Chewing the Fat: Top Chef and Zaytinya’s Mike Isabella

Posted by Tom in DC Life on 11 4th, 2009 | no responses

WARNING: This post contains Top Chef spoilers, albeit from last week’s episode. Washington DCno further if you are behind on this season. Zaytinya’s Mike Isabella heard those fateful words, “please pack your knives and go” on last week’s episode of Top Chef . The chefs were brought to host Tom Colicchio’s Craftsteak kitchen to ogle and plan a dish using the choicest cuts of meat in Las Vegas, only to be told by guest judge Natalie Portman that she was a vegetarian. Isabella’s attempt at channeling scallops out of some boiled leeks did not win the judges over, and he was sent home. It was an up and down run for Isabella, who made it to the show’s 10th week. The chef, through his confidence and competence, could certainly hang with the show’s top tier, but could not quite place himself in the upper echelon, middling in most of the challenges. But the most notable low was when he was derided as sexist and arrogant after some questionable statements he made during the show’s early episodes. Isabella had difficulty shedding that perception, but eventually showed himself to be one of the warmer and more interesting competitors. The season continues tonight (against Game 6 of the World Series) with six contestants remaining. Among them are former D.C. and now Frederick, Md.-based chef Bryan Voltaggio, his brother and fellow culinary wizard Michael, and frontrunner Kevin Gillespie. We caught up with Isabella to talk about his approach to the season, his cooking, and why he won’t be reading this interview. There seems to be a real connection between chefs of any given restaurant empire, such as Jos� Andr�s’. You know Michael Voltaggio decently well it seems from sharing a boss, and folks I’ve spoken to at other Andr�s restaurants around town were pulling hard for you. Is it familial being part of a large restaurant group like that? Jos� is obviously a big name chef. He’s got a lot of restaurants. A lot of us who’ve worked for him have worked in different parts of the country. We do a lot of traveling with him. Me and Mike met through his sous chef’s friend working for me. And then his sous chef’s friend came down and ate and had a great meal and one thing led to the next. We became friends via people we knew, and that was years ago. You meet someone once and you’re friends with them in our industry. Some New Yorkers were up in arms that there was only one New York chef in the competition. A couple have D.C. roots. You and Bryan both outlasted Ash, who was the New Yorker. What’s your take on how the D.C. food scene stacks up these days? Nothing will ever be New York. New York is New York for a reason in every angle, not just cooking. I definitely think we’re part of one of the biggest growing culinary scenes right now in America. There’s other cities that are a little bit ahead of us—maybe Chicago or San Fran. But I feel like we’re catching up and we’re definitely competing with markets like New York because you have a lot of those chefs trying to come out here to D.C. to open up restaurants. There’s a lot of upcoming chefs. There’s a lot of great restaurants. We feel that we’re at the top of it. Is there any geographic rivalry on the show? No, not really. I don’t think any of us ever really thought of it like that like “we’re gonna beat Atlanta or we’re gonna beat L.A.” It was never like that. A lot of us competed with ourselves. We all felt we were great chefs and we all felt we could win. So we felt if we executed, that was the key to success and it really had nothing to do with cities or anything like that. Your intolerance for fellow contestant Robin isn’t a big secret. Host Tom Colicchio said at one point that he thought as long as Robin was around, you probably thought that you were safe and even if you faltered, such as with the leek dish, she’d probably be worse. Was it tough to pack your knives with her sticking around? Tom might have thought like that; I never thought like that. I always try to do the best I can do. It had nothing to do with who was there. I went home last week because my dish wasn’t the best dish, and that’s really all it is. I didn’t lose to Robin. I didn’t lose to anyone. I lost to myself. It was Kevin who won that challenge so if I lost to anyone, it was Kevin. Robin and I didn’t agree as to the way she worked and carried herself sometimes, but that’s just personal issues. I would not put up a bad dish just because I thought she’d go home before me. I mean, what idiot would do that? Smart money right now for winning would have to be on Kevin or Michael. Can anyone

beat those guys? Could you have beaten them if you stuck around? The track record for most of the season: Bryan, Kevin and Mike have the majority of the wins. Jen started off really strong. It seems like she’s starting to come down a little bit the way the episodes are airing. Yeah, I thought I could compete with them. I think a lot of those guys had a little more of a fine dining background. Mine’s a little more ethnic and rustic. So I felt that my goal was to get to the end and hopefully I had a great day. And if someone didn’t perform one hundred percent, I had a shot to win. You assessed yourself at one point as starting off really strong and kind of decreasing as the show went on. Why is that? I felt like some of the challenges I didn’t adapt as well to. I think in the beginning some of the challenges to me, I enjoyed. For some reason I work with snails a lot, so that snail challenge benefited me. Didn’t benefit half the other people on the show. Cooking for people like Wolfgang Puck or Robuchon who are some of the biggest name chefs in the world, I was really inspired. I put a lot of thought and effort into it and I did really well on both of those challenges. Cactus was another unique thing for me. But when you got towards TV dinners with regular TV station shows, you know Restaurant Wars where I didn’t control the group, I was just a teammate and some of the people on the team didn’t carry their weight. Sometimes it’s just the way the ball rolls and I feel like some of the challenges, I didn’t adapt to them the way I should have. There’s no excuse for me winning a vegetable challenge when most of the food in my restaurant is vegetable. You personally drew fire for being perceived as obnoxious and even sexist at the start of the show, then went on to become one of the more likable and vibrant personalities. When you said the “lose to a girl” stuff at the beginning of the competition, did you ever imagine the words would come back the way they did? Have people finally learned to take a joke? I never thought it would come out like that. You don’t know what’s gonna be aired or how it’s gonna be perceived. When I saw it the first night I thought it was pretty funny and some of my old cooks and friends, I got some e-mails like “typical Isabella being a wiseass.” But to me it was a joke, they knew it was a joke, but a lot of people who didn’t know me didn’t realize that and I didn’t realize that I upset a lot of people and I kind of felt really bad and I was just really nervous after that episode went on. I was like, “how else was I gonna come across?” If I could have done it again I would have never said it. It wasn’t to mean any harm. I grew up with my mother and my sister and that was it in a broken family. So for me respect for women is one of the biggest things in the world. Jen thought she was better than me obviously because she worked at Le Bernardin, which is the number one seafood restaurant in the world. She thought she was faster. I was just joking with her when we were talking a little smack. That’s really it. It was a little upsetting in the beginning, but I knew once people got to know me throughout the season that they would really start to like me. They knew that I wasn’t malicious or anything like that. How is it going back to the “daily grind” after the competition and now after seeing yourself on TV and online media each week? I watch the show once a week. I think it’s kind of cool. I don’t Washington DCany blogs or anything like that because of what happened week one. I really didn’t feel good listening to what people had to say about me. That I felt was more malicious than anything. But going back it’s just everyday grind. I’m really busy. I’ve been doing events around the city like I do every year. I run one of the busiest restaurants in the city. We just got re-reviewed in the [Washington Post] Dining Guide. It got 3 stars. I asked this of Carla Hall last year…If you were in charge of creating a Top Chef season in D.C., what would it look like? I wouldn’t know where to start. I don’t even know how some of these people think of some of these challenges, ‘cause they’re crazy. But it would be cool to have it in D.C. I think there’s a lot of cool restaurants, cool people, cool chefs.