Executive Chef of Gramercy Tavern in New York since 2006, a one-MICHELIN-star restaurant (MICHELIN Guide 2025). Winner of the James Beard Foundation Awards: Best Chef: New York City (2012) and Outstanding Chef (2015).
Born and raised in Cincinnati, Michael Anthony came to cooking through languages: after graduating from Indiana University, he moved to Japan to experience food culture from the inside—bread baking, restaurant work, and time on farms—an apprenticeship that made seasonality a working method before it became an aesthetic.
The decisive step was Paris: he trained at École Ferrandi, then sharpened his craft in professional brigades where technique is a daily discipline, developing a taste for precision rather than spectacle. Back in the United States, he built a New York path through some of the city’s reference kitchens: first Restaurant Daniel, then March (as chef de cuisine), followed by Blue Hill as co-chef at the Manhattan restaurant and later as Executive Chef of Blue Hill at Stone Barns, where the relationship with farmers and the surrounding landscape became structural to the menu.
In 2006 came the most visible role: leading the kitchen at Gramercy Tavern, one of the landmarks of American hospitality associated with Danny Meyer. Here Anthony works by subtraction: legible cooking, sauces built on time and depth, vegetables treated as a narrative center even when they are not the declared protagonist. The restaurant keeps its dual identity (tavern and dining room), while the kitchen finds renewed continuity: three stars from The New York Times in 2007 and again in 2016; a MICHELIN star in the Guide; and a sequence of accolades from the James Beard Foundation (including Outstanding Restaurant for Gramercy Tavern in 2008, Best Chef: NYC in 2012, Outstanding Chef in 2015). In 2011 he was named chef-partner, solidifying a role that combines culinary vision with team leadership and long-term management.
His editorial work mirrors the same structure: The Gramercy Tavern Cookbook (Clarkson Potter, 2013) and V Is for Vegetables (Little, Brown and Company, 2015), a book focused on technique and vegetable-driven cooking that won the James Beard Foundation Book Award in 2016 in the Vegetable Focused and Vegetarian category.
On a more personal level, one episode he has spoken about marks a shift in perspective: emergency heart surgery forced him to rethink time and priorities, bringing attention back to the sustainability of the job—not only the performance of service. And while he continues to lead Gramercy Tavern, he has also opened a parallel chapter: he has been announced as chef partner of Lex Yard, the brasserie at the Waldorf Astoria New York (a project slated to debut in 2025), which reprises his idea of contemporary American cooking “with simplicity” and supported by local supply chains.
