WEDNESDAY, lunchtime: "No, Elliot, you can't have a third piece of pizza, and Samantha, please stop squishing the lemon wedge - you've gotten juice in the baby's eye," says the mother, attempting a calm restaurant voice at Alta Strada in Wellesley. Next to her, a businessman also tries for a mellow lunch conversation with a client. Unperturbed by the surrounding chaos, their talk continues through salad, pasta, espresso, and the who-should-pick-up-the-check ritual. Two tables away sits chef Michael Schlow, the owner of Alta Strada, his first solo venture (soon to be joined by a second location at the MGM Grand at Foxwoods). Schlow is huddled with his team, working out common restaurant kinks, planning menus - and trying to come up with a plan to bring the noise level down at his casual Italian trattoria. "Who knew that all these lunchtime suburban ladies - talking relationships, schlepping diaper bags, laughing - could be so noisy?" he wonders. But he clearly loves it. There's a wait for a table, even here in the 'burbs at 1:15.
Thursday, lunchtime: my dining companion and I are noticeably the least elegant people in the busy dining room at Via Matta in Park Square. Two Asian women have shopping bags from Burberry and Hermès. Three men at a round table are wearing Prada sunglasses pushed back on their heads, daintily forking though a platter of carpaccio as they wait for their entrées. The room has a nice clink: a laugh here, a cough there. Conversation burbles. An inveterate eavesdropper, I can't hear a single juicy bit. It's not sterile; it's just very civilized, very upmarket. The interesting thing is that Schlow, chef and co-owner of Via Matta (and also of Great Bay), is equally at home here and at Alta Strada. That's a rare feat for someone whose culinary credentials are stratospheric. He's been in Boston for 12 years, long enough to feel like a fixture. But he still remembers the city as it was when he first came here to cook.
A decade ago, when Schlow arrived in Boston to present arguably the most complex food in the city in arguably the smallest space - the sub-basement kitchen at the old Café Louis - he seemed a conundrum: a non-snotty New York guy with a baseball player's walk, a goofy sense of humor, and a perfectionist's sense of fine food. I liked him at once. And in many ways, success has not gone to his head. He still likes to cook, is happier in the kitchen than out, and makes goofy jokes. He was interviewed to be a judge on Top Chef, and was even a finalist, but ultimately the producers decided that Schlow wasn't "mean enough" for the job.
Better known today outside Boston than in it, Schlow came here in 1995, in the middle of a major recession and years before upscale restaurant openings became a weekly experience for local diners. He arrived hoping to make a splash as a name chef - something difficult to do in New York, with so many other cooks. He'd been trained by the best, and when he arrived, he helped Boston chefs and diners move up many notches on the food chain. He brought D'Artagnan to Boston, organizing a foie gras dinner at Hamersley's so that the rest of the local chefs would have a source for exotic ingredients like wild boar and fresh truffles. When Schlow opened Radius with Christopher Myers and Esti Parsons, it set a new standard for excellence, execution, and restraint in Boston. The prices were a brisk surprise for most diners, and so were the portions. "At first, people didn't get the food - or why we had to charge so much," Schlow recalls. "There were always these snide jokes about how they had to stop at Subway for a sandwich after a meal at Radius. Then, the jokes stopped." Schlow was soon winning all sorts of culinary awards, prospering in his adopted city. But still he was hungry for more: a cookbook, a cooking show, and a chain of casual Italian restaurants.
Now Schlow's become a major Boston culinary patriot, and he's annoyed that bad-boy chef-author Anthony Bourdain recently came to town and trashed the local culinary scene. "Since when did Bourdain become an expert on Boston?" Schlow wants to know. On the other hand, Schlow might be just such an expert. He's been here long enough to reflect on how dining in Boston has changed in a very short span of time. "The biggest change is that portions are not so gargantuan anymore," he notes. "They're still bigger than in New York or other places, but Bostonians now place a high value on service, ambiance, and quality - even if the portions aren't falling off the plate. I like to think that at Radius and Via Matta, by example, we were part of a change in the mindset, and in the professionalization of restaurant service."
In fact, the "professionalization" of the Boston restaurant scene is something Schlow talks about a lot. It irks him that many of his top sous chefs and chefs de cuisine, as well as those at a lot of Boston's best restaurants, end up leaving to work in New York or San Francisco. "It's flattering that they go tosuch good places like Restaurant Daniel and Le Bernardin, but we need to do something to keep the talent here," he says. "Why can't our best young chefs bounce from me to Ken Oringer, Gordon [Hamersley] to Lydia [Shire] to Jasper [White] to Todd [English]? In the nine years since we've opened Radius, we only had one chef go from us to another excellent local restaurant. I think we're in danger of having a brain drain. We have to figure out a way to keep the best good young chefs in Boston."
Schlow says he's had to add more restaurants to his empire just to keep some of his best chefs challenged and in town. "You don't want to lose a talent like Luis Morales, who opened Radius with me, went to open Via Matta, and is now taking charge of the Alta Strada at MGM," he says. Schlow thinks that one solution to the problem is for all of us to eat out more. "What is the problem with this city, that people go home so early and tell me, ‘Well, tomorrow's a school night'? Who actually has school in the morning?"
Schlow also thinks Boston's restaurants are equals in quality to those in New York. "We are an excellent food city - the difference is that we don't have the population density to have five or six excellent restaurants in each category," he explains. "We'd need a population base of 300,000 people dining out regularly to support that. But what we do have is world class, and Bostonians don't understand that. You might have more choices in San Francisco, London, or New York, but the food won't be any better."
As he prepares to open his new mega-venture, the 8000-square-foot, 225-seat Alta Strada at Foxwoods in May, and to take on a consulting role with the soon-to-open restaurant at the Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel, Schlow is buoyant - but still unsatisfied. "I'm not a success yet," he says, "but I'm a lot further than I ever had any reason to expect." @
[Photo by Joel Veak]
