Michael Vilim is an iconic and exemplary Austin restaurateur and wine genius. Part 2 will really provide you with a deeper understanding of how he thinks, what drives him and, besides his obvious talent, what makes him great. Part 1 was merely a prelude – read on:

What came first for you? Food or wine? 

My mother cooked badly. She was valedictorian at her university but she hated to cook. She associated cooking with farming and she didn’t want to go back to the farm so she didn’t like to cook. She burned meat all the time so I never developed a taste for meat. But then I’d go to my grandmother’s (she was Czech) and I’d have chicken and dumplings and her scrumptious meals that were so incredible that you were just happy to be there. So there was some really nice cooking going on, but at home, we pretty much ended up cooking for ourselves. My mother cooked but not with any enthusiasm. We would go to these different places and family affairs and all of a sudden you’d see these bounties of great food. So actually food came along first naturally, because of course you have to have food before you’re old enough to drink.

But drink happened when we won the city basketball championship in 10^th grade and I drank Cold Duck when we celebrated. Everyone else drank beer but I had wine, and I don’t really know how exactly that happened. At seventeen or eighteen I was drinking Mateus from Portugal, the red, not the rosé. I never liked beer but that’s what everybody had and I never liked liquor that much either. I was a big jock and you just couldn’t drink hard liquor – it would mess you up too much. Plus girls like wine so that’s the deal . . . [chuckles]

Besides home cooking, the food part came from working in Mexican and Italian restaurants that were really good at serving up family types of meals and just being exposed to that world. Back then San Antonio was 25 times better as a restaurant city than Austin was. Having a major military base there meant that all of these GIs were bringing back brides from Vietnam and all sorts of places so you had this ethnic food that was extraordinary. Plus the Mexican influence is substantial in San Antonio. And then you had just old school money there and a couple of extraordinary French restaurants and I went to them and knew waiters from both of them. The Greeks ran the restaurant world as they do in a lot of communities and I hung out with the Greeks so I learned about Greek food. They started the original Sea Island behind Northland mall, which is not so far from the concept of StrEat and was the largest retail outlet for seafood in the state of Texas. 

What is it that get’s you up in the morning and drives you so hard? You’re a really busy guy.

Well once you get the ball in the air you’ve got to keep in the air. There is that. But you know, there is a social element in the restaurant and wine industry that’s very important and we really enjoy turning people on and making them happy. Food is the way I like to do it. I’m moving away from wine a little but only because I can’t taste 50 wines a day like I used to. Leslie helps me and I have sommeliers help taste wines too because I can’t get to all of them anymore. But it’s about doing something special, doing it well, and in a format that’s going to allow us to continue doing it – you have to be successful to keep doing what you want to do.

I look at Starbucks as an example and I look at what is at the core of their success. Starbucks took an artisan product, espresso and cappuccino, and turned it into a commercial product.  They’re very, very consistent in what they do in all their stores so that’s sort of what I’m thinking about doing with StEat.

So you’re thinking about expanding StrEat or franchising it?

Well we have to get it down first. It’s not a given. It’s hard. You know we make a great kolache but that isn’t a system. A system is if I have four or five people in this process, somebody has to make the batter, we can freeze the batter to store it, take it out of the freezer, let it thaw, cook the sausage and roll it, let it proof overnight, and make them in the morning and keep them warm until they’re sold. That’s a process. So okay, I can make a great kolache but can I make it work in a commercial institution? That’s the question. That’s a beautiful example of a challenge: I have five people involved in making a sort of simple dish and just making them and selling them in a shop would be easy but I sell them to eat. They have to be hot and fresh. To get all the moving parts right and then get all of the people to understand when those parts are right is the real challenge. And that’s only one of fifty items.

I’m very clear to my staff about the challenges. There’s a name for it - it’s called clipboard management. I have a clipboard in the kitchen and every day I write notes on it. Up goes the notes, 25 or 30 notes, and everyone has to sign off on them. You have to do this if you want to do it right. These guys can put up the food and it can be mediocre but because of the interesting nature and exotic flavor profile of ethnic food, there is sort of that cover I could take [with mediocre food] but I don’t want to. My rule is I have to like it. That rule has always been a part of Mirabelle, with all of my food, all of my wine: I have to like it. If I like it, then it’s okay to serve it. It’s my method of quality assurance.

The system itself is exciting to me too and you have to have a system to make these things work. As I look at the guys, I tell them to start backwards. Get the end result where you want it to be and work backwards because the most important perspective in the restaurant business is from the chair of the person who is just about to eat. They’re paying the bill and they have to be satisfied. So put yourself in that chair and ask if yourself if you want to eat it, do you find it inviting, interesting, delicious, hot, and appropriate? You have to have all of those things.

