Michael Leviton and the Cult of Ingredients
If you ask what kicked off Michael Leviton’s path to cooking he says, “An inability to sit still.” Now 53, he’s clearly the highly functional type: energetic and fit, fidgety, but disciplined. His rust and gray colored fleece is adorned by multiple zippers, each zipped all the way up. He tinkers with the cardboard sleeve on his cup of coffee, taking his cup in and out of the sleeve, moving it a few inches this way, placing the cup back in. He’s wearing a gray rubber Chef’s Collaborative bracelet that reads: Change Menus. Change Lives.
Passion is really the tip of the iceberg when getting to know Leviton. The nonuple James Beard nominated (twice semi-finalist) chef and former owner of Lumiere in West Newton never went to culinary school. “I still wouldn’t really recommend it,” he says. Though he transitioned out of the restaurant that he owned and operated for 17 years after having sold it in 2015, he is devoted to Boston University’s gastronomy program, where he’s taught since 2000. He teaches in the culinary program and lectures about sustainable food practices at BU. He’s currently launching a venture to provide large-scale markets with quality staples, starting with tomato sauce.
In high school, Leviton worked as a prep cook in a basement at a deli in his hometown of Newton. After starting college, originally pursuing a degree in psychology from Wesleyan University, he took a year off, going back and forth between Middleton, Connecticut and the Boston area. He was helping his father, a neuroepidemiologist, with his research and compiling a database management system for his father’s work.
Perhaps cooking had already forged its roots in Leviton’s psyche though. His mother had published a low-cholesterol Kosher cookbook in the early 1980s, which Leviton says exposed him to the idea that flavor and texture could be manipulated in food. The idea of her roast beef conjures vivid food memories for him, as well as her knock-off version of a Legal Seafood’s recipe using bluefish and mustard, a flavor combination that “we abused at Lumiere, for so many years.”
So while his major philosophical influencers in college were Kant, “where the lightbulb started to go off,” John Rawles (A Theory of Justice), and Elliot Turiel, an educational psychologist whom Leviton claims to have set up the theoretical framework for which much of his thinking is based, he soon found himself back in delis. It was not something he wanted to do, but he knew how to do it, “I needed physicality to calm me down a little bit.” He created goals for how fast he could finish his mise en place, where he would time himself minute-by-minute and try to beat the previous day’s record.
Before sustainability was a part of the culinary lexicon, Leviton began working in San Fransisco restaurants with a league of chefs who’s mentality was constantly in “pursuit of excellence,” he describes. It was the late 1980s. In order to be the best chef, you have to use the best ingredients, and when you cook this way, “it becomes about the cult of the ingredient,” he says. There, he had the opportunity to work with others who were applying scholarship towards food— looking at it from a variety of perspectives and seeing it as something other than just food. In forming relationships with growers, he began to understand what went into producing those ingredients—he once tried 35 varieties of raspberries— and the passion and care for the resources behind them.
Joyce Goldstein, his former head chef at Square One in San Fransisco, remains one of his biggest influences today. Leviton reveals that he learned how to taste with her. One of his proudest accomplishments, he describes, was her crotchety voice telling him that, “Women want to cook because they love you. Men want to cook to show you how big their d*ck is. Michael, you cook like a woman.” (Although he admits that he cooked like a man in his younger days.) It is central to him that food should nourish in body and soul and, “feeling is what you want to get from a plate of food,” he maintains.
Leviton often applies this philosophy about ingredient quality when he teaches his sustainability course at BU. He has his students taste farm-fresh produce and compare it to store-bought, but admits that, “you can’t do the sort-of Pepsi challenge for everybody across the country.” When you taste the difference in the ingredients, the quality becomes immediately apparent. This thread about the ingredient would be carried through his refining years working in New York and Paris, and become the heart of the ethos of his own restaurant that he and his wife would open in 1999, Lumiere, when Leviton was 33.
