Hospitality Design - November 2013 - 74

2. The elegant façade of
Michael Mina in San
Francisco, the former
home of the chef's
illustrious Aqua.

Wow, that's amazing.

3
2
3
that your mastery of balance at such a
young age and exploring it in California
where you had the freedom to do so
was huge.
There was one other freedom-which never
occurred to me when we did it, but afterwards
I feel like it helped my career-was the fact
Aqua was a fish restaurant. I was never boxed
into Italian, French, or Japanese, so I was able
to look at food a lot differently in the sense
that if I wanted to do a dish that had Italian
or Spanish roots I could. The one similarity
you see when you start looking at all different
cuisines is balance.

Is that what led to the idea of doing
trios, wanting to explore a dish in a few
different ways?

I wanted to push myself to the next level,
something you have to do every day. I felt like
I had the strongest group of people you could
ever put together. I know every chef probably
feels that way, but I truly feel like the people
around me were strong and we could go to the
next level. A lot of people were saying, 'Why
don't you open a small restaurant where you
cook at it every day and do eighteen-course
meals?' I said, 'Because that's not me, that's not
my personality.' We had all different types of
guests, and a lot of them were at a high level,
but they didn't want to sit through
twelve courses.
I started playing around with the trios
concept, and like everything, you take any cut
of meat and there are always three cool things
you can do with it. Even if we were taking one
product, like a roasted piece of foie gras, we'd
find three different flavor profiles. I guess that's
the long answer to tell you that I truly believe in
keeping somebody's interest throughout a dish.
I'll always argue that doing a twelve-course
menu is still easier than doing an appetizer
and an entrée and having guests walk away
completely blown away by two courses.

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November 2013 hospitalitydesign.com

Having sampled the trios, you're spot-on
in that you get a chance to try out three
different approaches to the same cut of
ﬁsh or the same animal in different ways.
Whenever you do so, you feel as though
you're drawn to these explorations in
a way that's a lot different than when
you're just given one plate of food.
It was that point in my career, too, where I
wanted to do something where you had to
design the china because china didn't exist for
trios. It's fun to take it from the very beginning
and build a restaurant where you are doing
things through a much different pair of glasses
than most people are wearing.

You were at Aqua for eleven years, and
then you got a chance to go back to it
years later and get ahold of the same
space. What I loved when you told
me that you were doing this project is
that even though you weren't opening
a place called Aqua, and you weren't
recreating Aqua, you were channeling
its spirit in a way that was special-
insofar that moving Michael Mina there
meant designing the room in a similar
way with the same subcontractors
who built the space out the ﬁrst time.
It's just like a Phoenix rising from
the ashes.

It's kind of like your first girlfriend; that's what
Aqua was. No matter what you do, your first
true love is someone you're going to remember
all your life, right? That happened for a lot of
people; it wasn't just me. There were people
who said Aqua sprung their careers in many
different ways, and it meant a lot to the city.
Everybody has a story about it, and that's what I
realized right when a retired subcontractor who
worked on the original kitchen with me called
and said, 'If you're going to redo the kitchen, I'll
come out of retirement to do it for you, and I'll
do it for free.'

Why go out and get a bunch of new people
who are going to want to tinker with it? I think
that's why people wanted to do it. They didn't
want to see somebody come in and destroy
that place.

It's cool, though, because you give
people a chance to reconnect to a new
project within that original space. I
had never been to Aqua, but when I've
eaten at Michael Mina with you, it feels
like it's the continuity of something
that's been going on a lot longer than
any of us. It's almost an ethereal kind of
connection to a timeline that you can't
even understand.

Your goal for every employee is understanding
how do they connect with people? How do they
befriend people and then how do they build a
long-term relationship with them? Those are
the three things that make up hospitality. The
magic of Aqua was that every time we were
hiring somebody we would sit down, and I'd
say to myself when I got up from the table,
Would I go have a drink with that person?
Would I go to a ballgame with that person?
Would I go out to dinner with that person?
They can technically be the best server in
the world, but the ability to befriend people
is one of those things you either have or you
don't have, and if you don't have it, if you
can't connect with people, well it's called the
hospitality business for a reason.

You do it extremely well: eighteen
restaurants, all around the same
philosophy. It's great. Any time you
walk into a space there is a feeling that
you're connected to the people who are
working there. Then you feel inexorably
connected to the food in ways that you
don't quite register. It just works on so
many different levels.
From day one, it was we're going to have that
high level of food, that high level of service, but
we're going to have a staff that's friendly and
outgoing. To this day, twenty plus years later,
I'm still waiting for the complaint letter that
says, 'My waiter was too friendly.' I haven't
gotten it. That magic is still at Michael Mina.
I'm not going to say that we never make
mistakes, but that's what we're always hiring
for. Front, back, it doesn't matter, it's trying to
find people who have the ability to befriend. hd
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