Meet the Chef: Eric Korn

You may have noticed: your favorite sandwich shop has been closed lately.  The fact, is Michael's is gone for good. The good news: it is being replaced by a new shop called Good Life Gourmet. 

The creator, owner, and head chef of this newly conceived restaurant is Eric Korn and after digging through a mass of press releases, I finally got the chance to have a few words with the guy.

Chef Eric is youthful, concept driven, and research savvy. At 28  he is completely changing his business structure to accommodate an idea he had in college: the family dinner concept. 

Korn's family sat down to dinner together every night when he was a child,

"It was important to us, as a family," he says.

 He wants to bring a higher caliber of food to the table while maintaining the family dinner in the home.  He hired a "mom" to work in his new Scarsdale location to enforce that ideal.

He has also hired a majority of the old staff from Michaels, along with family and close friends, including his much younger brother William.   

Most chefs learn to cook at a young age. Korn confided that he never so much as boiled an egg until college, where in his fraternity kitchen he realized his true calling. 

After college he ended up working in insurance for four years, planning by day what he would cook by night. He eventually decided to put his culinary addiction to work and enrolled at the French Culinary Institute.  Soon after graduating, he worked under Marybeth Boller, a high end caterer in Greenwich CT, formerly of the Lafayette in New York. Working for Boller was "the kind of catering I wanted to do," he said.

Korn is high-end food at its best. "I feel like the luckiest guy alive, doing what I really love, cooking for people, relating directly to them and receiving their feedback," he says.

His Scardale location will be at 13 Spencer place, and should be open by September.

When I asked about the menu, "The only set item on our menu will be a Fluffernutter, our favorite sandwich growing up," he replied.