Michael Symon Interview

Food Network was kind enough to grant us a phone interview with Chef Michael Symon to help promote Cook Like an Iron Chef (on the Cooking Channel) and his new show Food Feuds. They admitted that they’re keeping him really busy!

(image from Food Feuds, courtesy of the Food Network)

I was the fourth person to interview him, after Katrina from Bite Buff, Nancy from Fun Playing With Food and someone from About.com. Audio from the entire call can be found here.

Heights Eats: Hi, Michael, and thank you for taking the time out to do this interview.

Michael Symon: No problem.

HE: This is a two parter. You’ve got a lot of restaurants in the Cleveland area and Roast in Detroit. How far do you plan to expand your restaurants in the area or beyond?

MS: Our immediate thought process is to really stay in the Midwest. That’s where we’re comfortable, that’s where we love to be, it’s our home, we understand the clientèle there very well. We’ve had talks with Las Vegas on and off for the past 5,6,7 years and I would imagine eventually we would do something [there]. But other than that we would really really focus on predominately Cleveland but certainly just the Midwest.

HE: The second half would be you just said you just said anything you do you make sure you do really, really well. With the number of restaurants you have, how do you make sure everything is up to that? Everything has been—I love the B-spot—but how do you make sure everything is up to that standard.

MS: We’ve been blessed. We have incredible people, we have close to 400 employees, and we really have surrounded ourselves with incredible people and we’ve never grown until we’ve felt ready. I’m sure a lot people look around and say, wow, six restaurants is a ton of restaurants in Cleveland. And it is, but we’ve had the opportunity to open hundreds.… We only do it when we feel we’re ready to do the next project. And our greatest advantage is we waited almost nine years before we opened our second restaurant, so for 9 years we had one restaurant and about 20 of those original employees are still with us, so that’s given us a really amazing foundation to grow with. My assistant Rebecca [Yody] has been with Liz and I for 15 years. Our GM of Roast, Frank Ritz has been with us for 18 years. Matthew, my chef at Bar Symon, has been with us for 13 years. There’s a lot of people like that that have been with us for a long time.

HE: We in Cleveland really appreciate the level of quality and the methodical way you’ve done that. I work near Strongsville so I’m really looking forward to the B-spot, being able to go there.

MS: Where do you live, in Strongsville Heights? [laughs]

HE: I work in Parma, at Tri-C. And I actually live in Cleveland Heights, which is kind of a crazy commute. I go to the B spot in Chagrin now, but I can actually do lunch [in Strongsville] once that opens.

MS: Oh perfect… It’s funny, I love what I do, and Liz loves what she does and our other partner does loves what she does, so we’ve had so much fun it never really feels like work to us. And the restaurants are really more driven by passion that they are by business, which probably isn’t always the best way to run a business from a financial way but its always made it very enjoyable, and I think it’s always allowed us to put food and service and all those things first.

HE: The B-spot is such a fun place to actually walk into and eat at. It shows that it’s an endeavor of enjoyment. You can feel it going in there.

MS: Thank you so much! My wife Liz designed it so I’m sure she’ll be thrilled to hear that.

HE: A couple more questions, more about Food Network and restaurants. In Cook Like an Iron Chef lately you mentioned something you learned from Bobby Flay about spicing. Is there any degree in which any of your restaurant menus are going to be influenced by what you’ve done on the Food Network?

MS: I think that it’s just natural you’re influenced a little bit by the food you see around you but at the end of the day our restaurant s for the most part are very grounded in the Midwest, in the heartland, and that’s the kind of food we’ve always done and that will be predominately the food we always do. It’s the food I love to cook, and I learn little things along the way from other chefs or things that I might have cooked with another chef or we might sneak in a technique or spicing technique here and there but for the most part the food will always be very driven by the heartland.

HE: We saw an episode lately of The Next Iron Chef in which people were getting full suckling pigs and using a tiny bit of [each pig]. We were wondering what happens in iron chef competitions to the food that is not used in the actual competition?

