Michael Chiarello, a hard-working, TV-ready chef from California’s Central Valley whose culinary prowess and intuitive flair for marketing helped define a chapter of Italian-influenced Northern California cuisine and the rural escapism of the Napa Valley lifestyle, is in Napa Friday died . He was 61.
His death in the hospital was the result of an acute allergic reaction that led to anaphylactic shock, said Giana O’Shaughnessy, his youngest daughter. The cause of the allergic reaction has not been identified.
Mr. Chiarello was part of a generation of Northern California chefs who broke free from the conventions of Continental cuisine in the 1980s. They swapped olive oil for butter when serving bread, and used seasonal produce and local cheese and wine long before the term “farm-to-table” became a menu cliche.
He later became caught up in the #MeToo movement when two waiters filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against him and his restaurant company Gruppo Chiarello in 2016. The case was settled out of court, but his reputation was damaged and television opportunities dried up.
Michael Dominic Chiarello was born on January 26, 1962, in Red Bluff, California, in the Sacramento Valley, and grew up surrounded by almond trees and melon fields 200 miles south in Turlock, a farming town built on the fertile soil not far from Modesto.
He was the youngest child of a couple with roots in the Italian region of Calabria. He owed his earliest cooking lessons to his mother, Antoinette (Aiello) Chiarello. His father Harry was a banker who suffered a massive stroke at age 40.
“We never had much money and always had to scrape by,” Chiarello told The St. Helena Star in 2006. “We were looking for our food. The kitchen table was our entertainment. If we had pasta with porcini mushrooms, we would talk about how we picked them. How wet and rainy it was that day or how the truck broke down. All the food we brought home had a story behind it, and it made everything taste even better.”
At 14, he worked at a restaurant between wrestling practice and classes at Turlock High School. By age 22, he had graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY, and from Florida International University in Miami, where he earned a degree in hotel and restaurant management.
Although he gained national attention for his cooking – he opened his first restaurant in Miami in 1984 and was named Chef of the Year by Food & Wine magazine in 1985 – his father was not pleased.
“When I decided to become a chef, it wasn’t what it is today. It was just a trade, not as sexy as today,” he said in the 2006 interview. “I remember my father was worried about me. One of my brothers is a doctor of medicine and one is a lawyer. I was a chef. He said, ‘The family came all the way from Italy.'” He could have done that over there.'”
He caught the attention of Cindy Pawlcyn, who was recently featured on the cover of Bon Appétit magazine with her restaurant Mustards Grill, a pioneering Yountville roadhouse with a huge wine list that featured the great winemakers of the day covered in farm dirt. She was looking for someone to run a new restaurant in St. Helena called Tra Vigne.
Mr. Chiarello came to an interview wearing a chef’s scarf and full of ambition.
“Michael was a very ambitious man; There was no doubt about it,” Ms. Pawlcyn said in a telephone interview. “Tra Vigne was a good starting point because Michael was outgoing and exuberant and could be charming on the spot. He met a lot of people there.”
In fact, Robert Mondavi and other top winemakers became regulars, and guests often included culinary and Hollywood elites, from Julia Child to Danny DeVito.
The restaurant was a starting point for Mr. Chiarello’s empire, which eventually included several restaurants, an olive oil company, a winery and a retail store with an extensive catalog.
He left Tra Vigne in 2001 to pursue a career in media and merchandise. His first TV show, “Season by Season,” debuted on PBS that same year. And he opened NapaStyle, a website and small retail chain where he sold panini, flavored olive oil and other specialty items, as well as cookware, table settings and wine from his own vineyard.
In 2003, he moved to Food Network with “Easy Entertaining With Michael Chiarello,” which earned him a Daytime Emmy Award. He then took part in the “Top Chef Masters” and was a judge on “Top Chef”.
He wrote eight books, one of which, “The Tra Vigne Cookbook” (1999), was at times as popular in Bay Area bookstores as Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential,” which appeared shortly thereafter.
Mr. Chiarello was one of the first to see Napa Valley as a lifestyle and a brand, said Northern California food writer and cheese expert Janet Fletcher, who wrote two books with him.
“He was really a very good chef, but also a great marketer and merchandiser,” she said, adding: “They couldn’t be more charming or prettier.”
“Walking through the dining room at Tra Vigne, you could see the star power,” Ms. Fletcher said, “but there was also substance. You wanted to eat every dish on his menu.”
Mr. Chiarello was one of the first to see Napa Valley as a lifestyle and a brand, said Northern California food writer and cheese expert Janet Fletcher, who wrote two books with him, including “The Tra Vigne Cookbook.” Chronicle books
Mr. Chiarello returned to the restaurant world in 2008, opening the casually elegant Bottega in Yountville. Five years later, he added Coqueta, a Spanish-focused restaurant on San Francisco’s Embarcadero, and expanded to Napa in 2019.
Accusations of sexual harassment dogged him. Two waiters at Coqueta named him in a 2016 lawsuit, claiming he created a sexually charged atmosphere, touched employees inappropriately and made lewd gestures with a baguette, among other things.
Mr. Chiarello vigorously denied the allegations and vowed to fight them. The parties ultimately settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.
In addition to Ms. O’Shaughnessy, his daughter from his marriage to Ines Bartel, which ended in divorce, Mr. Chiarello is survived by two other daughters from that marriage, Margaux Comalrena and Felicia Chiarello; a son, Aidan Chiarello, from his second marriage to Eileen Gordon; two brothers, Ron and Kevin Chiarello; and two grandchildren. A company spokesman said Mr. Chiarello and Ms. Gordon were legally separated and going through a divorce at the time of his death.
Despite his outsized career, Ms. O’Shaughnessy said, Mr. Chiarelli was a family man at heart who wanted to keep his family’s stories alive. He made a point of teaching his children how to make the gnocchi his mother taught him when he was seven, and he named several Chiarello Family Vineyards wine bottlings after his children.
“I lost a lot of time with my girls in the restaurant industry,” he said in 2006. “I don’t want anything like that to happen again. I don’t want to say anymore that I should have spent more time with my children, more time with my wife. If I get hit by a bus, I don’t want my last thought to be about the wine deal I made with Walmart.”