Michael White

Although Michael White’s soulful, flavorful interpretations of Italian cuisine indicate otherwise, he is not an Italian native who absorbed generations of recipes at birth. He is, in fact, a Midwesterner who spent the majority of his childhood days in Beloit, Wisconsin playing football and swimming competitively. At the time, cooking was simply an enjoyable family pastime and an escape from the biting winter.

By whim or intuition, White decided to try his hand at culinary school, pursuing a career out of something that had been only a passing fancy. He enrolled at Kendall Culinary Institute in 1989 and just a year later, secured a position prepping in Chicago’s most famous Italian restaurant, Spiaggia. He spent a year and a half learning from Chef Paul Bartolotta and, wanting to find the origin of his mentor’s awe-inspiring recipes, he followed the Chef’s footsteps to Italy.

He trained with the venerated Italian chef Valentino Marcattilii at Ristorante San Domenico in Imola and it was there, learning to cook in the Old World-style kitchen, that he began his Italian transformation. He learned everything about the kitchen while in Imola, visiting the markets to choose the best produce, making pasta by hand, creating fragrant sauces, scaling and filleting Mediterranean fish; butchering lamb and poultry. For the next seven years, he studied the hands-on, ingredient-driven cooking style of the Italians, working with Marcattilii and traveling across the country for informal, but equally important, cooking lessons with friends. “I was the American, standing over Italians’ shoulders asking ‘Why?’” he says of his need to understand their every move in the kitchen. It was on one of those cooking jaunts that he met his wife, a Southern Italian woman whose passion for and knowledge of Italy’s food offer constant inspiration for the chef.

White returned to the US in 2001 with his technique firmly rooted in his profound respect for Italy’s culinary traditions and a high-spirited desire to showcase the country’s finest ingredients and most revered recipes. He returned to Spiaggia as Chef de Cuisine and contributed to the restaurant’s four-star review from The Chicago Tribune. In 2002, he took New York by storm as Executive Chef of Fiamma Osteria. The restaurant garnered a glowing three star review from The New York Times and White was named Esquire’s Best New Chef, 2002. White also brought his famous recipes to home cooks with his book, Fiamma: The Essence of Contemporary Italian Cooking (John While & Sons, 2006).

In 2007, White partnered with New York’s accomplished restaurateur Chris Cannon and took the helm of the James Beard Award winning (2003) L’Impero and Alto. With White’s Northern Italian menu and the partners’ shared love for Italian dining and hospitality, Alto quickly garnered a three-star review from The New York Times and was awarded a Michelin Star for the 2009 Guide. In July 2008, White and Cannon recreated L’Impero into Convivio—a restaurant that exudes the soul and spirit of Southern Italy—to much acclaim, including a glowing three-star review from The New York Times and chosen as one of Esquire magazine’s Best New Restaurants of 2008. In May 2009, the two opened Marea, a restaurant devoted to the bounty of the sea.

Endlessly inspired by the notion of taste memory, White strives to recreate the sensory feel of true Italian dining experiences with each dish he creates. At the acclaimed Alto and Convivio—and surely at Marea—he succeeds.