There's a moment, just after dusk, when the fire at The Inn at Bay Fortune changes. The logs have settled, the kitchen crew is moving in practiced rhythm, and the smell coming off those open flames, salt air, oak smoke, and sizzling island-caught lobster, drifts out to the long tables where guests are gathered. First-timers look up from their conversations, and they pause. That pause is everything Michael Smith has spent the last three decades working toward.

Michael Smith at the oyster station, The Inn at Bay Fortune.

He could have stayed in Europe. The Michelin-starred kitchens were there, the prestige was there, the career ladder was clearly mapped. After graduating second in his class at The Culinary Institute of America and cooking his way through three-star restaurants in France and Spain, through kitchens in South Africa, the Caribbean, and New York City, Michael Smith had every credential the culinary world asks for. He chose a dirt road on a small island instead.

Plating by firelight at the FireWorks Feast.

Shucking Prince Edward Island oysters.

Seventeen Years Old, Hungry

The thread starts early. At seventeen, Michael was already in kitchens, not because someone told him to be, but because something in him needed it. He was at art school at the time, which tells you something. He has always seen food the way painters see light: as a medium for expressing something true about the world around you.

Within five years of that first kitchen job, he was running the line as Head Chef at a large upscale bistro. Then came the culinary institute, the European stages, the globe-crossing years of absorbing technique and influence. By the time he arrived on Prince Edward Island in 1991 to take the helm at The Inn at Bay Fortune, he was young, decorated, and deeply certain about one thing: he wanted to cook with the land beneath his feet.

He started building a kitchen garden. He introduced himself to the island's farmers and fishermen. He made the radical-at-the-time decision to let the seasons dictate the menu rather than the other way around. PEI, with its extraordinary soil and cold clean waters, turned out to be one of the great larders in the country. He just had to show people that.

From the Inn to Every Kitchen in Canada

From Culinary Farm, straight to the kitchen.

In 1998, a camera crew arrived at Bay Fortune. The show was called The Inn Chef, and it did something that food television rarely managed at the time: it put the land on screen alongside the food. Viewers didn't just watch Michael cook, they watched him walk the farm, pull the vegetables, and talk to the people who grew them. Cooking as an act of relationship, not performance.

It launched a career in television that would stretch across multiple series and millions of Canadian households. For many people who grew up watching food TV in this country, Michael Smith is simply the chef, the one who made it feel approachable, rooted, and honest. He has written cookbooks that live on kitchen shelves with actual flour and butter stains on them.

In 2010, he led the team that fed the athletes at the Vancouver Olympics in Whistler, a logistical and culinary challenge of a scale most chefs never face. He handled it the way he handles everything: go back to what you know. Find the best local ingredients. Respect them. Let them do the work.

Chastity, and Coming Home for Good

Michael and Chastity Smith at the fire, The Inn at Bay Fortune.

On August 17, 2013, Michael married Chastity Smith on Prince Edward Island. She is a singer-songwriter, a creative force, and the person who would become his full partner in the inn’s next chapter. Michael’s eldest son, Gabe, whom viewers may remember from Chef at Home, is now all grown up, working alongside his father at the Inn, and nearly as tall as Michael. Michael and Chastity also have two daughters, Ariella and Camille. Together, the three children have grown up on this island, in this landscape, with these values baked in from the beginning.

Serving guests at the FireWorks Feast.

When they purchased The Inn at Bay Fortune in 2015, it wasn't a business acquisition, it was a homecoming. Michael had spent years here as a young chef finding his footing. He was coming back now as the person he had grown into, with a partner who shared his instinct that a place could be more than the sum of its rooms and meals, that it could carry meaning.

In 2019, he was appointed to the Order of Canada, recognized "for his contributions as a chef, entrepreneur and champion of local foods, as well as for his efforts to develop regional tourism." That same year, he and Chastity opened The Fortune Bridge House. The vision was expanding, but the roots were only going deeper.

FireWorks, and What the Fire Knows

Prince Edward Island oysters at The Inn at Bay Fortune.

The FireWorks Feast is the dining experience at the heart of The Inn at Bay Fortune, and describing it as a "dinner" feels inadequate. It is an event, a ritual, a gathering. Guests move through the property as the evening unfolds, drawn toward the open fires where the kitchen does its work in full view. No hidden techniques, no magic tricks behind closed doors, just the oldest cooking method in the world, applied with thirty-plus years of skill.

The vegetables are grown on the property. The seafood comes from the island's fishermen. The menu shifts with what the season offers rather than what's convenient to order. This isn't a marketing position, it is how Michael has always cooked, long before "farm-to-table" became a phrase anyone used.

Tossing fresh greens in the FireWorks kitchen.

What the fire knows, and what Michael has spent a lifetime learning, is that good food doesn't need a lot of intervention. It needs attention. It needs care. It needs someone who has been paying close enough attention to the land and the seasons to know, right now, tonight, what this particular place has to offer.

He is also, quietly, a collector of vintage maps, a man who has always been oriented and always knows where he is in the world. Art school, culinary school, European kitchens, television studios, kitchen gardens, and now this: the fire lit, the feast ready, the island spread out around him. He is exactly where he is supposed to be.

Heirloom tomatoes being plated, seen from above.