Michael Fiorelli’s Long, Strange Trip to Italian Cooking Nirvana

Beneath the Kimpton La Peer Hotel, down an echo-filled stairwell, Michael Fiorelli is deeply focused on dinner prep. This subterranean, stainless steel workstation isn’t where the Olivetta chef expected to be before the pandemic started, but he’s more comfortable than ever cooking food like this: coastal Mediterranean cooking with Italian overtones that reflect his family’s heritage.

This summer, Fiorelli and his partners Marissa and Matt Hermer return Olivetta to its original Melrose address while opening a new concept in a similar vein at this boutique hotel, where they launched the “Olivetta on Holiday” pop-up last fall.

Both sides of Fiorelli’s family are Italian, with his mother’s predecessors from Apulia and his father’s ancestors from Abruzzo. Italian food formed the bulk of Fiorelli’s diet growing up in East Moriches on eastern Long Island. “I remember the raw ingredients more than anything else,” Fiorelli says, mentioning fresh mozzarella and big antipasti platters. He’d find his mother’s hand-cranked pasta draped over kitchen chairs, drying after he came home from school. His dad’s brother, Uncle John, worked for Boar’s Head and on holidays would bring over eye-opening products like sharp, aged Provolone, and spicy Calabrese salami.

No other family members cooked professionally, though rumors abound that his Uncle Vinny had “unsavory dealings with some mafia characters” and became John Gotti’s personal chef “out of necessity.”

Fiorelli started working in food at age 13, snagging a summer job with his father’s friend, who ran a meat delivery company. They would drive into Manhattan before dawn and pick up meat in the Meatpacking District in the years before developers transformed butcher shops into flashy restaurants and bars. He remembers seeing “old guys smoking cigarettes while they’re butchering meat and sides of cattle, like you’d see in the movie Rocky.” They’d pick up and distribute meat to restaurants on Long Island.

He worked at a local restaurant throughout high school, making chicken wings, frying tortilla chips, and smoking ribs. He briefly attended SUNY Oswego in upstate New York, majoring in literature and planning to either become a comedy writer or advertising creative, but his thoughts kept returning to the kitchen.

Fiorelli left college in 1994 before graduating. “That’s kind of when everything was changing,” he says. “Cooking wasn’t so blue-collar anymore. I was reading about people who had Master’s degrees and guys and girls who were doctors. Susanna Foo in Philadelphia was a librarian, and she really intrigued me.” Foo was an influential Chinese chef who ran her self-named restaurant from 1987-2009. “I packed up all my stuff and moved to Philadelphia and knocked on the front door,” Fiorelli says. “Is Susanna here?” Improbably, she hired him.

“Clearly I was in over my head,” Fiorelli says. “One of the sous chefs came to me and said, ‘You’ve really got potential. This might be a little fast-paced for you, and it’s very competitive. Everybody on the line here is probably at a sous chef level, and you’re definitely not there. There’s a guy coming to town that I apprenticed with at The Greenbrier and he’s opening up at the St. Regis Hotel. It’s going to be a smaller kitchen. He can probably give you a little more attention. You should give it a shot. I already called and told him about you,’” Fiorelli recalls. “I wouldn’t say I was fired, but I was transferred.”

History repeated itself at the St. Regis. After almost six months, chef Peter Schintler pulled Fiorelli aside, but this time, it wasn’t because he was lagging. “‘It seems like you’re serious about cooking,’” Fiorelli recalls him saying. “‘If you’re really serious, I suggest you go to The Greenbrier, where I did my apprenticeship, and apprentice with Peter Timmins. It will change your life.’ So I did. I got in the car and drove to West Virginia.”

At the time, Fiorelli considered attending culinary school in Philadelphia, but Chef Timmins made him an offer he couldn’t refuse, telling him, “You can go to school, but you have to look at it like you would any other investment. When are you going to see a return on that money?…If you come work for me for two years, I’m not making you any guarantees, but keep your head down, keep your ears open, keep your mouth shut and your knife sharp, and you can go work wherever you want.”

Timmins was right. Two years later, Fiorelli landed a job at The Inn at Little Washington, Patrick O'Connell's revered restaurant about 90 minutes west of Washington, D.C. in rural Virginia.

Fiorelli was working for legendary chefs and developing a strong resume, but something was missing. “This isn’t supposed to be my path,” he remembers thinking. He felt he was “meant to cook” Italian food, but the world wasn’t yet celebrating Italian chefs like Massimo Bottura, so he focused on fine dining and French technique, thinking, “I’m supposed to be like that.”

His shift to more personal cooking started after migrating south to work for chef Mark Militello in Florida. Militello was another Italian-American chef and a member of South Florida’s influential Mango Gang. “When I started to work for him, I started to realize, okay, all these guys and girls I’m working for, there’s one common theme,” Fiorelli says. “They’re using the best product that they can, they’re using it seasonally, and they’re really just putting their heart and soul into this. If you look at the basis of Italian cuisine, that’s really what it is.”

At a time when his desire to cook Italian food deepened, Fiorelli received an opportunity in L.A. He initially resisted the chance to work for vaunted restaurateur Elizabeth Blau and late chef Kerry Simon at Simon LA, but a wild weekend that included dinner at Crustacean with surprise guests Vince Neil and Tommy Lee from Mötley Crüe and a Pinot Grigio–fueled after-party on the Four Seasons rooftop convinced him to take the job. So did a memorable trip to the farmers’ market and a sense that L.A.’s food scene was on the rise.

After three years of working for Simon, Blau pulled Fiorelli away for her other L.A. project. He became executive chef for Mar’sel, the most luxurious restaurant at Terranea, a clifftop resort in Rancho Palos Verdes overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Fiorelli cooked more Italian food at Mar’sel, but felt it was “almost cooking by committee” at the large resort. He truly found his groove at Love & Salt, a modern Italian restaurant in Manhattan Beach that debuted in 2014. He left in 2018 to join Olivetta, which debuted on a fashionable stretch of Melrose Avenue in late 2019. They built momentum and celebrity clientele, which COVID-19 stopped abruptly.

Olivetta didn’t have any outdoor space to utilize during the pandemic, so they couldn’t welcome diners. Luckily, nearby Kimpton La Peer Hotel invited Fiorelli and the Hermers to take “Olivetta on Holiday” last fall, serving food on their pool deck and rooftop. Now that California has given Olivetta the green light to return to their original location, they struck a deal with the boutique hotel to stay on and replace Viale dei Romani with a new concept. “It’s a much bigger, more lively space,” he says. “The food is meant to match that.”

“There are some brand new dishes that just kind of evolved, mostly out of us having fun,” Fiorelli says. “There wasn’t a whole lot of risk. It started as a pop-up, just to get the staff back employed and to keep us relevant.” His Kimpton La Peer repertoire has grown to include wood-grilled lamb ribs served with cucumber garlic yogurt and rye pasta tossed with sausage and kale.

“I grew up eating orecchiette with broccoli rabe and sausage,” Fiorelli says. “Here we make a fennel sausage and we use kale because it’s everywhere in California. Same kind of flavor profile. We top with breadcrumbs, whipped ricotta, and fennel pollen…We get the rye grains from Tehachapi, mill them in-house and make the flour… Do people care? Probably not. They just know it’s delicious.”

Fiorelli looks forward to revisiting Olivetta’s signature dishes. “You’ve got to have the branzino,” he says. “You’ve got to have the bucatini with pesto. You’ve got to have the lamb Bolognese. There are probably eight dishes or so, if you didn’t have them on the menu, people would be disappointed.” Fiorelli is making the food he was born to cook and his efforts are resonating with a wider audience.