Michael Mina Restaurants Are Everywhere. Why Do We Know So Little About Him?

It’s the kind of scorching late-summer day that drives any reasonable person indoors to an AC blaring like Nirvana in 1993. But there’s nothing reasonable about the Ellensburg Rodeo. Cowboy hats and sterling belt buckles take center stage as the rural Washington town of fewer than 20,000 residents shuts down for Labor Day weekend, the three days when the world-class rodeo takes over this patch of the Kittitas Valley. Just outside the city limits, timothy hay grows steadily under the beating sun, unaware of the huge influx of visitors.

This is the annual event Michelin-starred restaurant owner and James Beard Award-winning chef Michael Mina looked forward to every year growing up, having moved to the provincial enclave when he was just two years old. It’s also the annual ceremony I looked forward to as a kid growing up in Ellensburg. I worked my first restaurant jobs on Canyon Road, just as Mina did during his high school years.

The significance of this chapter of Mina’s life is not lost on me but seems misunderstood by most. The chef never was comfortable discussing the details of his childhood, avoiding them in profiles from the ‘90s and early aughts up to his recent years as a business tycoon. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Soleil Ho, then writing for the food section, once riffed on the way Mina is less well-known as compared to other celebrity chefs. But even Ho gets it wrong in their piece, writing that Mina came to this country as a teenager from Egypt when, in fact, Mina’s family moved to Washington state when he was a toddler. (His birth name is Ashraf, Michael being a middle name he picked for himself at five since that was also the name of his best friend.)

In fact, despite his fame, Mina’s past remains relatively mysterious, something he’s generally sought to maintain — though that seems to be changing lately. “People have different positives and negatives in their lives,” Mina says. “It’s something I want to talk about now.” It’s undeniable that the world evolved throughout Mina’s career, and so has the U.S. dining landscape — which is now perhaps more celebratory than ever before of identity and culture and their intersection in the kitchen. The chef’s more open, too, talking about his past in interviews, evolving the menus in his restaurants, and discussing his history proudly in My Egypt: Cooking From My Roots, which comes out on October 8.

Michael Mina

These days Michael Mina may not be a name on the lips of stylish San Francisco bon vivants in the way it once was. But older diners still know him for Aqua, where he earned the James Beard Foundation Rising Star Chef Award in 1997, along with two Michelin stars. At Bourbon Steak in Washington, D.C., Mina has served presidents including Barack Obama, and urban restaurantgoers from Boston to Dubai can dine at his collection of international establishments.

Despite his roots in Washington and Egypt, Mina remains a mainstay of the dining landscape in the Bay. His introduction to San Francisco came when he was just 13; he remembers it as the first time he had a cappuccino and croissant. It was during a 10-day trip to the city that he saw other people of color — very different from his majority-white hometown of Ellensburg — and could recognize the scent of spices wafting down the street. “It was magical,” Mina remembers. “You grow up in a place where you’re looked at as weird. San Francisco was the first time I felt like I fit in.”

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Michael Mina is jovial and quick to praise others, deflecting attention from himself with his movements and words even though most of the time the people around him seem eager to hear what he has to say. As he describes his life, he gets choked up, and even more reticent to share. I’ve encountered this with plenty of people from Central Washington; gregarious and friendly, but less forthcoming about the intimate stuff.

Mina’s pivot into cooking is profoundly relatable: As a 14-year-old, his dad told him it was either basketball or a job, and he didn’t see eye to eye with his coach. His first gig was at a truck stop called the Husky House, where he became a line cook. He picked up a second restaurant job at McCullugh’s, an upscale option in a one-horse town, and started clocking about 70 hours a week on top of finishing high school. For all his accolades, his restaurants, and his status as a Culinary Institute of America (CIA) graduate — where he is now on the board of directors — Mina’s upbringing was anything but cushy.

Mina was born to a Coptic Christian family from a country that is 97 percent Muslim. His mother had seven brothers and sisters, all of whom had already moved to Washington state in the 1960s during Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rule. His mother was a chemistry professor and his father ran the business department at the American University in Cairo. But Nasser’s brand of Arab nationalism placed restrictions on religious minorities including Jews and Copts. Coptic elites lost an estimated 75 percent of their property to nationalization under the Nasser regime, according to the Minority Rights Group. So the Mina family took the government’s ongoing offer to leave their property and nab one-way tickets out of the country. His father got a role at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, and Mina grew up at 1912 Parklane Avenue rather than in his family’s ancestral home, surrounded by the tall Garry oak trees of Kittitas County instead of the date palms and acacia trees of the Nile Delta.

