Michael Psilakis
Photo: courtesy of Gus & Gabriel
Michael Psilakis says he looks at being extremely busy as a positive thing. Good thing because in addition to overseeing four New York restaurants – Mia Dona, Kefi, Anthos and his latest, Gus & Gabriel – he’s prepping for the fall release of his cookbook, How to Roast a Lamb: New Greek Classic Cooking, while continuously planning ahead for his next project. The award-winning chef spoke with us about his just-opened American gastropub.
Zagat Buzz: Tell me about the inspiration behind Gus & Gabriel.
Michael Psilakis: I have a three-year-old son, Gabriel. About a year ago we started cooking together. And as I started to cook things with him, I experienced dishes that I never really had growing up in the vacuum of Greek culture. But now my son comes at it from a completely different place; he has Greek, Italian and American culture. And then my father, Gus, passed away, and I wrote a cookbook that paid homage to him and the lessons he taught me about the value of food. And I thought maybe it would be really interesting to take food that people recognize at a specific, special point in their lives and revisit those things and use the concept as the platform to take them on a journey.
ZB: So if you grew up in a 'Greek vacuum' in terms of food, how did you research these types of American comfort dishes?
MP: I went to a lot of pubs, gathered a lot of menus and did a lot of research online. Basically I made a spreadsheet, and I sat down and listed all the dishes I was finding in typical American pubs and rated them. And then bridging the gap were some of the items you would find in a Greek diner, that diner we all knew growing up, run by Greek immigrants, where they blended a lot of different things on a menu.
ZB: In addition to your Greek restaurants, you’ve tackled Italian and now American. It’s amazing how you have avoided becoming 'typecast' as a Greek chef. Did you feel pressure to stay in that box? And was it a conscious effort for you to break out of it?
MP: I did feel the pressure, I can’t lie. And I really like to be known as the Greek chef. But one of the things I am most proud of is that the food is varied in all my restaurants. With each restaurant opening there is the experience that allows us to broaden our horizons and look at food in different ways.
ZB: When was the moment that you felt you had really 'made it' as a chef?
MP: When I started seeing other chefs using Greek ingredients on their menus and asking me about ingredients and thinking about Greek ingredients. Now you’ll see [Greek influence] on French menus and Italian menus, and I think that’s really when you start to recognize that you’ve influenced not only your particular genre of food, but the culinary world as a whole. We have made a tremendous amount of progress in a very short period of time, and I think more people know about Greek food today than they did years ago – it’s really starting to evolve into a tradition in the U.S.
ZB: I expected you to say it was when you cooked for President Obama.
MP: That was a big moment because I wasn’t just cooking for the President. I was cooking for the President on Greek Independence Day, and I had a whole country watching me doing it. It was a huge honor, and it’s very hard to put it into words. But I was getting hundreds of e-mails from these random Greeks that were just – I’m getting goosebumps now just thinking about it – telling me, 'We are so proud of what you are doing and what you have been able to do for us,' and that was what our mission was. I didn’t sit down one day and decide I wanted to cook for the President, or get a Michelin star, or get 'Chef of the Year' or any of these things. I really set out to show the culinary world that Greek food can be more than what they know, and we’ve been able to do that, so, mission accomplished on that side.
ZB: What’s next? A vacation?
MP: By the end of next year, I would like to open a restaurant in Greece. The exciting thing about going back to Greece is that I don’t have to teach what Greek food is all about – it's already known. It’s on the list, and I’ve been pretty good at crossing things off the list in the last few years.
– Kathleen Squires