For 30 years, adding flavor to Old Town Torrance.
Chewing the fat with The Depot’s Chef Shafer.
Hailing from Buffalo, New York, Chef Michael Shafer has always been drawn to creative pursuits. After high school he began studying art education at the Art School at Buffalo State College. In 1977, he moved to California to become a photojournalist. Once settled, Michael knew he would need to support himself while he built his photography clientele, so he took a job in the kitchen at the Century Plaza Hotel. There, under the tutelage of Walter Roth, Corporate Chef of Westin Hotels, his culinary skills quickly blossomed.
With his new found passion, Michael made a bold decision and moved to Austria to work in the kitchens of luxury hotels. For a year and a half he honed his skills and, at age 26, he was hired as the as Executive Sous Chef of the Hotel Scandinavia in Norway.
In 1983, Michael returned to the US as Executive Sous Chef for the Century Plaza Hotel. Three years later, he helped opened the Stouffer Hotel in LA, and then became Executive Chef of the Stouffer Hotel in Austin, TX. By 1988, he was back in California, accepting the position of Executive Chef of the Doubletree Hotel in Orange.
When the Depot opened in 1991, Michael was brought in as the Executive Chef, eventually buying the restaurant outright in 1999. Since then, he has become a local legend, hosting successful charity events each year, holding sell-out cooking classes at the restaurant, and donating his time, money and his culinary skills to many other community charities. Having started as a dishwasher at the age of 15, March of 2021 will mark Chef’s 50th year working in kitchens. We sat down with the Chef to chat about his business and about our Old Town Torrance.
Our Old Town Torrance (OOTT): First of all, how are you and your staff faring in this pandemic?
Chef: Terrible, in a nutshell. We’re always positive though. It’s definitely a glass-half-full situation, and if we don’t stay positive, we’ll never get through this. I’ve been in the business now almost 50 years, I’ve worked in seven different countries, in 30 cities—I’ve seen some of the craziest things in the world, and I’ve never seen anything like this. And if we don’t react properly, the future’s going to look even worse. The economy can’t take any more shutdowns, or even the lack of community. There’s no sales tax going to the government. How is the government going to survive without sales tax? So, something’s got to break. And I feel sorry for anyone who gets it. I was down with Covid for six weeks. It hit me bad, too. I was bed-ridden. I understand it, but I also understand that the rest of the world needs to function. I’ve got 30 employees who need to pay their rent, and buy food for their families, and pay their insurance, so I’m trying my best to stay open. But the business community has been hit so hard by this that they’re not re-staffing their businesses. Everyone’s working from home, which means all those buildings in downtown LA—no one’s going to work every day. All the kiosks and all the janitors, and maintenance, and everything like that, no one’s working, because the business isn’t there. Honda, who’s one of my biggest customers, are at ten percent occupancy. And so are most of the other companies in the south bay. It’s crippling the lunch business. It’s really tough to set up outside.
OOTT: Especially as the weather gets cold and potentially wet.
Chef: Well, not only that, people don’t want to sit in a parking lot in a business suit, you know, conducting business. I’m lucky, I get to wear jeans and a t-shirt to work. I don’t even own a tie.
OOTT: You often fuse different culinary styles from around the world to create new dishes. It’s fitting that the restaurant where all these gastronomical crossroads take place is located in an old train station. Is there one particular aspect all those many styles have in common?
Chef: Like I said, I’ve worked in seven countries, in 30 different cities, and traveled the world, and it’s sort of a fusion of all the different foods. If you sat down with me, I could pick apart dishes: this is a German dish, and this one here is Scandinavian, this one here is French, this is more Tuscan Italian, this one here is Asian, but it’s also blended with a little bit of Americana. So, it’s a little bit of everything, and it’s just become a palette of food. It’s funny you mention the train station—most cities in Europe have taken old train stations and made them culinary hubs.
OOTT: Right, turned them into either restaurants or museums.
Chef: Exactly. And it’s funny that I happened to open up in a building that was built in 1912, and I’m thrilled to be here. It was a crossroads back then, and it is now, too.
OOTT: Aside from simply adding a ton of butter to everything, why is classic French cooking so popular?