Growing up, Mina had a hard time looking so different from everyone else in Ellensburg. In 2023, Ellensburg was about 80 percent white, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, while Washington state was 91 percent white in the 1980 census. Kids wouldn’t want to come over to his house to eat his mom’s cooking, telling him his house smelled different, he recalls. He described school, navigating the halls, as a nerve-racking experience. “Being Egyptian was unique in that town to say the least,” Mina says. “It was challenging. I learned quickly to make friends or get into fights.”

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom when it came to food, making Mina’s experience more than the lunchbox moment. One major Ellensburg export is timothy hay, prime feed for Japanese wagyu. Like many from Ellensburg, Mina bucked hay as a kid and says he’s still never eaten beef jerky better than the decadent meat from Washington farms. The livestock in the countryside — including the lamb that became a staple in his North African cuisine at home — helped Mina pioneer some of his famous dishes, such as his hay-smoked beef. He even got the idea for his corn pudding, now a dessert favorite on his menus, from Washington-based Twin City Foods, Inc., where Mina’s older brother worked in high school.

Plus, some of his bullies eventually became lifelong friends. “I wouldn’t trade a thing about it,” Mina says of his childhood. “It made me a lot stronger. It gave me the hospitality gene, teaching me how to get along with people. The racism I experienced wasn’t as bad as a lot of people experience in this world.”

Chef Paul Chung clocked Mina’s inspired take on fine dining — presented with a rural Western spin — from the jump. The Saison Hospitality culinary director met Mina when Chung was hired at the D.C. outpost of Bourbon Steak, and went on to help launch 13 Mina restaurants over six years. He didn’t know much about the restaurateur before they met and had no idea Mina wasn’t white. “When I saw [Michael Mina: The Cookbook], I was like ‘Oh he’s not of European descent,’” Chung says. “It was inspiring [to see that from a fellow person of color].”

Still, Chung can’t help but think Mina’s non-European background is part of why the chef is less well-known than his peers. Though Mina has dozens of restaurants and an “extremely high” retention rate for his staff, Chung says, the new brass of cooks and chefs who pay homage to their roots don’t seem to consider him in their fold — yet he’s not considered a Bobby Flay of his era, either. “People outside of restaurants aren’t as familiar with Michael,” Chung says. “On the industry level, everyone knows who he is.”

But Chung also knows Mina’s shaped his media presence with intention. Rather than drawing on a personal cultural narrative, perhaps what new fine dining fans are drawn to in a Dalida or a Copra, diners came to Aqua for the same reason they come to the Bungalow Kitchen now: Opulent hospitality and a chance to bliss out. “Edgy” and “raw” are not words one uses to describe Mina or his restaurants. “That’s David Chang’s rebel thing,” Chung says. “That’s not Michael’s brand. It’s The Rolling Stones versus The Beatles.”

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After graduating high school in 1986, Mina gave college a try. But the truth is he already had a dream of cooking at the Space Needle. He’d just seen Jeremiah Tower on TV, and the San Francisco chef made cooking look sexy. Mina knew he wanted that life.

When Mina told his parents he planned to cook, his parents were less than enthusiastic, asking him if he really wanted to be a “servant.” So he went about proving to his dad it wasn’t a fleeting whimsy — by getting said job cooking at the Space Needle. His father eventually hopped on a plane and scouted the CIA in Hyde Park to make sure it lived up to its larger-than-life reputation.

Mina moved to New York to properly begin his journey. Among the many CIA grads that went on to become unknown back-of-house legionnaires, Mina stood apart. It was in New York that Mina would open the Tribeca Grill with Gerry Hayden and Claudia Fleming, setting the wheels in motion for opening Aqua at 23 years old in San Francisco.

Michael Mina

“I’m not sure Michael was ever committed to being famous,” says Gary LaMorte. He’s a former sous chef to Thomas Keller at the French Laundry and founder of Honest Hospitality Team, and worked for Mina for almost a decade, finishing his tenure as vice president of Mina Group. “But the rest of the country is catching up to things he was doing 15 years ago.” Mina’s innovative techniques in the archaic fine dining scene, on top of his approach to hospitality and sourcing high-caliber meat products, made him impressive to old heads early in his career. Even then, LaMorte says, Mina was pushing high-end cuisine into new places. “He was passionate about all of it, from a steakhouse to fine dining,” LaMorte says.

