An Interview with Chef Michael Smith

He’s one of Canada’s premiere television hosts, and yet he doesn’t have cable or satellite and can’t watch his own shows. He travels the world for his new Food Network Canada series, but thoroughly looks forward to the time he can spend with his family at home on Prince Edward Island. He’s an intimidating 6’8 tall, and yet, by all accounts, one of the most personable people you could meet. He’s a chef by trade, but he’s flourished as a dynamic media personality. It might just be the strange combination of seemingly contradictory elements that make Chef Michael Smith such a fascinating individual.

Smith has starred in several Food Network series over the last decade, but is best known as the host of Chef at Home. Part cooking show, part family narrative, part basic food education, and part motivational workshop, Chef at Home helped viewers create healthy, simple, and delicious meals for their families by encouraging adventure and innovation in the kitchen for over one hundred episodes. The show often evoked a sense of nostalgia for days of old when Canadians knew their neighbours, butcher, and grocer by name, and parents and children sat down to eat dinner together every evening as a family.

In his new show, Chef Abroad, Smith has traded the comforts of home on Canada’s east coast for a life of culinary adventure on the cutting edge of global food culture. During a brief stop in Canada, on the way home from Australia before jetting off to Spain, Smith chatted with (Cult)ure.

(Cult)ure: From The Inn Chef, to Chef at Large, to Chef at Home, and Chef Abroad, you seem to be moving further and further away from the location people most associate with chefs: the restaurant kitchen. Why is that?

Chef Michael Smith: My Food Network shows have always depicted the reality of my life in the kitchen. Ten years ago when The Inn Chef launched I was a working Inn Chef. Today, I’m a Chef at Home with a lust for travel!

You’ve described Chef Abroad as a “culinary adventure” show, and you were recently in Bangkok when protesters and government forces came face to face. Did you realize the show was going to get that adventurous?

After a week in Thailand filming an amazing story that fulfilled my life-long desire to visit that amazingly colourful, flavourful, and hospitable country, we ran into a bit of a delay at the airport in Bangkok. An interesting delay, a front row seat for history, but not a dangerous delay. We spent several days holed up at a rather posh airport hotel freely mingling with the polite protesters. They apologized profusely, offered us food, and cleaned up the airport themselves. We never felt in danger, but did enjoy seeing a revealing glimpse of history. Frankly, I thought it was more adventurous getting shaken down for bribes in Egypt and Morocco, dog sledding north of the Arctic Circle, and touching down on the rolling deck of a US aircraft carrier.

When an art form reaches a certain level of decadence, there is generally a counter movement that focuses on minimalism. Did you see Chef at Home and its "simple is better" motto as being part of a minimalist movement?

I live in an oddly ironic vacuum. My family is part of the less than 1% of Canadians that don’t watch TV. We have a DVD player, but no access to cable or satellite. I can’t even tune in Food Network! As a result, I don’t really pay attention to mainstream TV or what a counterculture movement might look like. I’m not immune to the ways of the world, though, and I definitely hoped to re-establish the home kitchen as a comfortable, welcoming place of creativity, flavour, and social responsibility.

With its emphasis on family and small town sensibilities, do you feel Chef at Home promoted conservative values?

I am hesitant to label the perfect world portrayed on Chef at Home as anything other than an idealized version of my day-today life. It is not my intention to promote conservative or liberal values or anything in between. I leave it to our audience to take away what they will. I’m too busy cooking and trying to be a great dad and husband to do otherwise!

As a celebrity chef, how do you balance your role of chef with your role as television personality?

Throughout my career as a chef, much of my success stemmed from my ability to motivate and teach those around me. These are skills that directly influence my role on TV. I’m also very proud to be a chef and inspired by my mission to share healthy flavours with Canadian families. Beyond that, I don’t really know what constitutes ‘celebrity’ so I’m unsure what I may or may not be doing right.

Okay. But how do you balance, say, authenticity with performance?

While cooking an exotic ethnic dish such as bouillabaisse, pho, or goulash, I often say that it’s not about authenticity, it’s about dinner. In other words you don’t need to exactly follow the recipe to enjoy yourself and your dinner. In a similar vein, when the camera’s rolling I’m just a larger-than-life version of myself, trying to stay in the moment. For best results – as with any pursuit I’ve ever undertaken – I find it useful to be prepared, to have a general idea of what I’m trying to achieve. This is why each episode of Chef at Home has a theme. I think it’s value added, beyond just watching some guy cook for his family there’s always a carefully considered underlying theme of usefulness.

You have your own line of cookware sold by Sears. How did that product come about?  

When I was offered the opportunity to design and market my own line of pots and pans, the first thing that occurred to me was that I’d be able to give them to my mom and dad for Christmas. Making your parents proud is still a powerful motivator! The line is doing well and when the greater market improves we may look at broadening it. For now, we achieved what I hoped to: we created a line of well designed, high quality, durable, no frills, kitchen basics that will last a lifetime.

Your cookbooks can be difficult to get hold of. Used copies are selling online for over a hundred dollars. Clearly, they are in high demand! Are there more books in the works?

My next cookbook will be out this fall, The Best of Chef at Home. I think the current one is in its seventh printing. The latest one just sold out entirely to Amazon.ca for their back orders. It’s a best seller and continues to sell well, but I’m not so sure the publishers and book sellers are doing the best job keeping it on the shelves.

How many different countries have you visited so far for Chef Abroad, and what's next for Chef Michael Smith?

I’m at 30 and counting. But I’m not sure I want to add any more after we finish our second season of shooting. I’ve been to Morocco, Hungary, Turkey, Peru, Australia, New Zealand, Grenada, Spain, and Thailand in the last few months, and really I just want to stay home!

Watch Chef Abroad on Fridays at 9:00 PM EST, and Saturdays at 1:00 AM, 4:00 AM, 7:00 PM EST on Food Network Canada.

Comments (1)

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Andrew Castiglione

March 09, 2010

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Michael, I am using this interview for my school project. You are such an inspiration to me. Your cooking and helpful tips get me to where I want to be in the future.

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