Mike Isabella - Mike Isabellas Crazy Good Italian: Big Flavors, Small Plates

W HEN YOU RUN a restaurant that does 700800 covers in a night and you want to make sure everyone gets the same great experience from start to finish, your food has to be very well thought out and easy to execute, but still pack the right balance of flavor. My food is straightforward because thats how I learned to cook, both as a kid and throughout my culinary training and restaurant cooking. Its important to me to be able to take simple ingredients and make a dish that stands out and is memorable. The recipes in this book are geared to help people cook delicious food on an everyday basis. And the food in this book? Is food I wanna eat.

I started cooking when I was five or six years old, growing up in Little Ferry, New Jersey, making meatballs with my Italian grandmother. I was a wild kid and she gave me things to do that kept me busy and out of trouble. When we went out to eat, I was always the kid trying the weird things on the menu. While my sister usually stuck to pasta with butter and cheese, I always wanted to order something new or different and then try to figure out how they made it.

From a really young age I knew I wanted to cook, but I didnt know what a chef was, exactly. I just wanted to be in a kitchen. As I got older, I got into trouble more often than not and the dream faded a little. When I was twenty, my grandmother passed away. Losing her shook me to the core. At the time, I was working in retail sales and barely phoning it in because I was more worried about going out every night instead of figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. My girlfriend at the time suggested I go to cooking school in New York. And since I hated my job and wanted to get my act together, I finally decided to try and get myself back on track.

My first day in class was inspiring and exciting, but I was scared. I didnt want to fail. Cooking was the only thing I truly wanted to do. I thought: if Im not good at this, Im screwed.

Fortunately, after culinary school, I got jobs in New York, Philadelphia, and Atlanta cooking with some of the best chefs and restaurateurs in those cities. My specialties became Latin, Mexican, Spanish, and Greek food, and when it came time to become an executive chef, I sent my rsum to Jos Andrs, who hired me to be the chef at Zaytinya in Washington, D.C. From there, I earned my own solid reviews and Zagat #1 rankings, and that opened the door to being on Top Chef and Top Chef All-Stars.

Appearing on Top Chef All-Stars was really important to me. I feel like the Ellis Island episode showed America the real me, not the jerk I looked like the first season I was on the show. My whole career, I had mostly avoided cooking Italian food because it was something Id learned from my grandmother, so it didnt seem very chef-y. But on that All-Stars episode, where we had to cook based on our heritage, I let my guard down and, for the first time since I made it with her as a teenager, cooked Grandmas gnocchi and gravy. It was very hard to do, and its still hard to talk about because I really miss her and wish she were able to see what Ive done with my life. I felt like she was there on the show in the kitchen with me. It was big.

As I thought about the first restaurant I wanted to open, I knew that I wanted to have the kind of restaurant where I could one day cook for my kids and share with them the flavors and experiences I had growing up. Thats how the idea for Graffiato started. I didnt want to do traditional Italian food, or traditional Mediterranean food. I wanted to do my version of those foods Ive grown to love so much. When I decided to write this cookbook, I wanted to include recipes that make the ordinary extraordinary and incorporate ingredients and flavors that give everyday home cooking that special twist. I wanted to show people how I like to cook and eat my foodbig, bold flavors on small plates, with three or four different things to eat throughout the meal. Many of the recipes in the Family Secrets chapter serve up to six people, but most everything else is made for four people, in small portions.

In this book, youll find recipes inspired by the cooking I did with my grandmother all the way up to the food I cook today at my restaurant and at home. These recipes are in the tradition of my family and every chef Ive learned from, but at the end of the day, its my flavors, my food. This food is who I am.

MIKE ISABELLA

I hope this book inspires you to cook every day and try new things in the kitchen. Here are some things I want you to know before you start reading the rest of this book:

Always use the best ingredients you can find. It really does make a difference!

Make things from scratch when you can. If you cant, buy fresh and local.

Get to know the farmers at your farmers market, and the other specialty food purveyors in your area. Having friendly relationships with them will only help you in the kitchen.

I almost exclusively use only fresh herbs in my cooking and in the recipes in this book. Cooking with fresh herbsinstead of the dried stuff in jarsis the way to go!

Toast and grind your own spicesa spice grinder is an inexpensive, important tool for any kitchen.

A Microplane is key to getting the best citrus zest and the finest shavings of hard cheese. Its a must-have for every kitchen.