Michael’s—the restaurant that takes pride in delivering great food, great drinks and great service. Michael McCarty, the founder and proprietor of Michael’s, has immense experience in knowing what works to keep a restaurant successful, with Michael’s of Santa Monica celebrating 45 years in business and Michael’s of New York celebrating 35 years in business. McCarty’s ability to know a customer’s wants and needs while not spreading himself and the restaurant thin has been remarkable. His journey of discovery and plan of action has led to Michael’s being what it is today—a sought out establishment with delicious food.
At Michael’s, you can find it all: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Desserts, Happy Hour, Cocktails and Drinks, and most importantly, a feel-good enjoyable time. There’s a reason why those who go there build life long relationships, from eating there regularly, to having birthdays, weddings and all types of events catered. At Michael’s, you can find Blueberry Pancakes, Brioche French Toast, a cobb or Niçoise salad, Korean BBQ Steak Lettuce Wrap, Dry Aged NY Strip Steak, a variety of wine— do you prefer Italian or French, maybe even Malibu?— and numerous other options. You might as well look at the menu now. And when discussing the items on the menu, McCarty stated,“ We never do fancy, we do solid, simple, beautiful looking. We let the ingredients speak for themselves and the way we combine them. Everything we do is perfectly ripened, ready to be served.” He continued with,”They’re all on the menu because they’re equally as good. I’m not going to tell somebody who feels like they want fish to eat the steak, or those who want the steak to eat the fish. Trust me when you can’t go wrong. And if that strikes a chord, you should order that. And by the way, come back next week and order the other one.” McCarty does not want a customer to come once a year, designing the menu 45 years ago so that it wasn’t formal, fancy or pedantic. It was—and still is to have food brought out, people to have a good time and taste a wide variety of sorts.
Now, McCarty’s interest for the restaurant/hospitality business began in September of 1969. McCarty grew up in Briarcliff Manor, witnessing his parents and their friends entertaining each other with parties of all types. He said “They threw wild parties of all sizes and shapes—from black tie, all the way down to casual barbecues, parties at the beach, parties in the forest, parties in the mountains. They [his parents] just had a great group of friends, and they embodied this sort of joie de vivre.” So, rolling around to 1969, that was the time when McCarty was going off to spend his junior year of high school in Rennes, Brittany, in France. Right before his trip, his parents took him to Laurent—a classic French restaurant in NYC. It had beautiful decor with the sorts of likes of Maxine’s in Paris. There, McCarty had the epiphany that his experience at Laurent was like the parties his parents and their friends had. McCarty’s epiphany continued when he saw his father and mother’s best friend fighting over the check, having stated, “This is like throwing one of my parents’ parties except for at the end of the night, you give everybody a check. In the middle of the meal, in walks the owner—Laurent himself. You could feel the energy in the room go through the roof. It’s like you took a dimmer and just flashed it up to full power; he was working the floor, everybody’s talking and everybody’s laughing, having a great time.”
After dinner at Laurant’s, it was time to take an 11-day student boat ride to France. From what McCarty had known growing up—food was food; simple and good. He stated “ Food and cooking wasn’t the intellectual insanity that it is today. It was just a matter of course. You always had good food and it was always extremely simple. In other words, nobody spent a lot of time futzing around on the plates. It was just, they bought good, great ingredients.” His experience had transformed on the boat, having met the Dolce Vita, as the Italian chefs of the boat met him and all those on it, with a five meals a day: breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack in the morning, snack in the afternoon. McCarty said, “Even though we were students, they [the chefs] still adhered to. And that was something which I really learned from them. I said ‘you know, they didn’t care if we were rich adults on some cruise line. These are a bunch of scraggly kids with backpacks and no money.’”
A year had passed and McCarty had learned that France had a hotel and restaurant school—the Ecole Hôtelière de Paris—, that there was another route in life to learning, other than getting a degree, as there was a bigger selection of trades. With the knowledge of the Ecole Hôtelière de Paris, McCarty’s interest for the restaurateur life had developed. He went back to the U.S., getting his high school diploma but returned to France to enroll in a three year program at the Cordon Bleu. He also attended the Ecole Hôtelière de Paris, a school for French students—all the while he became fluent in French when staying with a family in Brittany—and Académie du Vin, a wine academy.
Based on McCarty’s experiences, during the time he was learning about the restaurateur life, all the restaurants were the same—the same menu based on the Escoffier cookbooks and recipes, being that whether you were in Berlin. Rome, London, Paris, Chicago, Boston, New York, you would find the same style of cooking. McCarty said, “ If you were the best restaurant in the city, you were a classical French restaurant. It was like the Olympics, everybody ran the same race. It was who could do it better, but there was no inventiveness. There was no fusion. Your goal was to perfect it.”