Chef: At the turn of the century, there was a chef named Auguste Escoffier, who standardized the cooking for all the hotels he was a corporate chef at. He wrote a book called “Le Guide Culinaire,” [Note: The book he cited, Le Repertoire de La Cuisine, was written by Escoffier's student, Louis Saulnier.] and it said that if you go into a restaurant and order Eggs Benedict, it’s got to be a certain way or it’s not Eggs Benedict. He said there are five “Mother Sauces,” both hot and cold, and from these Mother Sauces any sauce could be made. So, Hollandaise, which is one of the Mother Sauces, if you add zest and juice of a Blood Orange, it’s called Sauce Maltaise. If you add Tarragon and shallots in a white wine reduction, it’s called Sauce Béarnaise. These are common sauces we’ve all learned about through his documentation, and then people like Julia Child, and James Beard, and Jacques Pepin brought it to the masses. And before the fusion of cuisine with Wolfgang Puck and Alice Waters, and all of them, haute cuisine or continental cuisine was the fare. You were eating very good quality cuisine, but it was so much heavier than the lighter fusion cooking of today. The methods of French cuisine, meaning sauté, roast, braise, you know, all these culinary terms—even the way we cut stuff, shoestring potatoes is “Julienne et Pomme de terre,” every cut you can think of was documented by Auguste Escoffier. When I moved to Austria in 1980, I didn’t speak any German, but someone could throw me a bag of onions and say, “Macédoine,” and I would understand what that meant, what a square cut that is, and I could do it. I didn’t have to know that onions were “Zwiebel” in German.
OOTT: Right. You two met in the middle at French cuisine.
Chef: Exactly. It’s an international “speak” around the whole world.
OOTT: So, after 50 years in the business, what drives you each day?
Chef: I love what I do. I really do. I love to cook. If all I did was cook every day, and create, it would be a perfect world, but I run a business too. You know, I started off as a dishwasher when I was 15, and eventually moved into being a prep cook, and then into a line cook, etcetera, but I always did it just because I needed a job. We grew up a lot differently than my children do. I didn’t grow up in Rolling Hills. I grew up as an inner city kid in New York. My mother raised five of us on her own, so if you wanted something, you got a job and you earned it. I mean, I bought my first bicycle by taking out garbage for all the old ladies in the neighborhood. It was a Stingray with a sissy bar with a green metallic seat.
OOTT: I had one of those myself! A purple Schwin Stingray with a sissy bar.
Chef: One of the originals. I’m 65, so it was the original.
OOTT: So, do you cook in the kitchen every day at the restaurant?
Chef: Yeah, I do. I make the soup of the day, plus I create all the specials every day. And I jump on the line when I want to. Last night I had a customer who didn’t want the Potato Bisque that we had, so I asked her “What kind of soup do you like?” and she said, “Well, I like a tomato vegetable sort of thing.” So I quickly made soup for two people, and they loved it. They posted it on Facebook and said it was the best soup they’d ever had. Those situations are what I live for.
OOTT: So, what would you like to see happen here in Old Town Torrance?
Chef: I’ve been here so long, and Old Town Torrance is doing really well right now. When I first moved in, I had to have armed security in my parking lot 24/7 to protect my three quarters of a million dollar investment to open the Depot. That’s how scary it was. The whole complex across the street from me was an empty parking lot with a crack hotel with broken glass in it. No one ever even parked there. It was a risk, but with the help of the city—and I’m taking credit for some of this—pushing them, we’ve brought in some new tenants, and I’ve helped every person in the neighborhood, restaurant wise, get their permits and stuff like that. I believe that if you’re worried about competition, you don’t have a good product to start with.
OOTT: Not only that, but the more choices people have, the more this becomes a destination neighborhood.
Chef: Exactly. And we’re still working on more concepts and more things, entertainment factors and things like that.
OOTT: Well, you certainly are a local legend, that’s for sure.
Chef: Well, I don’t know about that, but I am big and loud.
As of this writing, the Chef is only offering takeout fare, but for your reference, The Depot is at 1250 Cabrillo Ave, Torrance, CA 90501. Call: (310) 787-7501.