Chef Michael White (r.), partnered with builder Alex Pirez (l.) to open MIKA in the Miami area. | Photo courtesy of Evan Sung.
Chef Michael White’s 37-year culinary journey has taken him from a boyhood in Wisconsin to Chicago, Italy, New York, Miami and beyond, with Michelin stars and countless accolades along the way. But it is his Midwest roots that define his management style, business acumen and humility.
“I put trust in my teams and let them get the touchdowns,” said White, a former college football player. “I’m just there to kick the extra point.”
Together with his team members, some of whom have been with the chef for 25 years, Michael White restaurants have earned stellar reputations for food, ambience, hospitality and service. He currently is chef-partner in six restaurants in locations including New York, Miami, Puerto Rico and Atlantis Paradise Island, with plans in the works for Dallas and possibly Dubai. As head of the Altamarea Group until 2020, White helmed a dozen award-winning Italian restaurants, including the multi-starred flagship, Marea.
Despite trying to stay under the radar, White’s name on the menu creates instant cred as a restaurant that delivers superior hospitality, menu, service and attention to detail. Here’s why.
A lifelong love affair with Italian food
White’s restaurants are regarded as some of the best Italian dining destinations in the U.S., but he grew up in a Midwestern family with Norwegian roots. There was no Italian Nonna cooking Sunday dinner in his childhood home. Nevertheless, his passion for Italian food was sparked early.
“Growing up in Wisconsin just over the state border from Chicago, when we celebrate a birthday or something, it was either Norwegian food or Italian,” he said. “We had a lot of Italian restaurants and I had fantastic pizza and pasta, so that was my first entry into it.”
The half-moon shaped stuffed pasta known as “mezzaluna” is combined with lobster at MIKA. | Photo courtesy of Evan Sung.
When his future as a football player was tabled after a severe knee injury, White sent his resume out to restaurants in Chicago. “My brother was already working in Chicago and I planned to go to cooking school,” he said, eventually enrolling in Chicago’s Kendall College for a culinary degree. “Really wanting to cook Italian, I reached out to Spiaggia to see if I could stage there,” White added.
Spiaggia was a top fine-dining Italian restaurant and at the time, Paul Bartolotta, another Wisconsin transplant, was the executive chef and managing partner. “He allowed me to stage, and that was a turning point for me,” said White.
“I was on Paul’s team and I started the stage and just couldn’t get enough of it,” he said. “We were making these raviolis with potato and leek, and we were drizzling this green sauce called pesto over them. And risotto with these smelly mushrooms called porcini, and it was all foreign. This was the early ‘90s and I was a young person cooking with cooks from all over, and the whole thing was just mind blowing.”
White kept working through all the stations at Spiaggia and decided he needed to get to Italy and learn Italian cooking at its source. He saved enough money and traveled to Imola, Italy, in 1993 to train at Ristorante San Domenico. “I lived above the restaurant and started out cleaning vegetables. It was like baptism by fire, learning to speak Italian and learning to cook Italian from the ground up,” he remembers.
While in Imola, White met and married his wife, Giovanna, and now speaks Italian fluently.
During his time in Europe, White also cooked in the South of France and Paris, but when he returned to the U.S. he was sought after for his Italian cooking talents. In 2002, he partnered with Stephen Hanson to open Fiamma Osteria, then in 2007, joined forces with Ahmass Fakahany to open two restaurants in New Jersey. That partnership led to the formation of the Altamarea Group, which eventually included Marea, Osteria Morini, Ai Fiori, Alto and other restaurants reaching as far as Turkey and Hong Kong.
Despite the many Michelin stars he earned, White does not consider himself a celebrity chef and is most proud of his success in building successful teams.
“His focus is not on awards and accolades; it’s about sharing what he loves with others,” said Jessica Schupak, currently a food and beverage consultant with her own firm who worked with White in the Altamarea Group. “He gets a sparkle in his eye when he talks about Italian cuisine, the purveyors and techniques, and his enthusiasm is contagious.”
Crudos are a specialty at several of White’s restaurants. Here, sea scallops are plated with gooseberries, Fresno chili and citrus colatura. | Photo courtesy of Evan Sung.
But beyond spreading his passion about Italian cooking, he is entirely approachable, inclusive and grounded in Midwest values, she added. “He gives his people all the tools they need to do their jobs well, and a long leash to explore and experiment and make mistakes,” said Schupak. “There were a couple of chefs who wanted to incorporate Asian ingredients and he told them to ‘cook their hearts out’ and I’ll put it on the menu.”
Trust and care are the two pillars of Michael’s management style,” she added. “He taught me that if you take care of your team, they will take care of the guest and deliver a memorable hospitality experience.” She was also impressed that White knew the names of everyone on his teams (close to 1,000 people), even junior members, and knew a bit about their personal lives, even when most of the time, he was jockeying between six restaurants at once.
The last ingredient
A deep passion for Italian cuisine, his teams and the guest all contributed to building world-renowned, successful restaurants. But White brings another essential ingredient to the table: a laser focus on the business side.
Again, he traces that skill back to his Midwest upbringing. “My dad’s a conservative banker from, Wisconsin, and he taught me to never force a deal. I don’t do vanity plays.”
That is evident in his current partnership with Alex Pirez in MIKA, the restaurant the two opened in Coral Gables, Florida, a neighborhood near Miami, at the end of last year. “Michael is not only a world-class chef, he also understands the business side of running a successful restaurant and how to create a menu that resonates with guests,” said Pirez. “That combination of talent in the kitchen and business acumen are unique traits that have brought success to MIKA.”
