Food is never far from Michelle Bernstein’s thoughts. One recent night she woke up her husband, David, at 3 a.m. to ask him what he thought about a combination of fennel-crusted sweetbreads, sour oranges and bacon. Another time, in a needle-induced trance during a visit to her acupuncturist, she dreamed up a dish consisting of a red wine-poached egg with crispy pig ear served alongside a Latin-style white bean stew. That one landed with a thud when she added it to the menu at Michy’s, her acclaimed eatery on Miami’s Upper East Side. “Nobody would buy it,” she chuckles.
 Michelle Bernstein runs Golden Spoon winner Michy’s in Miami (above) as well as MB at the Aqua resort in Cancun, Mexico, a seasonal restaurant called Michelle’s at Carysfort in Key Largo and a new tapas restaurant in Miami. And she and her husband/business partner are preparing to open another restaurant next year in Palm Beach. [Photo: Brian Smith] |
RECIPE Shrimp Tiradito with Avocado and Corn Nuts Celebrity chef Michelle Bernstein shares this easy-to-make appetizer. Read how to make it |
Indeed, the soft-spoken chef says the most unexpected aspect of her success has been the smorgasbord of economic opportunities outside the kitchen. “To think about so many ventures and possibilities ... I get to spread my wings. It’s pretty cool.”
Prep work
In the Miami Shores neighborhood where she grew up, the Bernstein house was known for its exotic menus. While other moms served macaroni and cheese, Bernstein’s mother, Martha, who is from Buenos Aires, prepared homemade gnocchi, “outrageous” risottos and braised fennel. Bernstein recalls making her first roast chicken with her mother at age 4. By 9, when most of her peers were playing with Easy-Bake Ovens, Bernstein was begging for an escargot set.
She never imagined food as a career, however. “I just loved to eat,” says Bernstein, who pursued a career as a ballerina successfully enough to land a scholarship to train with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York when she was 18. The dancer’s life changed her mind. “Girls would just get mean and try to trip you —smack into you and try to get in front of you. I didn’t have a lot of competition inside of me —at least I didn’t at the time.” She also found she was tired of starving herself into ballerina shape. “I wanted to eat. I thought about food all the time. I went to sleep with cookbooks.”
Bernstein doffed her tutu to study nutrition in Atlanta. She then returned to Miami for a culinary arts program at Johnson & Wales University and worked at a variety of restaurants up and down the East Coast. A stint as a prep cook at the Coconut Grove restaurant JanJo’s in 1992 grounded her in the basics of restaurant kitchen work, from cutting and washing lettuce to cleaning veal bones for broth.
Bernstein went on to train at Mark’s Place, one of Miami’s top restaurants, and later under the late legendary French chef Jean-Louis Palladin at the Watergate in Washington, where she became a fishmonger, breaking down hundreds of pounds of seafood each day. Chef life at the Watergate occasionally resembled scenarios from the reality TV show “Hell’s Kitchen.” Palladin’s temper was as legendary as his kitchen skills, and Bernstein says mistakes produced humiliating scoldings and the occasional pot thrown her way.
As Bernstein climbed the restaurant ladder, she says, she learned to balance her striving for quality with business realities. She always pushed to offer the freshest ingredients and create adventurous plates, but her disdain for cost considerations came at a price. While she was chef at a Coral Gables restaurant, the owners “were delighted because we were doing 450 covers a night, but my food costs were terrible. When they asked me to turn back to frozen foods and things they did before, that’s when I quit.”
Rising star
Bernstein’s first foray with her own restaurant came in 1999, when she borrowed $35,000 from her father and went in as a partner in a new South Beach restaurant called The Strand. Bernstein savored the creative freedom associated with co-owning a restaurant, but the Strand faltered. Working 20-hour days, Bernstein dwindled to 85 pounds and reached what she calls the “lowest point in my career.”
The clouds parted 10 months later when Bernstein walked away from The Strand and her investment to accept a job as executive chef of the new Mandarin Oriental hotel’s fine-dining restaurant, Azul. The restaurant opened in December 2000, and Bernstein soon began wowing food critics with a blend of Latin flavors mixed with Caribbean, Asian and classic French influences. “I wanted to define fine food and fine dining in this city, and I wanted to take it by storm,” she says.
