddaddy to 14 sets of staff scattered around the planet.

MM: Right. Since I started doing it, I’ve kept my infrastructure of people for so long and so the culture is all the same in all the restaurants. So they go in and start a restaurant, and they’re the chef or the GM. And it’s still one of my restaurants, but they are the people that worked for me for a long time in the kitchen at Aqua. One of my GMs actually started out with me as a bus boy, and so you end up with the same type of people in all the restaurants, which is great. The customers can always tell.

RL: But you run this empire by means of visiting at least two or three of them every week and at least a phone call to everyone of them every day and night?

MM: Yeah, we have very, very detailed systems with everything. There are logs that are filled out, really detailed in every restaurant of what goes on good or bad and right down to the average check, what got served, what got ordered and whatever problems may have arisen. I read those every night and then I talk to the chefs and the GMs all the time and then I visit the restaurants. And when I visit, I work, I mean I’ll go in, cook and expedite and actually run the kitchen for a night so that way I get the real feeling of what’s going on. It’s the fastest way to know it.

RL: How long a day is it of traveling from home in San Francisco maybe to Vegas and then to L.A. What kind of hours are you putting in a day?

MM: I try not to ever do two places in the same day -- like you’ve just caught me. The airports drive me nuts, but on an average day, I take the kids to school. I get up every morning that I’m at home and make breakfast with the kids (Anthony, 6, and Sammy, 10), make their lunch, take them to school and then I go into work after that. So I usually get to work right around quarter to nine, nine o’clock. And then I’ll work, talking to the chefs, going through all my stuff for all the restaurants and then usually whatever restaurant I’m in, usually like the one in San Francisco, I’ll usually just go down and work in the kitchen during service and then if I’m in Vegas or whichever one I travel to, then I’ll just go into the kitchen during service and expedite the line and get a feel for what’s going on. Even in Vegas, I’m still an hour’s flight from getting back home afterwards from any one of my restaurants -- other than our MGM Detroit and Atlantic City restaurants. Even Mexico City, which is still a direct flight with only one set of customs, is a quick flight. The majority of what I have is Vegas and California.

I try to take Sundays off unless we’re doing the openings. I run and cook in the restaurants Monday through Friday, but on Saturday I go in just for the night dinner service, and I usually bring one of the boys with me. Sunday I take the day off.

RL: Do they want to follow in dad’s footsteps? Are they the next generation?

MM: The youngest one seems to be saying more and more that he wants to, and the older one, I think will, too. My goal is that. The reality: I’m going to keep working until they know whether they want to or not because if they follow in my footsteps, I want to be the one that trains them. But if they don’t, then at some point I want to retire. A little earlier than later, to be honest!

RL: How on Earth did you juggle Nobhill Tavern’s opening in Vegas and the new restaurant in L.A. since those were back-to-back, same-night activities?

MM: Well, Nobhill we had already done a menu change and everything besides the uniforms and the front of the room. I had gone there about a month ago and did all the food and did all the menu changes, did everything else. We were just waiting on the uniforms and some of the collateral to come in before we had you in for dinner. That wasn’t like I went there that day and did it all -- that would have been real insanity. No, I was there for a solid week when I changed it over. The whole philosophy is when we say tavern is more of a feel of very modern American as opposed to traditional tavern: the whole idea was the wood feel to it, the private booths and a lot of my classics, which we will change around seasonally all year long. Then there is the whole fried chicken, burger and the short rib, more of the heartier traditional. The idea behind the menu is you have all of these items and everything is in categories just based on the products, whether it’s beef or duck or lobster or what shellfish or finfish is available. You can just go to the category on all the courses -- you can select the first one or you can have a tasting of all three, and that’s just so it’s fun for people who like to taste lots of different things at the same meal rather than one large main dish.

RL: Now tell me about the new restaurant 14.

MM: Like the Roman numeral XIV. The design is like Louis the XIV’s living room, plus one entire whole wall of stainless steel. Its designer, Philippe Starck, always does, he always puts a twist to it. So it’s a slice of a French chateau with a beautiful, huge deck outside, and sits right on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights. It’s completely free standing, nothing on either side of me with a huge parking lot. The cuisine is very social dining, so the menu is like when you go to a great restaurant and there are 20 things you want to eat. Here you can pick 15 items because the menu is presented family style, so the table all orders together. You can choose or you can let the chef choose for you, but you pick 10 to 14 items as a table. But instead of coming out family style with shared plates and silverware for you to do all the sharing, we have everything individually portioned for you served on a huge silver tray. It’s very social. You pick up the plate and everything is cut so that you can eat it with just a fork or spoon. The waiter isn’t coming to the table 30 times to preset you. But it’s still that highest high of the level of food I do in San Francisco, like the caviar parfait. It’s the highest level of food and cooked product but all done in a way where you can sit there and one to two trays come at a time. So that you can literally sit there and have 14 different dishes and not be there for four hours. But stay as long as you want!

