Chef Michel Nischan: Serving the Underserved

Meet Michel Nischan, a chef cel­e­brated for more than his kitchen skills.

Cookbook author and James Beard Foundation Award win­ner, this acclaimed restau­ra­teur is more inter­ested in help­ing oth­ers than gath­er­ing fame and riches for him­self. Whatever he touches—whether it’s mixed heir­loom grain risotto, a truck-stop café, a New York City bistro, or a nonprofit—success abounds. Yet instead of reach­ing for mate­r­ial rewards, he takes the road less trav­eled and fol­lows his inner guides of val­ues and passion.

Early Years

Nischan read­ily admits to myr­iad men­tors along his path to suc­cess, but his true hero­ine is his mother, whom he cred­its with mak­ing him who he is. Nischan spent many a day in the kitchen with his mother—though this was not the typ­i­cal baking-cookies-on-a-Sunday-afternoon kind of cook­ing. At three years old he was work­ing the apple peeler to skin bushel after bushel, and by twelve he was fry­ing chicken, smoth­er­ing pork chops, and can­ning toma­toes and bell pep­per. “I just loved being with her in the kitchen. After school my broth­ers would go play sports; I would go hang out with Mom in the kitchen,” he says.

Having expe­ri­enced the Great Depression while grow­ing up on a fourth-generation farm, his mother was keen on food secu­rity. “My mom saved all fat; we rarely had beef because it was expen­sive, but when we did, she’d save the fat and put it in cof­fee cans in the freezer. This is a woman who could dis­patch a live hog and turn it into bacon.”

The con­nec­tion between nature and food was always present in the Nischan kitchen. “When Mom wasn’t happy with the ane­mic veg­eta­bles she found in the gro­cery stores, she dug up the back and side yards to plant a kitchen gar­den that the neigh­bors called ‘the farm.’ We had an above-ground swim­ming pool that we had to put in the dri­ve­way because there was nowhere to put it in the yard,” he relates. From this gar­den, Nischan learned what ripe, just-picked fruits and veg­eta­bles tasted like—a taste that would guide his future culi­nary endeavors.

From Nightclub to Kitchen

In the late 1970s when Nischan first struck out on his own as a young adult, he headed not to a kitchen but to night­clubs as a musi­cian. However, the money was a los­ing propo­si­tion. “We were good; still we’d come home from a tour and do the math and we’d have lost $500 to $1,000. During this time my mom saw how thin I was and she said, ‘Let’s get you a job at a restau­rant so that at least you can eat.’”

And so, at a local truck stop, began the career of a world-renowned chef. A string of restau­rants fol­lowed, where Nischan impressed with his cook­ing skills. “There’d be some­one strug­gling to break down legs of veal, and I’d offer to help and then sur­prise them because of all the veni­son and pig legs I’d done; and they’d see that and make me in charge of butchering.”

The $2-an-hour raises kept com­ing and Nischan offi­cially quit music, though not for the money. “It was a lit­tle heart­break­ing, but I was get­ting much the same thing out of food as I was get­ting out of music. Putting together numer­ous plates and dishes requires a lot of peo­ple to work. You all have to be on the same page and—just like with a band—when you are, the audi­ence loves you. I was doing well; peo­ple liked me. I was a nat­ural at it.”

His abil­i­ties landed him in a num­ber of upscale restau­rants. “So here I was, cook­ing at these clas­sic French restau­rants, get­ting busted for call­ing stock ‘broth’ and sautéing ‘fry­ing.’ Then I’d come up with some­thing like roast­ing shal­lots with lar­don, pour­ing off the fat, which was very sweet because of the shal­lot juice, and then mount­ing it back in to make a sauce. People would go nuts over the stuff. I didn’t have the ter­mi­nol­ogy but I sure had the cre­ativ­ity,” he remarks. In 1981, his cre­ativ­ity led him to become chef at the Fleur de Lis restau­rant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

On the way, the one thing Nischan could never get used to was the qual­ity of the meat and pro­duce deliv­ered to restau­rants. He fig­ured that if he could get farm-fresh pro­duce (no more huge, round, pink toma­toes), he could beat every other chef based on that alone while cre­at­ing aware­ness of local farms. He started dri­ving out to the coun­try look­ing for farm­ers to buy pro­duce from, only to dis­cover there weren’t any small farms. The seeds of advo­cacy were planted. “Those were the days when you could make 30 phone calls and have 5 per­cent of the stuff in your cooler come from a farmer. It was really tough back then,” he says.

Making Connections

By 1991 Nischan owned his own restau­rant, Miche Mache, in Connecticut with his wife, Lori. By this time Nischan was mak­ing 20 phone calls and get­ting 40 to 50 per­cent of his food from local pro­duc­ers. “We would take the seats out of our mini­van and drive to the coun­try for organic eggs, pig and veg­gies.” Although they were buy­ing local, Nischan was reduc­ing cream, cook­ing with foie gras and but­ter, and using every weapon in the arse­nal to get great reviews. The health of the food wasn’t in the equation.

Then his son, Chris, was diag­nosed with type 1 diabetes.