I always say that I don’t want to cook. I know how to cook but I don’t know how to cook like my chefs cook. But I’ll work backwards until I get it right. And I tell all of my chefs over and over again that the customer’s seat is the most important perspective to understand. I don’t care what the food is. If you can’t cook it right, it’s garbage and it’s amazing how much food is turned into garbage by bad cooking. There’s a lot of it and it’s a crime. You don’t throw food away. You make it into a stock or a salad but you don’t throw it away unless bad cooking ruins it.

I always tell people in my wine classes that one of the unrecognized changes in the wine industry is that today’s winemakers grew up drinking great wine. This applies to chefs too – they grew up eating great food. Fifty to a hundred years ago winemakers were farmers, but today they are hardly considered farmers, they’re educated scientists and viticulturists. They grew up drinking great wine. What does that mean? It means that they know the end result of what they’re looking for. They’re trying to make a new world Chablis, they’re trying to make a new world Côte-Rôtie or they’re trying to make a new world Hermitage, which is what I think Shiraz [Syrah grown and produced in Australia] tries to do. Shiraz is not Côte-Rôtie, it’s Syrah with power, whereas Côte-Rôtie is feminine and aromatic. Hermitage is in your face. So what are you trying to make?

Winemakers now, have to have an idea of where they’re going. They have an end result and they work backwards to achieve it. From the condition of their vineyards to the elements they have at their disposal, they have to work with what they have and work backwards. Sometime a vintage won’t allow them to do what they want and they end up somewhere else. Bob Dylan used to say he wanted to sing real pretty like Woodie Guthrie but he just couldn’t – he had to work with what he had. So that kind of thing happens in the wine business too.

I probably make that remark more than any other to chefs. I explain to them what I’m looking for. I have a food memory; I have insight into something and I’ll be very careful about how I’ll explain it. Sometimes they don’t want to do it, they don’t get it, or whatever, and it’s tough but I’m lending them my food knowledge oftentimes. So that’s a real good perspective. It’s kind of like drinking a First Growth – once you have that food or taste memory you never forget it.

Michael is there ever a time you could imagine drinking wine without have food there too? 

Ahhh . . . yeah, I mean as an aperitif, Champagne or sparkling wine when you start the evening . . 

But if you had a ’61 Latour sitting in front of you – you’re such a food guy you’d know what to do with it, but the rest of us, maybe not so much. I would have an idea but wouldn’t want to take a chance and be wrong unless I had a case of it; I wouldn’t attempt to ruin a bottle of wine like that with food. I’d be too afraid that I wouldn’t get the right match for the wine. 

You’re talking about staying out of the way. If you have an extraordinary bottle, you don’t want to get in the way with food. My rule is, ‘the better the bottle, the more simple the food’. You don’t want tons of complexity but you know, if that’s the show, if ’61 Latour is the show, then you don’t really need anything else. But if you’re having it for dinner and let’s say you have a hundred of those bottles in your cellar, well then you’re going to have some of them with dinner because it’s not your only special bottle. So it depends a little bit on that. You know people like Gary Glass and Brian Owens [well respected Austin wine collectors] really don’t drink wine without other people being there and they really don’t bring wine without food. Because of my business I taste a lot of wine and I’m constantly tasting wine on the fly so if I’m just enjoying a really good bottle of wine, to be frank, if we were sitting somewhere, we’d probably have a little nibble of something and focus on the really great bottle of wine, then we’d have something else with dinner. If you’re going to have something really, really special, then you’d focus on it alone. Now in Italy and Germany and even France, rarely do they drink wine without food – it’s almost unheard of.

You and I are in the minority on that issue. For me when I bust out a bottle of Mouton or something, I don’t want food in the way.

One time I took a mature Château Margaux home for Thanksgiving and not everyone in the family appreciates wine but I opened up this bottle and they say, “well this isn’t so bad” and the bottle is drinking beautifully. But the focus didn’t last long and they went on to eat and the two weren’t really working together. I was sort of focused on the wine and I kind of went on to the food but it wasn’t an experience where I was matching the food and wine together. You know food and wine pairing is only a recent phenomenon of thirty or forty years. Before the sixties there was none of this food and wine pairing – you drank your favorite wine with your favorite food and there you are. There was a regional synergy that you got between the food and the wine and they tended to go together.

