Michael Chiarello, Chef and Foods Network Star, Dies at 61

Michael Chiarello, a really hard-doing the job, Television set-ready chef from California’s Central Valley whose culinary prowess and intuitive knack for promoting assisted define a chapter of Italian-motivated Northern California cuisine and the rural escapism of the Napa Valley life-style, died on Friday in Napa. He was 61.

His dying, in a medical center, resulted from an acute allergic response that led to anaphylactic shock, stated Giana O’Shaughnessy, his youngest daughter. The cause of the allergic reaction has not been discovered.

Mr. Chiarello was a member of a generation of Northern California cooks who by the 1980s experienced freed by themselves from the conventions of continental cuisine. They swapped olive oil for butter when they served bread, and they utilized seasonal develop and domestically built cheese and wine prolonged prior to the time period “farm to table” became a menu cliché.

He would later get caught in the #MeToo movement, when two servers filed a sexual harassment lawsuit in 2016 from him and his restaurant business, Gruppo Chiarello. The circumstance was settled out of court docket, but his reputation was tarnished and television prospects dried up.

Michael Dominic Chiarello was born on Jan. 26, 1962, in Purple Bluff, Calif., in the Sacramento Valley, and raised surrounded by almond trees and melon fields 200 miles south in Turlock, a farming town constructed on the wealthy soil not significantly from Modesto.

He was the youngest boy or girl of a couple with roots in the Calabria region of Italy. He credited his mother, Antoinette (Aiello) Chiarello, for his earliest culinary lessons. His father, Harry, was a banker who suffered a debilitating stroke when he was in his 40s.

“We under no circumstances experienced considerably dollars and generally had to scrape by,” Mr. Chiarello instructed The St. Helena Star in 2006. “We foraged for our foodstuff. The kitchen area table was our entertainment. If we had pasta with porcini mushrooms, we’d talk about how we picked them. How damp and wet it was that day, or how the truck broke down. There was a story to all the foodstuff we introduced residence, and it designed every little thing style even greater.”

By 14, he was doing the job in a cafe in concerning wrestling observe and classes at Turlock High Faculty. By 22, he had graduated from the Culinary Institute of The usa in Hyde Park, N.Y., and Florida Global University in Miami, where by he attained a diploma in lodge and cafe administration.

Even though he was setting up to obtain national focus for his cooking — he opened his 1st restaurant in Miami in 1984 and was named Food & Wine magazine’s chef of the year in 1985 — his father was not pleased.

“When I made the decision to be a chef, it wasn’t what it is nowadays. It was just a trade, not hot like today,” he explained in the 2006 interview. “I keep in mind my father was anxious about me. One of my brothers is a Ph.D., just one an attorney. I was a prepare dinner. He’d say, ‘The family came all this way from Italy. He could have carried out that about there.’”

Mr. Chiarello caught the focus of Cindy Pawlcyn, who experienced lately been on the deal with of Bon Appétit journal for her restaurant Mustards Grill, a revolutionary Yountville roadhouse with a big wine listing exactly where the excellent winemakers of the era would walk in lined in farm grime. She was searching for another person to run a new restaurant in St. Helena called Tra Vigne.

Mr. Chiarello arrived for an interview putting on a chef’s neckerchief and brimming with ambition.

“Michael was a extremely driven person there was no question about that,” Ms. Pawlcyn said in a cellphone interview. “Tra Vigne was a great spot to start, due to the fact Michael was outgoing and exuberant and could be charming on the spot. He achieved a whole lot of folks there.”

Without a doubt, Robert Mondavi and other top rated winemakers would come to be regulars, and visitors normally included culinary and Hollywood elite, from Julia Boy or girl to Danny DeVito.

The restaurant was a jumping-off stage for Mr. Chiarello’s empire, which would ultimately consist of various dining places, an olive oil firm, a vineyard and a retail business with a strong catalog.

He still left Tra Vigne in 2001 to pursue a occupation in media and goods. His to start with Tv demonstrate, “Season by Period,” debuted that year on PBS. And he opened NapaStyle, a internet site and a compact chain of retail retailers exactly where he bought panini, flavored olive oil and other specialty foodstuff, as perfectly as cookware, desk décor and wine from his own winery.

He jumped to Food Community in 2003 with “Easy Entertaining With Michael Chiarello,” which landed him a Daytime Emmy Award. He would go on to compete on “Top Chef Masters” and was a decide on “Top Chef.”

Mr. Chiarello wrote 8 textbooks, a single of which, “The Tra Vigne Cookbook” (1999), was at just one issue as preferred in Bay Location bookstores as Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Private,” which arrived out shortly right after.

He was one particular of the very first to see Napa Valley as a lifestyle and a brand, explained the Northern California foodstuff writer and cheese pro Janet Fletcher, who wrote two guides with him.

“He seriously was a incredibly very good cook but also an amazing marketer and merchandiser,” she mentioned, adding that “they didn’t come much more charming or handsome.”

“Walking by way of the eating home at Tra Vigne, you could just see the star ability,” Ms. Fletcher mentioned, “but there was compound, far too. You wanted to try to eat every single dish on his menu.”

Mr. Chiarello jumped again into the restaurant environment in 2008, opening the casually tasteful Bottega in Yountville. Five decades later on, he included Coqueta, a Spanish-focused cafe on the Embarcadero in San Francisco, and in 2019 he expanded it to Napa.

Sexual harassment statements dogged him. Two servers at Coqueta named him in a lawsuit in 2016, professing that he presided over a sexually charged atmosphere, touched workers inappropriately and, amid other things, produced lewd gestures with a baguette.

Mr. Chiarello vigorously denied the expenses and vowed to battle them. The get-togethers inevitably settled out of courtroom for an undisclosed sum.

In addition to Ms. O’Shaughnessy, his daughter from his marriage to Ines Bartel, which finished in divorce, Mr. Chiarello is survived by two other daughters from that relationship, Margaux Comalrena and Felicia Chiarello a son, Aidan Chiarello, from his 2nd relationship, to Eileen Gordon two brothers, Ron and Kevin Chiarello and two grandchildren. A company spokesman claimed that Mr. Chiarello and Ms. Gordon ended up lawfully divided and in the process of divorcing when he died.

Even with his outsize occupation, Ms. O’Shaughnessy stated, Mr. Chiarello was a relatives guy at heart who required to preserve his family’s tales alive. He made a issue of instructing his small children how to make the gnocchi his mother taught him to make when he was 7, and he named several bottlings of wine from Chiarello Loved ones Vineyards after his young children.

“In the cafe business I misplaced a ton of time with my ladies,” he explained in 2006. “I don’t want that to come about yet again. I do not want to be saying any longer that I should really have used far more time with my kids, more time with my wife. If I get hit by a bus, I really do not want my past considered to be about a wine deal I was performing with Walmart.”