“It was a time of tur­moil in my life,” Nischan recalls. “I was now mak­ing the con­nec­tions between food and human health, real­iz­ing that every­thing I did with food would have every­thing to do with Chris’s long-term outcome.”

The solu­tion? He opened Heartbeat at the inau­gural W hotel in New York City. “You could order any­thing at Heartbeat and you’d know it would be healthy,” Nischan says. Heartbeat was based com­pletely on local, sus­tain­able and organic, with no processed foods of any kind—no white sugar or flour and no but­ter or cream. “We were juic­ing a lot of starchy veg­eta­bles so the juices could thicken them­selves with­out our using flour or corn­starch,” he says. Heartbeat became very pop­u­lar and so did Nischan’s mis­sion to cre­ate a cui­sine of well-being. He began speak­ing pub­licly about sus­tain­able, local healthy food.

Life was good. But some­thing nagged at Nischan. That some­thing was a deep desire to pro­vide healthy food to other than the wealthy Heartbeat clientele.

Then 9/11 brought the hotel indus­try to its knees, and the W New York told Nischan he would have to order food from approved pur­vey­ors to cut costs. “But look on the bright side,” they said. “You’ll cut costs and max out on your bonus.”

During this time his mother would become sick and pass away. “My mother’s ill­ness had me think­ing about the dif­fer­ence I could make in other peo­ples’ lives the way she had made a dif­fer­ence in mine. I was deeply trou­bled that at Heartbeat we could feed peo­ple this healthy, local food because I could charge $40 an entrée. Now they wanted me to use boxed beef and con­ven­tion­ally raised stuff. I had these intense feel­ings that I just had to quit. I talked to my wife and we looked at the check­book; we had enough money for five months. I resigned.”

Working as a con­sul­tant in the local, sus­tain­able food move­ment, Nischan helped Delta’s Song air­line develop one of the first in-flight food-for-sale pro­grams, and it was all based on organic and sus­tain­able pro­duce. “It was great; you could fly on Song and get Stonyfield organic yogurt, and an Earthbound Farm organic apple instead of some year-old Washington State apple. I was begin­ning to really love life; I wasn’t work­ing 80 hours a week or tied to a range. I was par­tic­u­larly proud of the work I was doing with Song because they were fly­ing about 35,000 peo­ple a day. I set up the dis­tri­b­u­tion to allow this to hap­pen and I felt like I was truly start­ing to make a difference.”

Meeting Paul Newman

Out of the blue came a call from Paul Newman’s daugh­ter Nell ask­ing for Nischan’s help because her dad wanted to open a restau­rant based on local and sus­tain­able val­ues. “I need you to either talk him out of it or help him with it,” she said. The restau­rant would be housed in the his­toric Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut that Newman’s wife, Joanne Woodward, had worked to revi­tal­ize. “I told Nell I was really flat­tered but that I was finally at a place in my life where I was gain­ing momen­tum, although I’d be happy to offer advice,” Nischan recounts.

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“I went to a meet­ing with Paul and a poten­tial oper­a­tor, and Paul started the whole dis­cus­sion by say­ing that we really needed to buy from local pro­duc­ers. Immediately the oper­a­tor says that won’t be pos­si­ble; that he’d like to buy from Connecticut farm­ers, but they don’t deliver and he can’t drive all over the state. So I looked at Paul and said, ‘How about a farm­ers’ mar­ket in the park­ing lot?’ I sug­gested get­ting a dozen or so ven­dors and hav­ing the mar­ket on Thursday when there were no plays so that the park­ing lot would be empty. The restau­rant could get its weekly pro­duce deliv­ery then. Paul looked at me, his eyes twin­kled and this grin popped up across his face; he stood up and stuck his arms out to hug me. That was our first meeting.

“The sub­se­quent oper­a­tors we inter­viewed kept dis­qual­i­fy­ing them­selves because their val­ues didn’t align with Paul’s. About a year later he asked for another meet­ing at the play­house, but when I got there it was just him wait­ing for me; his entourage of trusted advi­sors was absent. He gives me a hug and we walk into this mez­za­nine level where he had all the light bulbs in the ceil­ing unscrewed except one, and two chairs oppo­site each other under the one burn­ing bulb, and he made me sit fac­ing him. ‘Why won’t you just do this damned restau­rant with me?’ he asked. I said, ‘I don’t know, Paul; I need to ask my wife.’ The prob­lem was that I had com­pletely fallen in love with the man.

“Lori said, ‘Michel, this is the first time you’ll ever work with some­body that you don’t have to con­vince of any­thing.’ And the lights went on and the sky opened up. In every job pre­vi­ously I’d always had to fight. So it was an oppor­tu­nity to have my first ever restau­rant that could really be based on my per­sonal val­ues. I took the job.”

When he told Newman yes, he said it was on the con­di­tion that he could start a non­profit based on food jus­tice and food secu­rity in order to bring a more sus­tain­able food sys­tem to under­served pop­u­la­tions and bal­ance out the white-tablecloth restaurant.

Dressing Room, ded­i­cated to local, sus­tain­able cui­sine, opened in October 2006. Nischan’s dream non­profit, Wholesome Wave, with a mis­sion to bring healthy, sus­tain­able food to under­served com­mu­ni­ties, opened in June of 2007.