You know the French tended to like stuff a little more earthy and bitter, the Italians tended to like it lighter because it was hotter there, and of course the Germans liked their Rieslings, and the English tend to like bigger wines because of the cool climate. So it really has something to do with where you are but you can pretty much count on the region’s cuisines and wine to be similar or complimentary.

The French drink simple wines, their table wines, Vin de Pays, their AOC wines, and even sometimes their Premier Crus, but they don’t drink their Grand Crus. They preserve them. They have special occasion wines too but they don’t drink the kind of wines America drinks.

Sitting at a wine dinner with Jacques Lardiere, the winemaker from Maison Louis Jadot, he was just stunned that there were so many Grand Cru wines on the table. We had twenty Premier and Grand Crus on the table and we were tasting through them and he was in shock. He told us that he has never seen this many of his wines in one place, at one time, unless his winery was putting on the tasting.

I put together that tasting specifically because we had a lot of collectors of Jadot and we might never see him again because this was the last time he was going to travel. There were two tables with ten people each and he was in the center. Monsieur Lardiere has a pretty heavy accent and he doesn’t talk very loud, but he started talking and it was like that old EF Hutton commercial – ‘when Lardiere speaks, people listen’. Everybody was concentrating on what he was saying. Very much that day, the food was sort of incidental - there were twelve Grand Crus on the table.

I remember talking with Jean-Michel Cazes at Aquarelle and he was getting ready to pass Chåteau Lynch Bages on to his son, and I consider him a legend so, yes it’s very cool to listen to these guys.

Guys like that are really special. But Lardiere didn’t talk about theory. He was giving us the low down, the facts, from forty vintages. It was a different tone, a different point of view; ‘this is how it is’ without being arrogant about it. The maturity of his remarks and the insights he had was like someone just lifted the darkness. It was that kind of experience and you were just sure that you were hearing the way that it really was. You had the best collectors in Central Texas, hanging on every word.

I‘ve heard that you sometimes start with a bottle of wine and create food to go with it, as opposed to most restaurants, that start with the food and try to find a bottle to go with it.

Not sometimes – I start with the wine always. I almost can’t write a menu without tasting the wine and knowing how it’s going to work.  After doing about 400 wine dinners, we have created a lot of different foods to go with those wines and we try not to repeat ourselves. The second thing is that the wine is bottled so fundamentally the wine can’t change. It can evolve but it is what it is.  You can always change food though. We start with the wine and build the dish. So wine is made and it’s pretty much done, but food can change.

Why does everyone else do it backwards?

Well because the food is already made. It like the chefs at Four Season used to tell me, ‘this is the dish we’re doing, so find a wine to go with it.’ The dish is done so I don’t have a choice, I have to go scramble to find something that will work. And there were times when I would pull three or four bottles and it would take sometimes that many or more to find the right match. 

Doesn’t everyone recognize that you can’t change the wine?

Well it’s the nature of restaurants. Food is ready to go, the wine is made, you make the pairing and because you’ve tasted the food, you have an idea of what will go with it. I call it: the revenge of the sommelier. For the first ten or fifteen years of my career, Chef would tell me, “I’m making this. Find a wine to match it”. So okay, I can do that. But now these are our wines, I can create around them, and that way I can really get the pairing right. Like with German wine, we do famous Riesling dinners. We had a couple where Gary Glass and a few other collectors brought in older Riesling from their cellars. Some were fifty years old so we did a five-decade tasting dinner. Of course a fifth decade Riesling tastes very different from a new Riesling so the dish has got to be a lot different. So I’ve done fifteen or twenty German dinners, which is probably far more than anyone else in town has done and I’m able to do those because I understand the wine and I understand the food.

A long time ago I had one dinner where there was older wine and younger wine and so I served a ’92 and a 2004 and I made a dish for both of them. But the dish only worked with the younger wine and there was no way it could work with the older wine. It was a really eye-opening experience about how a wine changes, how they age. That day even though I sort of messed up the pairings I began to understand how Rieslings change with time. It was a great lesson for me.

I have a lot of people ask me to do dinners like this and I don’t have a lot of time to research everything so I have folders with recipes that I collect from reading and I can use those as I go along. I collect German recipes so I have a lot of resources for German wine – I have a folder for that. German wine is a lot of fun. Especially when they’re old – I don’t really like them when they’re young. They don’t taste the same. The good ones you get a lot of cloves and spices and it’s so unusual. There’s this herbal and mineral component and there’s no sweetness – they’re dry wines.

