Sixty-three floors above the bustle of Manhattan, in Saga’s serene dark-toned dining room, mid-way through executive chef Charlie Mitchell’s 10-course, $315 tasting menu with the lights of the city twinkling magically below, you will be served potato salad. It happens to be a layered composition involving almonds, capers, lemon, chives, a silky white-verjus sabayon, and caviar, and it arrives in a handcrafted German porcelain bowl, but it’s still, absolutely, 100% potato salad. It’s also not like any potato salad I’ve ever had. When I was there, my dining partner and I agreed that we would eat it every day for the rest of our lives if anyone (i.e., Mitchell) happened to give us that option.
An eye-catching shima aji dish with strawberry and basil at Saga.
Credit: Food & Wine / Alex Lau
That dish — stratospherically elegant but also deeply humble — is a nod to Mitchell’s grandmother’s potato salad, which he ate regularly as a kid. Mitchell grew up in Detroit with a single mom, and his grandmother played a crucial role in his upbringing. In his family, he says, everyone helped each other, which meant everybody cooked. “I just had a cooking family,” he says. “That made it the thing to do. And I cooked at home with my mom because it was nice to help out around the house.”
Eventually, his love for cooking led him to his first industry job. It started with a chance interview for an opening in the kitchen at the Detroit hotel where he worked as a valet. “The head chef was like, ‘Show up with a paring knife and a chef knife,’ and I remember going, ‘What the hell is a paring knife?'” says Mitchell. “But I went to Sur La Table, I got my gear together, I showed up for work the next day, and the rest was history.”
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That history now includes positions at a number of top New York City restaurants — One White Street, Per Se, Blue Hill, Eleven Madison Park — and a formative stint in D.C., where he worked under chef Ryan Ratino of the two-Michelin-starred Jônt. “He was the first chef I worked closely with who was just completely excited about where an ingredient came from, what it was, and how to treat it,” Mitchell says. “I was like, ‘Oh, man — I love cooking like this.’ I love being excited about what the earth has given us.”
Marigold pasta with Daurenki caviar at Saga
Credit: Food & Wine / Alex Lau
That passion shows now at Saga, which he took over after the untimely death of founder Jamal James Kent, a good friend. Mitchell has kept the end-of-meal Moroccan tea service at Saga as an homage to Kent, but the rest of the menu is entirely his own. He coordinates the two-Michelin-starred restaurant with a tightwire-walking procession of tasting-menu dishes that draw effortlessly on multiple traditions at once: Southern U.S., Japanese, and French, primarily, with a ruthless focus on the best ingredients and a devotion to vivid flavor.
While Saga’s dining room is calm and composed, there’s a pulsating energy here, too, like an electric current running under the surface (is that Drake on the playlist? And D’Angelo?). It matches Mitchell’s intense ambition, which runs under his soft-spoken manner.
A painting by renowned artist Jean-Michel Basquiat hangs in Saga’s dining room.
Credit: Food & Wine / Alex Lau
Mitchell is wary of falling into what he sees as one of the risks of high-level fine dining, which is that chefs can get so rarefied that their food ends up being boring or bland. When Mitchell cooks, he imagines his grandmother in the kitchen with a tasting spoon. “My grandmother would never stand for bland food, ever,” Mitchel says. “She’s part of the essence of how I season food.”
A deceptively simple tart at Saga
Credit: Food & Wine / Alex Lau
You can see his influences in dishes like cured Sawara (Japanese Spanish mackerel) with Tsuyahime dirty rice, hen-of-the-woods mushrooms, Scotch bonnet pepper, a ham hock dashi, and collard greens — each bite is earthy, spicy, subtle, complex. Or in a deceptively simple tartlet that layers shima aji tartare (Japanese striped jack), a charred shishito aioli, grated wasabi, tiny pearls of finger lime, and green flecks of scallion within a delicate crust made using white miso, to create a one-bite pop of vivid flavor.
And has his grandmother been to Saga? Mitchell smiles. At 80 years old, she flew from Detroit to eat at Brooklyn’s Clover Hill, Mitchell’s first executive chef gig and where he began to draw national attention. It was the first time she’d ever gotten on a plane. “I don’t know if she’s going to get on a plane again,” Mitchell says. “But we’ll see. She supports me. She still thinks she’s a better cook than I am, which I think is bananas. But that’s what makes her who she is.”
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