The world lost Paul Newman in 2008, but today Nischan owns the vibrant and suc­cess­ful Dressing Room. “If Paul and I have a hand­shake, it’s until the last man standing—and I am the last man stand­ing. And boy, do we miss Paul! Joanne comes in a lot and the girls come in a lot, and we see the part­ner­ship is alive and well—which it is. It’s a won­der­ful thing,” he says.

Nischan works at Dressing Room on week­ends but his wife really runs the show. Nischan’s heart and soul belong to Wholesome Wave.

A Wholesome Tidal Wave

Nischan didn’t want Wholesome Wave to be another non­profit descend­ing upon a com­mu­nity, deter­mined to change things. He wanted to offer a pro­gram to already estab­lished com­mu­nity non­prof­its to help them raise money, teach them, and give them the tech­ni­cal assis­tance they needed to be able to run consistently.

“The way we work is com­pletely based on trust. It’s how I wish the restau­rant biz always worked; but the mar­gins there are just so slim and com­pet­i­tive that it’s really hard to get chefs to col­lab­o­rate, even though that was my dream. When I was buy­ing from farm­ers, I was reach­ing out try­ing to get other chefs involved, think­ing, ‘If we all can buy more from local farm­ers, they can grow more, and maybe we can get them to deliver.’ It never worked out, but we now have that sort of col­lab­o­ra­tion at Wholesome Wave.”

The first Wholesome Wave pro­gram was the Double Value Coupon Program, for which pre-pilots were con­ducted in 2007, fol­lowed by its offi­cial launch in 2008. The pro­gram dou­bles the value of food stamps and other fed­eral assis­tance when cus­tomers pur­chase locally grown fruits and veg­eta­bles at farm­ers’ mar­kets. It’s doing extremely well; after four years, DVCP is in 25 states in almost 300 mar­kets. “The suc­cess just exploded, but a lot of that has to do with the tal­ent, pas­sion, drive and inno­v­a­tive nature of our Wholesome Wave team and of the many non­profit pro­gram part­ners that we work with,” Nischan points out. “Often the fun­der has a non­profit that they’ve iden­ti­fied, and we go in, teach them every­thing, and then fold them into our learn­ing community.”

The learn­ing com­mu­nity involves nearly 60 non­prof­its through­out the coun­try that Wholesome Wave con­nects. “Another rea­son we’ve been able to grow so fast and be so effec­tive is that every­body learns stuff in real time instead of a sin­gle, iso­lated pro­gram tak­ing four or five years to fig­ure it all out on their own. For exam­ple, one non­profit informed us that if your mar­ket­ing brings peo­ple to sign up for fed­eral assis­tance, you could actu­ally get half of your mar­ket­ing bud­get reim­bursed by the gov­ern­ment. So it’s things like that that one part­ner learns and then reports to us, and we push it back out onto the field and now all the part­ners know it. Many mean­ing­ful rela­tion­ships among non­prof­its have been cre­ated in this way; hence the suc­cess of great networks.”

A key objec­tive of Wholesome Wave is data gath­er­ing from its pro­grams that, among other things, can be used to influ­ence gov­ern­ment leg­is­la­tion. Nischan is a big believer in the fact that, regard­less of eco­nomic sta­tus, if peo­ple could choose to eat healthy food, most would. “Our data shows that, yes, when peo­ple can choose healthy, they do.”

In 2010 they sur­veyed 1,700 farm­ers and 550 con­sumers receiv­ing fed­eral ben­e­fits and using DVCP at farm­ers’ mar­kets. The aver­age sales increase after DVCP was imple­mented was at least dou­ble in every mar­ket; some have seen up to 600 per­cent increases. Over 90 per­cent of the con­sumers said the amount of fresh pro­duce they could buy with DVCP made a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence in the health of their family’s diet. Additionally, the increased sales helped local economies and cer­tainly the farm­ers themselves.

Wholesome Wave’s next pro­gram, launched in 2010, was the Fruit and Vegetable Prescription Program (FVRx). This pro­vides under­served com­mu­ni­ties with pro­duce from farm­ers’ mar­kets by allow­ing con­sumers to redeem health­care provider–generated “pre­scrip­tions” at par­tic­i­pat­ing mar­kets for fresh fruits and veg­eta­bles. Each dol­lar invested in the Family FVRx pro­gram pays for­ward three­fold by nour­ish­ing the con­sumer, boost­ing the farm­ers’ rev­enues, and uplift­ing the com­mu­nity as a whole—not to men­tion the poten­tial sav­ings to our nation’s spi­ral­ing health­care costs.

Has this chef on a mis­sion finally found where he wants to be? “One thing I’ve learned in life is that I don’t plan that much. I do know that doing a white-tablecloth restau­rant, sell­ing food to those who can afford it, def­i­nitely cre­ates aware­ness, but it’s not going to change things. We have to work on all aspects of sus­tain­abil­ity and bring­ing real food to every­one, regard­less of income. That will cre­ate change, and that’s what I intend to do.”

To find out more about Wholesome Wave, visit www.wholesomewave.org.