In 2001, Esquire magazine chose the 120-seat restaurant as the top restaurant of the year in its annual survey of the country’s best new restaurants. In 2002, the Mandarin Hotel and Azul became the first hotel and restaurant in Miami since 1994 to receive a five-diamond rating from AAA. Bernstein acknowledges her quest for perfection brought her a reputation in south Florida “as being one of the nastiest chefs in town.”
Nasty or not, Bernstein couldn’t have timed her rise any better. In the decade she spent honing her cooking skills, America had witnessed an explosion of interest in cooking and food. With the advent of food-oriented television programming, cooks like Emeril Lagasse and later Rachael Ray became household names.
“The Food Network put chefs and the careers of chefs into the public eye for the first time. Previous to that, the only real media attention that focused on chefs was from the magazines —Food & Wine, Bon Appetit and Gourmet,” says Bill Guilfoyle, associate professor of business management at the Culinary Institute of America.
In 2001, during her first year at Azul, the cable channel invited Bernstein to serve as a co-host of a new cooking show, “The Melting Pot.” The show became a hit and Bernstein’s part-time home for the next two years.
In 2003, she got her first endorsement deal, landing a contract to serve as a spokesperson for Oster blenders. In 2006, Delta Air Lines drafted her to design the five-course meals it serves to its international BusinessElite customers.
“I fill a lot of niches,” she says. “If they’re looking for a girl, if they’re looking for a Jew, or if they’re looking for a Latin, they call me. I know it’s part of the reason I’ve done so well.”
 Bernstein’s flagship restaurant, Michy’s in Miami [Photo courtesy Michy's] |
Last year, Bernstein began pitching a pressure cooker on HSN and this year will launch a line of cookware. Adam Marland, vice president of HSN’s housewares division, says Bernstein “fires on a lot of cylinders. She’s a known authority. She’s a she. In the land of Wolfgang Puck and Emeril, she brings a Latin influence. All those things really make her kind of an ideal guest in a lot of ways.”
Bernstein has yet to reach the top tier of celebrity chefdom, where cooks like Mario Batali and Paula Dean rake in $3 million and $4.5 million a year, according to a recent tally by Forbes magazine. She describes herself as “somewhere in the middle,” explaining that the outside deals don’t generate as much cash as one might expect. The Delta deal, for instance, pays her with frequent flier miles, not cash. Bernstein says she’s invested most of the extra money she’s earned in her restaurant business. In addition to Michy’s, her flagship, she also operates a successful restaurant called MB at the Aqua resort in Cancun, Mexico, and has a seasonal restaurant called Michelle’s at Carysfort in Key Largo. Bernstein and husband/business partner David Martinez opened a new tapas restaurant in Miami last month called Rincon 40 and plan to open another restaurant next year in Palm Beach. Bernstein keeps close tabs on her restaurants’ operations, while Martinez handles most of the day-to-day business details of purchasing, pricing and payroll.
Though never too far from the kitchen, Bernstein finds her days more resemble those of business executive than chef. A typical day sees her up at 7 a.m. to take a quick run with her dog and then at home on her computer — answering e-mails, considering offers and typing up recipes and preparation lists for any number of upcoming events on her schedule. By 10 a.m., she’s at Michy’s to meet with the restaurant’s pastry chef, to go over some new recipes with her cooks and to strategize about how to get more locally grown produce into the restaurant. (Local produce, she laments, costs double, and there’s much less variety.)
Later that day, she shops for cookware, tests out a recipe she’s putting together for an article, phones Delta to talk about her ideas for a new in-flight menu, meets with a kitchen designer and mulls over new designs for her waiters’ uniforms.
She also started a Miami branch of Common Threads, which teaches underprivileged children to cook. Bernstein, who often doesn’t get home until nearly midnight, says the frenetic pace “has been my life for a long time.” Eventually, she says, a slower pace will be on the menu. “I want a family. I want to be able to cook more at home.”
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Michelle Bernstein
Creating: “My true escape is to think about recipes.” The best recipes, she says, come easily. “It’s like squeezing orange juice out of my head.” Success: “We live well, better than I ever thought I would in my profession, but we are nowhere near wealthy.” Business Environment: “I can’t imagine anyone backing a restaurant right now.” Celebrity Status: “Maybe what I do in the public eye gets a few more people in the door locally, but only the food and service will keep them coming.” |
