Janine Booth opens up on her new wellness direction as her US restaurants thrive

Perth chef Janine Booth may live a world away in Miami, Florida, but she remembers as if it were yesterday sitting in Leederville restaurant Siena’s and telling comedian Joel Creasey she wanted more out of life. It was both a lifetime and a decade ago and the pair had struck up a close friendship while working for radio station Nova 93.7 — Creasey was a station “Casanova” waiting for his stand-up career to take flight; Booth had found work there after arriving home from a year overseas that she hoped would give her life direction. Creasey has said the pair was supposed to be working but Booth, a former Penrhos student, laughs and is adamant they were on a coffee break. “When we met we just clicked,” Booth says of Creasey. “I wanted to be a chef and he wanted to do stand-up. We gave each other a little pep talk and the encouragement to follow our dreams.” Creasey would go to Melbourne and build his international reputation; Booth would go to the US and with husband Jeff McInnis, build a food and wellness empire that stretches across six restaurants and has sprinkled them with stardust. It has been 10 years of hard work, long hours and enduring the cold of New York winters but now settled back in the warmth of Miami, Booth can look back and appreciate what they have created and how far they have travelled. “I always wanted to live a good, healthy life on this Earth and leave something positive behind,” she says. Last year, Booth launched Sunny Side Up, her line of natural skincare products. Most of the ingredients she uses could have been lifted from the shelves of her restaurants — apple and apricot, caramel and camomile, grapefruit and green tea, lavender and licorice — but before she talks about that, she wants news of Perth. She was surprised to hear about the lockdown and asks what happened. She says Florida has about 10,000 new cases of coronavirus each day. Her restaurants have had to close at times but most are open again with a reduced capacity. Booth grew up in Jandakot and Como and fondly remembers the riverside walk around the Mt Henry and Canning bridges. I ask if she remembers winning, with her Year 4 schoolmates, the primary school section of the national 1996 Earthworm Environmental Awards for cleaning up the Waterford wetlands. “I do remember that. I remember being on the news. That’s hilarious. We had to make pooper scoopers to pick up all the dog poop from the wetlands. A couple of my friends got to go east for the award. I remember the two girls, too. Amy Price and Lucinda Crisp. I was kind of envious.” Booth was last in Perth in January 2019 when she and McInnis married at Matilda Bay and celebrated at Swanbourne restaurant The Shorehouse. She has not seen her parents and her two sisters since then. Her application to get a “green card” — the ticket which allows holders to work and live permanently in the US — kept her in Miami initially and then the coronavirus pandemic wrought its havoc. “I feel like I’ve been through the wringer,” Booth says. Her new baby, Daisy, is now seven months old, joining Sunny, who is four, and Bryce, who is nine and from McInnis’ first marriage. “Mum was supposed to come out for the birth,” she says. “She would never miss a moment and we have never felt further away from each other. Every day, I wish I had my Mum. At least once a week I have a bit of a cry,” she laughs. When Booth first arrived in Florida she enrolled at culinary school Le Cordon Bleu, a step that would lead her to McInnis and his braised, short-rib meatloaf. She fell in love — initially with the meatloaf — and went to work for him. An appearance on the hugely popular show Top Chef, which McInnis had appeared on five years earlier, would give her the confidence to suggest they open a restaurant together. Roots & Bone opened in New York in 2014, specialising in the food of McInnis’ American South and quickly becoming the toast of the town. Their southern-fried chicken was named by TimeOut magazine as the city’s best dish and Booth was named in Forbes magazine’s 30 Under 30, an influential list featuring young stars on the rise. “We opened a restaurant in the food mecca of the world, we achieved something special, but it was exhausting,” she says. “We were so busy running the restaurant by ourselves, and New York has such a hectic pace.” The lure of Miami’s warmth and the dread of another cold winter took them back to Florida about three years later. They would extend their Root & Bone concept by opening restaurants in Miami and Indianapolis and the Roots Coastal Kitchen in Puerto Rico. But it was the opening of their Miami fish bar, Stiltsville, in 2017 that would take Booth in a new direction. Booth’s favourite foods on the Stiltsville menu are coconut shrimp — local royal red prawns wrapped in a kataifi filo dough and cooked in coconut oil with a coriander and lime aioli — and the smoked fish dip, which features many different types of fish crumbled and smoked with capers, lemon juice, a hot sauce, fresh herbs and lemon zest. “We encourage people to eat with their hands and I thought it would be really nice to have a hand scrub in the bathrooms,” she says. “Customers could scrub away all the sins that they had eaten in the restaurant and not go home smelling like shrimp.” Booth had gone to beauty school after finishing at Penrhos, training as an aesthetician and working in various spas. “I always loved using coconut oil and olive oil and natural things that I could basically find in my fridge,” she says. “I would make a face mask with egg yolk, with avocado, with yoghurt, honey and oatmeal and different things. I had this back-knowledge of all these ingredients you could find in your kitchen that are really good for your skin.” Her first hand scrub for Stiltsville was made from sea salt, coconut oil, bergamot oil, lime zest, orange zest and lemon zest. “It’s very simple,” she says. “I made it in batches and put it in a big conch shell in the men’s and women’s bathrooms with a little wooden spoon and a sign telling people what to do with it. People went crazy over it, so I started putting it in jars and selling it in the market area at the front of the restaurant.” It gave her the confidence to make other products. When the couple opened Root & Bone in Miami, Booth made a hand scrub from sweet tea, lemon and mint. When they opened their latest Miami restaurant, Mi’talia Kitchen & Bar, she chose olive oil and Meyer lemon. The lockdowns imposed by COVID gave Booth the time to develop a range that includes scrubs, masks, sanitisers and suntan lotions. She launched the Sunny Side Up website last April. It states that she uses only high-quality, natural products that are consciously sourced and that her packaging is either glass or recyclable cardboard. “I was pregnant, the restaurants were closed and I could channel my anxiety into something good,” she says. “Everything is clean, natural and smells really, really good. This is something that makes me happy. It combines all of my passions and I get to do something beautiful.” She is conscious of what she wants to teach her daughters. “I want to teach my girls how to take care of themselves, how to eat healthy and feed their body and their mind and their souls with all positive things. I want to lead by example and show you can do anything you put your mind to.” The expansion of their business means they are not as hands-on as they used to be, though they continue to have a finger in every part of the pie — from recipes, to brand development, restaurant and kitchen design, and updating menus. Booth would love to move back to Perth at some point but does not know when that will be. “My parents and sisters are now in Bicton and my friends post pictures of them doing the bridges walk and I am so envious. Miami has lots of beaches and water bodies but nothing quite like how they have made that beautiful footpath all around the water.” She hopes this year will allow her to return home for a holiday and show off her new daughter to her family. “In the meantime I will just mentally transport myself to where they are.” She remains close friends with Creasey, who was the MC at their wedding. “We catch up when we can and Mum always keeps me up-to-date with what he is doing. I am just so proud of him.”