Running kitchens in the ’90s, Mina began serving three to five dishes at a time on one plate, not unlike meze or a snack tray. LaMorte says this paralleled Mina’s trajectory as a restaurateur; he was presenting various restaurants of different styles in cities as though they were big platters, canvasses to dot. At the time, this technique was a smart way to plate smaller portions of ornate dishes. Butter-bathing meats is another Mina-developed approach that involves putting a cold steak in warm clarified butter, “bathing” the meat in seasoned fats to enrich the flavor. It was a method for infusing flavor into meat before sous vide took off. Wood-firing the meat, especially with that butter marination on the outside, promoted steadier, more even cooking at a quicker temperature and charring.

Aqua, Bourbon Steak, and the eventual Michael Mina restaurant were ahead of their time. Take the wood-fired focus; that comes from hay-smoking for Mina. He learned this technique in rural Washington surrounded by friends in the hay and meat industries. It’s also when he learned that rib caps were an often-overlooked cut, something he’d earn acclaim for serving at Michael Mina at the Westin decades later.

Raj Dixit, who’s worked with Mina for about 12 years, remembers reading about Mina’s cooking in Food and Wine years before taking his first Mina job at the St. Regis Monarch Beach in Dana Point, California. He says Mina was as uncompromising in his cooking then as he is now, all while keeping the culture in the kitchen professional. And, like Chung, Dixit points out how rare it was to have a nonwhite boss in a kitchen. Pre-2005, way before it was cool, Mina was throwing cardamom, heavy black pepper, and saffron into the mix. “Mina set out to be the Le Bernadin of the West,” Dixit says. “He had all these rich dishes he lightened up with fish, and his spice trail was the most interesting back then.”

As an Indian and Filipino chef, Dixit appreciated Mina’s boundaryless cuisine. But he speculates Mina wasn’t able to experiment with his identity in the ’90s in the same way chefs might be empowered to in 2024. “It’s clear to me he wants to return to his roots,” Dixit says. “His fondest food memories were with his mother and father, but he never had the opportunity to revisit that.”

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In spring 2021, Mina arrived at his now-closed flagship restaurant Estiatorio Ornos, fresh off a plane from Egypt where he had spent a few weeks traveling the country. The FiDi restaurant (the location of the flagship Michael Mina restaurant until its 2020 closure) served Greek cuisine, but when he arrived at the restaurant that day, he unpacked spices and photos from his trip like a kid unwrapping Christmas presents. Ornos head chef Daniela Vergara remembers that day at the restaurant vividly. “He wanted to show off his culture, his style,” she says.

It was just seven years ago that Vergara was finishing up at the CIA herself. Even back then, she knew she wanted to cook for Mina. His group offers the MINA Fellowship, a two-year intensive that sees aspiring chefs rotate through four Mina Group restaurants. After a few installations, she became the company’s youngest and only female head chef working at Ornos before the restaurant’s spring 2024 closure. Mina’s immigrant background gives Vergara reason to think she could someday open her own Colombian restaurant, a nod to her family’s heritage. “It gives me hope,” she says.

Now in his mid-50s and a seasoned restaurateur, Mina is bringing more of himself to the restaurant world. Dishes like lamb hummus and his mother’s falafel recipe, which incorporate fava beans rather than chickpeas, are what he calls “Middleterannean.” The head honcho is fully in his rebirth era. His cooking is homey, but also big and brash. It’s loving, but white tablecloth.

Mina opened Mediterranean, or Middleterranean, Orla at Mandalay Bay in early 2024 and is polishing his new cookbook, My Egypt. Macaroni bechamel, typically prepared with mushroom duxelles at the restaurant, is a centerpiece at Orla; while the dish is usually presented with meat, it was served without animal protein in Mina’s home growing up to accommodate his vegetarian father. Eighty percent of Orla’s menu will be in his new book, a nod to Mina’s renewed focus on his origin story. “When I was at the CIA back then, there wasn’t a Middle Eastern class,” Mina says. “There wasn’t an Egyptian chef you could point to. I want to be an advocate for that, to push that, and make sure it keeps happening.”

Looking back, he feels the highest height he’s reached is the family of chefs he’s worked alongside — his protegees. Mina doesn’t feel he’s been overlooked, that he should have been a Bobby Flay. When asked about his accolades, he rattles off lists of names — of his peers as well as those he’s mentored — an encyclopedic knowledge of talent: That itself is the true achievement.

“I won a James Beard in my 20s, and there were a lot I won at 26, 27,” Mina says. “But I always said no to the television path, to getting credit for all of it. I was a part of a team, and my responsibility was to enable this beautiful restaurant so everyone could work and grow.”

Paolo Bicchieri is a reporter at Eater SF writing about Bay Area restaurant and bar trends, coffee and cafes, and pop-ups

Copy edited by Nadia Q. Ahmad

Additional photo illustration credits: All photos courtesy Michael Mina