McCarty wanted to be different. He moved to California in 1975 and that’s when he told himself, “Ok, what’s happening here?” He proceeded to call up the food critic for the LA times, and asked her who knew the most about food and the most about wine. The woman gave him the name of Jean Bertranou from L’Ermitage, the best French restaurant in the city. At the time, Bertranou was the only one who had begun to move away from Escoffier and at the same time, not 100% embrace Nouvelle Cuisine, which to McCarty, started to become ridiculous, having stated, “You know, a 16-inch plate with one scallop on it and a leaf of chervil.”
With continued research, McCarty was strengthening his knowledge on how to make a California restaurant successful. About starting his business, McCarty said, “California was phenomenal. The climate is excellent. and with Jean, I began to study the local ingredients, what grows here, how often it grows here, what the different seasons are.” After learning much about California, McCarty then decided on how he wanted his restaurant to be. He said, “ I want to make a new American restaurant. I don’t want to have waiters in tuxedos. I don’t want the design to look like Maxine’s. My wife’s a painter and we had a lot of friends in the art business and the art gallery business— we want it to look like that. We wanted the music to not be classical, but contemporary jazz, and to be outdoors.”
Michael’s has a long proven success story, having flourished how it has after so many years. McCarty said, “The key to my restaurant, when we opened [Michael’s of Santa Monica] in 1979, was that it was virtually 60% outdoors in a beautiful lush garden and very few restaurants had that in LA.” He also said that word of mouth has always been the success of his restaurant. “Publicity is great—and now with all this social media, but the number one reason why we’re still 35 years in New York and 45 years here [in Santa Monica], is because we have a consistent package, the whole thing.” McCarty also attributes timing and location to his success, as he truly was in the right place at the right time, including going with his gut—waiting 10 years to open up his New York restaurant, because he knew the spot he wanted was going to be available, he just had to wait his turn. 35 years and still succeeding proved him right.
When discussing decor for Michael’s in New York, McCarty said, “We have almost a timeless look—like an art gallery, and that look has never changed and most likely will never change. The garden room there has like a pavilion, and it goes out and overlooks a fabulous garden with the light coming in, so it’s like California in New York. We didn’t go the route that all these fancy restaurants have done where they spent $20 million in the basement of a $3 billion dollar building. That’s all great; that’s just not us.” For Santa Monica, McCarty said, “We had a distinct style 45 years ago. Fancy flowers, great silverware, china from France, beautiful garden, lots of art on the walls, indoor, outdoor. We evolved with the time back in 2016, from a white tablecloth restaurant to a more casual, still elegant, still professional look. I was also able to open up the entire restaurant. We have a history, rotating our art consistently. We have beautiful private rooms upstairs. My wife always curates shows. She knows how difficult it is to get a gallery. Whether it was famous artists like Ed Ruscha and his best friend, Joe Goode or it was John Baldessari, or it was Lori Precious, which is up right now, or it was John Baldessari’s eight assistants, it was always a combination of the local artists that we knew here. One of the reasons why people go to the restaurant is because they’re always looking to see what our art is.” The clientele at Michael’s includes many notable individuals such as Martha Stewart, Bette Midler, all the art gallerists and more.
In regard to adapting to current times and what is being done to keep business going, McCarty said, “ We’re always on the lookout for great stuff. With the weird climate stuff going on, so many things are different that you’re constantly sourcing—new ingredients, new farmers are coming to us with stuff, new fishermen bring stuff. However, McCarty stated, “ We’re very conscious, but at the end of the day, the number one thing is hospitality. It’s taking care of people. People want to be taken care of.” One of the many ways to make that happen is by looking at the overall setting, every member on the team. McCarty added, “I always say this, it’s like when they used to publish a big picture and say, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ And you’d have to go in there and figure out what was wrong. That’s the one thing I teach my managers—attention to detail. They look at the dining room and go, okay, what’s wrong with the dining room right now? It’s the observing eye on the eight ball.” Additionally to how he operates, McCarty said,“Make sure the whole thing is like you’re the conductor, the director of the movie, the conductor of the symphony, the director of the Broadway play. You’re open for business every night. It’s always a party, but it’s a show and you want your clients to give you a standing ovation when they walk back out the door.”
Providing above board hospitality.—that’s how passionate McCarty is about what he offers—the Michael’s way.