I bought some Quarts de Chaume [from France’s Loire Valley] recently and honestly I didn’t know that botrytised Chenin Blanc even existed but this blew my mind. It was incredible.

Yea, it’s really one of the great wines in the world. I bought a case of Baumard one year because I though it was going to be the number one wine of the year. I bought it for like $45 a bottle and these were 750s [ml]. I probably gave away eight of them for charity auction. They made 1500 or 2000 cases that year and to make the Spectator Top 100 you have to produce at least a thousand cases and score at least 96 or 97 points. So we put together packages of wine lots based on our guesses about what wines would be included in Spectators Top 100 wines of the year for the Wine and Food Foundation. I wish I still had some!

That brings me to a question I’ve wanted to ask you. You quietly and behind the scenes do a lot of things for the community in terms of charitable work. Where did that come from? How was that instilled in you?

Well both my mother and father did a lot of charitable work. She graduated from the University in San Antonio and they had this church that was built 180 years ago. There was a fire and they had needed to raise 3 million dollars of the 5 million needed to rebuild it. She volunteered to head the committee and they told her they needed some famous people to be on the committee to raise that kind of money and they didn’t have those people. She raised the money. My father did a lot of those things too. I know he was on important councils with the Chamber of Commerce and he was always teaching people English as a second language. Every Sunday we had strangers at our house for dinner and he would bring four or five people home and they would stay the day.

Also working at the Four Seasons for eight years exposed me to the benefits of doing charity work. There is a matter of marketing, and they would do a lot because mostly wealthy people and philanthropists were Four Seasons kind of clientele. So we would get involved as a company with the idea that we would help them with their charitable cause and they would in turn do business with us. So we did a lot of that type of thing and I was very aware of the relationships that were developed.

Like Larry Peel [well respected Austin wine collector] does a lot of his entertaining at the Four Seasons and the Four Seasons is always doing things for him. They’re always providing things for his Wine and Food Foundation of Texas auction and the chef always puts on a dinner in his wine cellar every year so that relationship is very give and take. And behind the board meeting doors, it was very apparent that that was going on and acknowledged as a business strategy. So if you take those principles you can apply them to your own restaurant. I have a lot of events coming up and having been past president of the Wine and Food Foundation, and I’m still a board member.

With established business like Mirabelle you don’t have to do that much because people know who you are. But when you have a new business you want to get in front of people at every opportunity. It’s a way to grow. But also I do these things because I love the cause. At the end of the day it doesn’t really justify the charitable contribution in terms of dollars returned, but I do it because I enjoy it. We’re hit up at least ten times a week from various charities and we have to say no much of the time just because we couldn’t possibly do all of it.

One last question: It’s kind of an old cliché but it’s always interesting to me. If you could have dinner with three people, living or not, who would it be?

I don’t know . . . there’s a lot of people out there. Ummmmm . . . John Wooden, the UCLA coach that just died recently, because I admired him so much. I learned a lot as a basketball player – I played in college and even though I’m not too tall, I really liked basketball. He’s considered by many to be the greatest coach ever; even coaches called him ‘coach’. I’ve been using his phrase, ‘be quick but don’t hurry’, which is a beautiful phrase in basketball but it also applies to cooking. I say it a lot to these guys in my kitchens because there’s a false economy to precooking food so they don’t get caught behind but it can destroy the food. You want to be quick but you don’t want to hurry to the point of ruining things. So he would be one, and if you read anything about him, you’d find that he was an extraordinary human being. He had three rules. One was show up on time, don’t complain about your teammates, and dress nice - every one of his players talked about him with reverence. So he’d be one.

Gore Vidal. He’s crazy but he writes so amazingly well. “Lincoln” is a book that is so special and of all the books I’ve read, and I read a lot - I was a philosophy and theatre major with an English minor - he would be one to have dinner with just because his life has been so flamboyant. But his writing is just at a different level - he’s a genius.

The third one would be the longshoreman philosopher, Eric Hoffer. Very interesting fellow - he never went to college and was blind in his formative years - wrote a classic book, “The True Believer”. He once made a remark that he only reads an author’s 1^st book, which sums up everything he or she wants to say in an abbreviated length; any books after that are mostly just elaborations on their favorite themes, in longer and longer formats.

I also would enjoy simply being in the same room with Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama, and maybe George Clooney. I would love to just witness their charisma . . .

Michael, you have been so very generous with your time and to share a part of yourself with everyone – thank you very much.

Well (chuckling), you definitely have your work cut out for you to edit all of this. I hope I gave you enough to work with. Thanks.

David Boyer