MS: The staff eats very, very well! [laughs]

HE: I was thinking I would really love to be on staff on one of those shows.

MS: What people don’t see is to make Next Iron Chef happen it’s such a huge production, there’s literally 60−70−80 people working to make that show reality. Same on Iron Chef, an enormous crew. So there’s a lot of food being cooked, and a lot is presented to the judges, but anything that’s not—they have a full culinary team on all these shoots—so the culinary teams whisks way with leftovers, feeds the staff, and whatever’s left they bring to the local shelter.

HE: Wow. That’s very good the hear, especially with that little bit of the full pig used.

MS: Right. That was a tricky challenge because they asked some people if you were stuck on an island, what food would you live with and they didn’t know that was actually what they’d be cooking three weeks later, so that’s what makes it so hard.

HE: It was a perfect sort of mirror of an Iron Chef Competition too because you have to take one ingredient and use it as fully as you possibly can.

MS: Yeah, absolutely.

HE: I don’t even know if you’ll remember this, but a few years ago at Taste of Tremont you were serving melon and prosciutto. Your preparation of it would definitely be on my personal “best things I ever ate” list [Michael laughs]. It’s a fairly classic combination, but I’ve never been able to get it anywhere near as good as the one you served. I don’t know if it was the prosciutto or the sauce on it—which did an unbelievable job of tying all the flavors together. Would you be able to tell me what it was?

MS: We essentially did it with a mint salsa verde, if my memory is correct. We just made it with fresh mint, almonds, a little bit of fresh anchovy, extra virgin olive oil and lemon.

HE: Wow. I have never before or since had melon and prosciutto that were tied together so well.

MS: Really, the key to that dish is getting the very best prosciutto that you can and the best melons that you can, and that’s what really makes it sing.

HE: Do you remember where you got the prosciutto…?

MS: Yeah, we get our prosciutto from a little artisanal guy out of Iowa. He does about only 20–25 chefs. He’s a little bit bigger now, and the name of the company is.… my brain just went numb… Um.….

HE: That’s okay, it doesn’t sound like I’m going to be able to get it anyway.

MS: You can order online. Why did my brain just go numb? I’ll think of it before you get off the line.

HE: OK, no problem.

MS: Oh, La Quercia (spells it)

HE: OK, I’ve heard of that, actually.

MS: They’re awesome. I actually think Whole Foods carries it now.

HE: That’s where I may have seen it. I live a mile from Whole Foods.

HE: Thank you very much [for the interview]

MS: Have a great day!

HE: You, too.

*************

The interview was a lot of fun, and Michael was really upbeat despite his crazy schedule. My only regret is that I meant to ask him if the corn and bacon ice cream from Cook Like an Iron Chef might show up on one of his menus. I hope it does, but if not I might be making it soon.

Bite Buff didn’t transcribe her interview (I don’t blame her as it was a really long process, especially listening to everything at slow speed in Windows Media Player), so I thought I’d reprint the following answers to her excellent question about Michael’s and Liz’s favorite Cleveland restaurants:

High End: Fire, Flying Fig, Momocho, Fahrenheit, Red

Casual: Superior Phở, Ha Ahn

Pizza: Geraci’s, Marotta’s (technically as an answer to one of Nancy’s questions)

He also jokingly said he’d probably be hearing from some local chefs about not mentioning their restaurants.

Nancy also asked him about how he made the B-spot burgers so good, and he mentioned the cuts (sirloin and brisket) and course grinding the fresh meat twice. This is also mentioned in Live to Cook. This motivated me to finally grind my own burgers (I have a Kitchenaid grinder bought mostly for sausage) from Whole Foods grass fed local beef. Despite their being a bit too lean–the brisket was strangely lean, and I think B-spot actually uses some chuck as well–they were some of the best, juiciest burgers I’ve ever made. I’m not sure I can go back to buying ground beef.