Cooking positions in England, France, Canada, and the United States all factor on Michael Gilligan's international rÈsumÈ, but it is the food of Italy that has won him recent praise as chef of Antonio in New York's Greenwich Village neighborhood.

Gilligan was born into a family that owned Irish pubs in Birmingham, England, and it was in those selfsame pubs that he realized his calling for the kitchen. He graduated from cooking school and completed an externship at Raymond Blanc's famed Manoir aux Quatr' Saisons outside Oxford. Work at restaurants in France (one mountain retreat was accessible only by helicopter) and England provided the culinary foundation that readied him to cross the Atlantic.

In New York, Gilligan was sous-chef of Park Avenue Country Club, Fantino in The Ritz-Carlton hotel, Tribeca Grill, Torre di Pisa, and Candela before assuming the executive chef position at the last restaurant in the list. The New American menu at Candela received acclaim from the critics at the New York Observer and Paper magazine. A brief stay in Key West at his own Indian-style restaurant ended when the owners of Antonio-Rita Viscoso and her son Antonio-asked Gilligan to be the chef.

A neighborhood Italian restaurant with a traditional menu, Antonio has been kicked up a notch since Gilligan's arrival. Spirit restaurant critic Tom Steele wrote that Gilligan's grasp of Italian cuisine "ought to make a number of Italian chefs around town blush." Steele noted his beautiful quail on truffled polenta, his delicate braised rabbit ravioli, and his fat crabcake, "98 percent crabmeat, and it's bound and held together by Gilligan's sheer willpower."