Lumiere was reviewed a mere two months after opening by restaurant critic Alison Arnett, of the Boston Globe, under the title Bistro shines, simply and elaborately. Arnett highlighted that, “Leviton's attentiveness really shows up in entrees where he pulls incredible depth of flavor from simple ingredients.” Leviton’s vision was to present menus that used foods raised locally and sustainably, but also to keep their doors open. You can’t run a restaurant without olive oil, sugar, or coffee, for example, and for a restaurant owner, everyday is fought with these purchasing compromises. “At the end of the day, you’re selling a story. Selling a story about the farmer, the fisher, the rancher— whatever modus operandi tells the story of why this is better for the planet, the local economy, why it tastes better— and then prove to them that it tastes better than the commodity sh*t they can buy down the road,” Leviton asserts.
Leviton has a very macro-perspective of looking at the food we eat, “eating is a political and economic act in many ways,” he says. It’s no surprise that he was chair of the board of the Chef’s Collaborative for three years (although on the board for seven, and a member since 1995). The Collaborative helped to fund a track-fish dinner series at Lumiere that sparked a working conversation about sustainable seafood, where fish were tracked via photographs from boat-to-table. His work at Lumiere and with the Collaborative team helped broaden the fluid definition of sustainability, and look beyond the environmental perspectives associated with sustainable eating.
To borrow Leviton’s simile, running a restaurant is like the last few minutes of the seventh game of the playoffs, 365 days a year. The pressure and responsibility that restaurant owners and chefs feel is not something a lot of people can relate to— you’ve invested your entire life-savings, and your career and reputation feel perpetually as if they’re on the line. Which is why Leviton may have inherited a twinge of the “old-school chef” mentality. “Do you think you could please, perhaps, try a lot harder to not f*ck that up? That doesn’t get you where you need to be. If you want people to perform above a level they think they can, you need to push them, and it doesn’t come by saying please and thank you all the time. I don’t believe humans are wired like that.” A student of the culinary program at BU program testified that Leviton was their hardest instructor, but whom they learned the most from.
Working in such a high-caliber environment also typically demands that restaurants pay their cooks more, or try to get their staff insurance. That’s one of the reasons he decided to sell Lumiere. Restaurants are not built for high profit margins, and Leviton became less willing to make purchasing compromises that could have made him more money, but that ultimately wouldn’t have served his staff or upheld the integrity of the quality of food he was committed to serving.
Leviton’s passion and activism continue to thrive in his pursuit of excellence— in education, and in sustainability. His mind seems to be constantly looking forward. “Sustainable is okay for today, but not for tomorrow. We need to be regenerative. So how do we incentivize that?” He asks. “If we understand people’s reasoning and can somehow tie it to their actions, decisions, then we have a much better understanding of what’s going on in the world and how we can effect some change.”
How does tomato sauce effect change? Recently, while doing some work with Commonwealth Kitchen in Dorchester, Leviton was looking at how they could scale their production capabilities. Restaurants are small-scale compared to college, university, and healthcare market systems, and those larger market systems have the mandate to increase local purchasing. By regionally sourcing, growing, and processing tomatoes into tomato sauce, Leviton is looking to achieve this scale and create an impact upon those foodways. This is the beginning of his tomato sauce venture, and another example of his macro-perspective on local food systems.
Leviton’s coffee cup is back in its sleeve, but it is empty and pushed aside. He is sitting back, waxing philosophical about how we can take more accountability for our actions and our health, the dire need for planetary action, and to have a seven-generation mentality; how we need to be more aware of our purchasing decisions, and that people often want simple answers to a complex questions: eat this, don’t eat that. “I think, perhaps, rather skeptically, that we are all self-interested. But if you are also taught from an early age to make that higher order abstraction that is the golden rule, if you can think that way, then the golden rule is all about self interest, and not about altruism.” In our own self-interest, we are communally responsible for making choices to effect positive change on the planet and in our food systems, which consequently, benefits others.
Food is never just food— it’s also telling stories, generating feeling, or starting conversations. When Leviton cooks for people now, he likes to cook big meals. He puts it all in the middle of the table. It’s not about the individual plate, it’s about the interaction between the people sharing the meal. Kant’s lightbulb is still very much on.