When Michael Mina was about to start his restaurant group back in the early 2000s, chefs were getting a bit of backlash for expanding beyond one restaurant. “The media asked, ‘Well who’s going to be in the kitchen if you have more than one restaurant,’” he related in a recent Menu Talk podcast.
Luckily, he forged ahead anyway, believing that the food of the country as a whole would benefit if chefs were the ones driving restaurant companies. What’s more, “We’re not magicians … we’re not cooking for 80 people by ourselves. It’s the team that’s working and cooking together,” he said. And the MINA Group was born in 2003. The company now operates more than 30 restaurants in the U.S. and others overseas.
During the podcast, Mina shared key learnings gleaned over the years and talked about his new cookbook, “My Egypt: Cooking from My Roots,” and how it inspired his latest restaurant, Orla. Here are excerpts from our conversation.
Hotels make good business partners
With Aqua, [a former restaurant group where Mina was a minority partner] we had four restaurants with hotels and they were great partnerships, great experiences. As a chef in an independent restaurant, everyone thinks you know how to do everything. So the toilet breaks, and you’re supposed to know how to fix it. There are a lot of plusses to be part of hotels. And I could see where we could really expand our company and continue to do innovative showcases that were different concepts and work with different chefs. And knock on wood, that happened in 2003, when we opened our first restaurant at the Westin in San Francisco, Michael Mina at the Westin St. Francis. We did trios [on the menu] and we earned two Michelin stars. And that kind of changed the trajectory of my career.
Retooling the company
From there, it was go-go-go, opening restaurants in hotels in Las Vegas, New York City, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Miami, Southern California and more.
During the pandemic, we took some time to slow down, re-evaluate and focus on learning. We decided to retool the company and build it to over-face with hotels by putting in our own HR department, the right learning development team, the right marketing team. Because we also knew that as hotels came back, they would have some staffing challenges. And if we had the right team, we knew there would be some good opportunities to go into hotels and build showcase restaurants.
This was a big game-changer for me. We had gotten off track a little bit, creating some freestanding restaurants. That is a very different skill set than creating hotel restaurants. Now we’re back to one team and I absolutely love it. And we’re back in a pretty big ramp-up phase.
Rediscovering culinary roots
I left Egypt for the U.S. when I was two, so all I knew about Egyptian food was what my mom cooked for me and our extended family. I cooked with my mom a lot, and tasted, and what I took away was that Egyptian food is high in acid, sweetness and spice and very flavorful. I loved food with a lot of flavor and that really influenced my cooking, although I never cooked much Middle Eastern food in my restaurants.
Then Middle Eastern cuisines started taking off, and I began doing as much research as I could to better understand Egyptian food. I built a test kitchen in San Francisco to test out a concept called “Middleteranean.”
At Orla, Chef Mina elevates his mom's falafel by topping it with ahi tuna. | Photo courtesy of the MINA Group
A journey back to Egypt
I decided to take a trip to Egypt to start a kind of document and better understand the food … whether this was going to turn into a book, a restaurant or nothing. There I met an Egyptian chef named Mustafa and he changed my life.
Mustafa had all these young chefs working with him and I started seeing all the things I had grown up eating cooked as they’re made in Egypt ... I was able to learn all the foundational pieces. And that’s a very dynamic difference.
The makings of a book and restaurant
I wanted to take this foundation and move the cuisine forward, and that led to the cookbook [“My Egypt: Cooking from My Roots,”]. I was going to take my mom’s falafel, which was one of my favorite dishes in the world, and she served it with tahini and a salad made with tomatoes, peppers, red onions and parsley, in a pocket bread. I said I’m going to use a piece of ahi tuna and make a crudo out of it—keep the foundation but elevate the dish. Don’t lose the foundation but put some innovation into it. And so the book does both of those. And Orla is the restaurant that was created off the book.
The first Orla opened in the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas and the second in The Regent Santa Monica Beach Hotel.
Whenever we launch a book we have a little fun with it, and we’ll do a My Egypt cookbook menu in pretty much all of our restaurants over the next couple of months. When my mom comes to my restaurants, she always tells me how great everything is. But whenever I give her the “modern” version of it, she’ll tell me I’m not making it right!
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