MIKA attracts the lunch and dinner crowd at its location in a mixed-used building in Coral Gables, Florida. | Photo courtesy of Pablo Enriquez.
That combination is particularly key in today’s challenging economy. “We have declining budgets, and I want to run 29% food costs but not compromise on the raw materials. The margins are tight, but I’m not squeezing my customers,” said White.
The pasta is made from scratch and he brings in the best olive oil and balsamic vinegar from Italy and octopus from Portugal “because the salinity in the Mediterranean is different,” he said, but White is also sourcing more fish from the East Coast, as provenance is important to him. He works with a Montauk seafood company that is fishing deeper to pull more species out of the ocean, including Montauk red prawns, black bass and scallops.
White is also being more strategic about restaurant locations. Pirez is the founder of Miami-based Moccha Group, specializing in real estate development, construction and design, and the two stategically located MIKA in a mixed-use building in a neighborhood that gets lunch traffic from the office crowd and dinner business from residents. “About 300,000 people left New York for Miami during the pandemic, and everybody and his brother rushed after them to open a restaurant,” White said, “but now Miami’s getting crushed and it’s better to be in more of a neighborhood.”
MIKA is billed as a “coastal Riviera restaurant” and offers a daily business lunch priced at $38 for two courses and $46 for three; customers can get in and out in an hour. Appetizer options include Hamachi Crudo and Heirloom Tomato Panzanella, followed by Mushroom Risotto, Chicken Caesar Milanese and Filet of Branzino. There are four desserts to choose from on the three-course lunch. At night, MIKA turns into a “clubstaurant” with music.
Branzino, a Mediterranean fish, is prepared simply with tomato livornese and grilled lemon. | Photo courtesy of Evan Sung.
“We have high net-worth guests and lots of transients in the building,” said White. Traffic and sales have been robust.
A pandemic reset
His winning formula that combines business acumen, culinary excellence and well-managed teams has led to more than a dozen successful restaurants under White’s leadership. But the pandemic was a turning point for the chef-owner.
“The Altamarea Group had to lay off 900 people and we all thought it was going to be a few weeks, but then it turned into months and we still had to look after the restaurants,” he said. White, his wife and daughter retreated to their home on the East End of Long Island where he had time to “reconfigure and reinvent.”
“I wasn’t baking sourdough at home, but I was really thinking about what I was going to do, how is this going to change my career? You put in 30-plus years and it was like, ‘holy shit, this is over.’ It just went from bad to worse,” he said.
He decided to exit the Altamarea Group and in December 2020, headed down to Atlantis Paradise Island to explore options. White also did a series of pop-ups in Miami with other notable chefs, including Thomas Keller.
It was a long journey, he said, but he worked with hotel company Brookfield, owner of Atlantis, to open Paranza in August 2023. The restaurant’s menu features a wide selection of crudo, antipasti, handcrafted pastas and risottos under the “Primi” heading, and “Secondi” composed of meat and fish entrees. Luxe ingredients like caviar, foie gras and lobster dot the menu, along with dishes with a clear Italian pedigree: Pacheri with lamb ragu, roasted pepper, mint and pecorino, and Pesce Spada, grilled swordfish with Sicilian caponata, pine nuts and salmoriglio dressing.
Then three more restaurants followed in quick succession: Mirabella in Miami’s Fountainbleu Hotel in October, MIKA in December 2024, then Santi that same month, all under a new company name: B Bianco Hospitality.
At the time of this interview, we were sitting in Santi, his flagship New York City restaurant located in a Tishman-Speyer office building in the former Alto space. It’s a multi-level upscale spot that caters to the executive lunch customer and well-heeled dinner crowd. The prep kitchen is downstairs, where skilled pasta makers were rolling out and stuffing dough by hand.
The Primi menu section at Santi includes handmade pastas like Fiochetti (robiola cheese ravioli.)| Photo courtesy of John Keon.
Upstairs, the beautifully presented dishes highlight local seafood and reflect White’s travels through Italy. At dinner, a la carte prices range from $24-$42 for antipasti, $28-$42 for pasta and $52-$79 for entrees.
Skilled team members make pasta from scratch in Santi’s kitchen. | Photo courtesy of Pat Cobe.
Levant opened in March of this year at the La Concha Resort in Puerto Rico—a first for White on that island with a menu that leans more Eastern Mediterranean/Middle East. The launch of Levant spurred him to participate in the Puerto Rico Wine and Food Festival in April, and he invited one of his former sous chefs and proteges, Rafael Galea, to cook with him. Galea worked at Marea and is now the chef-owner of his namesake restaurant in Mexico City—a place also dedicated to the cuisine of the Levant. He credits White with “giving people the chances they need to succeed and the tools they need to succeed.”
White now has six restaurants and is exploring options with Brookfield and other partners. “I don’t want to do one-offs,” said White, preferring to cut smart deals with hotels, real estate companies and investors who will inject capital into the restaurant. And it works both ways. “I’m part of the puzzle, because having a Michael White restaurant encourages other businesses to sign leases in the building or fill hotel rooms,” he said.
But in the end, White is a hands-on chef-owner and doesn’t want to spread himself too thin. When he puts his name on a restaurant, he wants to be there several times a year, to interact with and mentor his teams, introduce new seasonal menus and get to know his guests—his top priorities.
“I knew what I wanted at 21 and the future looks bright,” White said.
Pat plans and executes menu, food and drink stories for Restaurant Business and hosts the weekly Menu Talk podcast. She provides in-depth coverage of chefs, trends and menu innovation.
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