RL: So it’s a fairly new adventure in dining?

MM: Very much so. It’s like a tasting menu with no formality to it. You know, it’s just a really fun, fun way to dine. I mean that’s the thing I’m noticing because people are just having a blast while they’re eating, because they’re socializing and there is no pressure on you and just the way people like to eat. People like to taste a whole lot of little things, and they don’t want to sit through that 18-course tasting menu.

RL: On the day you open, congratulations on the new Michelin stars: one at your restaurant in the Bellagio and two more home in San Francisco. You’re a three-star Michelin chef!

MM: The Michelin Guide is so revered because of the company that you’re in that’s always with it -- and the people that have had it before you. When you’re growing up and cooking and that’s like a kid playing basketball is going to idolize Michael Jordan, I want to be like that as a chef. You have to think of whom you’ve always idolized as a chef and a lot of them it was all about Michelin stars. I’m ecstatic that I have them. It’s nice when you travel, people really know it and when you’re in other countries and people are talking about your restaurants, oh he got two Michelin stars … you know it’s a lot of credibility.

RL: Our Vegas hometown hero, Andre Agassi, became your sole shareholder financial partner when he dined in your restaurant and asked you to cater a last-minute, backyard barbecue party. If you hadn’t thrown the party together for him, do you think you’d be here now with 14 restaurants?

MM: I don’t think I’d be anywhere near where I am now if I hadn’t had that opportunity with Andre. He is the best partner you could ever have. There are a million reasons, but it all comes down to his unbelievable integrity. He is very, very intelligent, he is also very close to my age, which is nice to have a partner who is similar in age.

RL: And I’m presuming that you beat him in the kitchen as much as he beats you on the court?

MM: Well, we still have a steak cooking competition going every year. But I don’t think that I’m anywhere near as good on the court as he is in the kitchen.

RL: Is he encouraging you to keep on expanding this group of restaurants?

MM: He has never once gone either way with me. He just let’s me run my business. He just tells me, “You do whatever you feel good about and your family feels good about.” He made a bet on the business and on the person. He’s just been a delight to be partner with. He has got to get his butt to this one, to XIV. He hasn’t been here yet and he hasn’t been to Detroit yet, but all the others he has been to, yes. For now we only have two more on our plate. They’re things I’m real passionate about. The big one is RN74, which is going to be a restaurant/wine bar, the baby of my sommelier Raja, in San Francisco at the new Millennium Tower, and then we have American Fish at MGM’s new CityCenter on the Strip.

RL: Even with economic hard times, do you feel people are still reveling in dining out? Is it still the main part of the social world we live in?

MM: They are, and obviously the economy goes through what it goes through right now, and it does affect you, but it hasn’t shut us down in any way, shape or form. The restaurants, depending what city they’re in, they’re down a little bit. It’s like five percent. But certain cities got hit harder than other ones, but San Francisco is still good. I think I’m really fortunate. I’ve been in Vegas and San Francisco for so long that I had a lot of loyal guests and that’s helped me right now a lot.

The 6-foot-tall, Egyptian-born chef, the son of Middle Eastern immigrants, is revered by his fellow kitchen kings across America, even though his name might not quite be as well-known as Food Network stars Wolfgang Puck and Emeril Lagasse.

He began his career bussing tables and as a dishwasher, at just 15 years of age in an after-school job at a local French bistro. Then while watching my old Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous, he learned that cooking could be a full-time, rewarding profession. His father, though, insisted that he attend the University of Washington for at least a year before he switched over to the Culinary Institute of America in upstate New York. He interned with another famous Vegas chef, Charlie Palmer at Aureole in New York City, and then moved to San Francisco and wound up at the Four Seasons Clift Hotel, where he met his future wife, Diane, who was making scones for the high-tea service.

It was only in 2002 when Michael went out on his own after being head chef for 11 years at the San Francisco Aqua restaurant. Now his near $100 million empire is a big business success with 14 restaurants that include steakhouses and seafood fine dining.

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