For his first cookbook in almost 20 years, chef Michael Mina is going back in time to blend his mom’s original recipes with the newest trends in Egyptian street food.
Mina, who was born in Egypt but moved to the U.S. as a toddler, grew to fame in the 1990s as executive chef at San Francisco’s Aqua, where he won a James Beard award in 1997, and his career took off.
Today, Mina and his partners run 30 restaurants, including San Francisco’s Pabu Izakaya, International Smoke and Clock Bar, each representing a broad range of cultures. (For years, that included football culture via Mina’s popular Bourbon Steak and Tailgate at Levi’s Stadium.)
But over the last decade, he began making annual trips to his home country with several friends who are Egyptian chefs. He blended what he learned there together with memories of his mom, Minerva, into a cookbook where classic Egyptian flavors meet modern cooking innovation.
“My Egypt: Cooking from My Roots” (Voracious, $40), was released on Oct. 8, is billed as a “heartfelt homage to his heritage.”
Chef Michael Mina with his mom, Minerva, and dad, Ezzat, look over old photo albums. (Photo from John Lee and courtesy of Little, Brown and Co.)
Among the recipes in this book are Mina’s twist on a watermelon and halloumi salad, his mom’s classic koshari and a feta-brined chicken that’s so simple, Mina says anyone can make it.
The award-winning chef sat down with us recently to share recipes, his five favorite Middle Eastern restaurants in the Bay Area and discuss what led to this cookbook’s creation.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Where did the title come from?
Mina: I moved to the U.S. when I was 2 to a town in the center of Washington State. I loved where I grew up. It was a town of 8,000 people. My mother was a chemistry professor in Egypt, and my father ran the business department in Central Washington University.
Growing up is the “My Egypt” part of this. We didn’t make a lot of trips to Egypt when I was a kid. But my mom had nine brothers and sister,s and the majority all lived within 40 miles of us. So the culture, the food I grew up eating — everybody brings food and everybody has their way of making it. You’ve got 30 people eating together. Everyone is laughing and happy, then everyone is crying and fighting, then they’re happy again. The table is full of food all day long. That’s where my love for hospitality started, that piece of it.
Chef Michael Mina with his family and friends. Mina released his new cookbook, “My Egypt,” on Oct. 8 (Photo from John Lee and courtesy of Little, Brown and Co.).
Q: How connected did you feel to Egyptian food?
Mina: In all honesty, one of the things I shied away from was bringing my friends over to the house. You grow up in a town like that, you’re eating spaghetti, tacos, burgers when you go to the other kids’ houses. The smells of the food in my house were a little weird for kids.
(But) bold flavored food shaped my palate. Middle Eastern food, because it’s high in acid, high sweet, high spice and high fat — kind of like Asian food — helped get me my palate. Then, when I went to culinary school, I got obsessed with European cooking. That’s what you learn in culinary school.
Q: When did you start gravitating towards Middle Eastern food again?
Mina: Over the last 10 years, you started to see how a lot of Middle Eastern, Mediterranean food is becoming more and more popular. But Egypt is not getting any love here. What I really wanted to do is a book that tells my story a little bit more. I wanted to pay homage and really learn the roots of what it was that I grew up eating. Where did it come from? How was it made? I wanted to use my skills to keep the foundation of the food, but innovate with more modern flavors, techniques, equipment. That’s how the journey started.
Q: How did you reconnect with those Egyptian roots?
Mina: When I was in Detroit, I met this Egyptian chef, Moustafa Elrefaey. He’s in the book, and he’s a great chef. He has a line of restaurants called Zooba — one in New York and a bunch in Egypt. I told Moustafa that what I wanted to do was go to Egypt. Not only is he a chef, he’s very much a historian.
Chef Michael Mina and chef Moustafa Elrefaey explore Egypt. Elrefaey helped inspire Mina’s new cookbook, “My Egypt,” released on Oct. 8 (Photo from John Lee and courtesy of Little, Brown and Co.).
Moustafa knew everybody. We ended up with this group of young chefs — we went seven times, and we’d travel together. We’d go to different places, different restaurants, villages and learn a lot more history about the food.
Q: What surprised you the most?
Mina: I think the one thing that I never understood — that really sparked my mind — was there’s Alexandria, right on the water, and Cairo. A lot of the food I grew up eating that I thought was 100% Egyptian? Egypt was invaded by so many people, but the one person and culture that made the biggest impact was Alexander the Great. The Greeks had (Egypt) for 300 years. The amount of Greek-influenced food that I grew up eating was just as heavy, if not heavier than Egyptian food. It’s a really interesting crossover. That blew me away. I wanted to go deeper with that.
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Q: Can you give us an example of the innovation you’re talking about?
Mina: The book became something that I wanted to take with these young chefs and help them push in Egypt, adding better product, better technique, a little more innovation but keeping the foundation of it.
If you look at the falafel in the book, it’s very classic with tahini and salad. Then you have the version with the ahi tuna that’s more like a crudo, a little more innovative. That’s what I tried to accomplish with the book.
The hummus in the book is with foie gras, which started in Egypt — it’s not a great subject in the world right now, but it is what it is, it’s part of the book. To do a hummus with foie gras makes a lot of sense. A lot of times you do hummus with chicken liver, so this is just an upgrade of it.
Q: What else surprised you?
Mina: Mangos in Egypt are like pineapples in Hawaii. When it’s mango season, there are 19 different mango varieties. Every day, when the guys pulled up the cart to start our tours, one of the chefs always had a bag of mangos, so we’re just eating mangoes while driving down the street.
Q: Are you still in touch with those guys?
Mina: This really became so much more than a book to me over these seven years. It became something about meeting some amazing people. I learned so much. That’s where “My Egypt” came from. No, I didn’t grow up there, but I had this pretty wild journey.
Food prepared by Chef Michael Mina, who released his new cookbook, “My Egypt,” on Oct. 8 (Photo from John Lee and courtesy of Little, Brown and Co.)
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