Celebrity chef Michael Cimarusti, who graduated from Hopewell Valley Central High School in 1987, recently opened Connie and Ted’s, a restaurant, in West Hollywood. Cimarusti was inducted into the HVCHS Distinguished Graduates Hall of Fame Oct. 17, 2013 with three others.
Celebrity Chef Michael Cimarusti named Hopewell Valley Central High School Distinguished Graduate
Michael Cimarusti has become one of the most celebrated chefs in the culinary pressure cooker of Southern California, but his journey to the top may have begun at the pond off Wargo Road in Pennington, where he regularly fished as a boy.
Cimarusti is best known for his award-winning seafood restaurant, Providence, which he co-owns with Donato Poto and where he is executive chef. In May, Los Angeles Times food critic Jonathan Gold ranked it first in his list of the best places to eat in greater L.A.
Providence also has two stars in the Michelin Guide, an honor accorded to just 29 U.S. restaurants in 2012. (Twelve of the 29 received three stars, the highest Michelin rating.) It’s heady stuff for a kid from Mercer County, who remembers catching bass in the Stony Brook-Millstone Watershed Reserve.
Cimarusti was in Hopewell with his family last month to be recognized along with three others as a 2013 Distinguished Graduate in the Hopewell Valley High School Hall of Fame. Cimarusti, Debbie Ryan and Jill Gora all addressed HVCHS seniors and juniors at an assembly in the Performing Arts Center on Oct. 17. Annette Compton Fiertz, also a 2013 Distinguished Graduate, died in 2012.
Cimarusti (pronounced “Sim-a-rusty”) lived in Hamilton until fourth grade. His father, Chris, now a retired senior executive with Bristol Myers–Squibb, had been working up in New Brunswick. The family moved to Pennington after Chris Cimarusti transferred to BMS Princeton to work.
Cimarusti went on to be a soccer player and swimmer during his HoVal days. But the 1987 graduate admitted to the students that he might not have been the most accomplished scholar.
“When my wife of 18 years, Cristina Echiverri, first forwarded me an email informing that I’d been chosen for this distinction, I have to admit I thought it was a practical joke,” he said. “Clearly somewhere along the line, the administration had lost my high school transcripts.”
Cimarusti may not have always cracked the books, but it seems he always knew he wanted to be a chef. Talking to a reporter after the assembly, he recalled a memorable trip to The Forager Restaurant, a small fine-dining restaurant in New Hope, Pa. that had a big effect on his life and career. One visit in particular, when he was 11 or 12, sticks out in his memory.
“We were in the dining room, I was talking to the maitre d’, and he kept talking about the menu items, and I was engaging in conversation about it,” Cimarusti said. “And he was like, ‘Why does this 11-year-old kid know so much about food?’ So he brought me back in the kitchen and introduced me to his brother, who was the chef.”
Cimarusti went on to get a few firsthand experiences in kitchens as a teenager, and like many successful chefs, he worked his way up from the bottom. He got his start washing dishes at the Hopewell Valley Country Club, and after high school worked as an unpaid apprentice in a bakery in Bethesda, Md. owned by his father’s sister.
Chris Cimarusti said he was always supportive of his son’s enthusiasm for cooking, saying it made him a more focused person. That notion seems borne out by the fact that after his stint in the bakery, Cimarusti enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. from which he graduated with honors — he had found his calling.
And once he did, he went straight back to the Forager and asked for a job.
“I just went there and said, ‘Look, I grew up eating here. I’ve always loved it. Would you please give me a job?’ He said, ‘Yeah I’ll give you five dollars an hour,’ I was like, ‘No no no, I’m only worth four.’”
From there he went on New York, where he worked at An American Place, before returning to Forager in 1992 as chef de cuisine. Eventually, however, he found himself back in the city at Le Cirque, where he worked alongside legends such as Paul Bocuse.
After three years at Le Cirque, Cimarusti had reached the position of sous-chef (second in command) and gotten married to Echiverri, who was then pastry chef at Restaurant Zoe. (Today they have two children, daughter Isabella and son Dante.) Deciding they needed to extend their skills still further, they took a year’s working sabbatical in France, working at restaurants La Marée and Arpège.
Upon returning to New York, a turn as chef at Osteria Del Circo followed for Cimarusti. The restaurant got a two-star review from the New York Times.
Chefs get used to itinerant lifestyles, and soon Cimarusti and Echiverri were moving on to sunny L.A., where he seems to have set down roots. He became chef de cuisine at famed Spago, and from there was named executive chef at Water Grill. After helping turn Water Grill into one of the hottest restaurants in Los Angeles, he struck out on his own, partnering with Poto to start up Providence.
His success has even led to a notable appearance on television, as a participant in the first season of the Bravo TV show, Top Chef Masters, in 2009. Placed alongside noted chefs Jonathan Waxman, Rick Moonen and Roy Yamaguchi for the cooking exhibition show, Cimarusti won the episode’s Quickfire Challenge.
Cimarusti has had no shortage of mentors, but among them is his father’s mother, Josephine, who he says showed him what it means to be passionate about cooking. Her specialty, in accord with the family’s heritage, was Italian cooking.
“She prepared every element: homemade pasta, I mean, everything. A meal at her house on a Sunday was an event. It took place over the course of several hours — it was always just incredible,” he said.
The Feast of the Seven Fishes is a Christmas Eve tradition celebrated by Italians all over the world, and Cimarusti’s family was no exception. Josephine prepared a feast every year., and now her grandson carries on the tradition at Providence, where he has done a Feast of the Seven Fishes every year since the restaurant opened.
“We have guests that come every single year, so it’s become a tradition for them too,” he said. “It’s the one night of the year that I can sort of reflect back on my grandmother’s cooking and sort of bring that influence into what we do now.”
What Cimarusti does at Providence now, wrote Jonathan Gold when he declared Providence to be L.A.’s best, is “operate within the context of modernist seafood, which means his raw materials come from all over the world, but his sense of seasonality, his easy multicultural flavor palette and his unfussy use of California produce plants his cooking solidly in L.A.”
Cimarusti is genuinely grateful for the recognition, but knows it only really means the bar has been raised.
“If he feels like that, that’s great, and I’m glad he put it out there for people to read,” Cimarusti said. “But I always feel like, ‘That’s great, but that was yesterday. What are we going to do today? How are we going to push it forward?’ If you start to rest on your laurels, you fall behind.”
Cimarusti said the recognition has inspired him and his partners to continue to improve every aspect of operations.
“If anything, it just drives you more, because next year when he writes that list, hopefully we’ll still be there (at the top),” he said.
In terms of those ambitions, the timing on Gold’s pronouncement could hardly have been better. Shortly after Providence was anointed, Cimarusti and his partners opened a second restaurant, Connie and Ted’s — named after his other grandparents — in West Hollywood. The new restaurant’s theme is New England coastal cuisine, and he said it’s been successful beyond their expectations so far.
“(Connie and Ted’s is) like an homage to growing up here on the East Coast, where I spent summers in Narragansett, Rhode Island. It’s all the food that I grew up eating there — it’s not reinterpreted, it’s not modernized, it’s none of those things,” he said. “It’s incredibly simple, and I try to pay as much respect as possible to the restaurants that inspired it.”
To think, it all began back at the Watershed Reserve pond, where he remembers making daily forays for large-mouth bass and catfish as a teen.
“It was a half a mile walk to get to that pond,” he said. “So every day, I’d get home from school, throw down my books, and pick up my fishing rod and go fishing.”
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