The Reach of a Chef (26 page)

What are you to do, though, if you’re Melissa Kelly in Maine and know you’re going to
lose
money by staying open January, February, and March just to keep your staff? While I was at Primo, she’d gotten a call from Tom Gutow, chef-owner of the Castine Inn, a B&B in nearby Castine, with the news that he couldn’t afford to keep the restaurant going. Forget about the work—work was hard no matter where you were—the restaurant wasn’t making it financially.

Consider Melissa’s personal situation again, in terms of work versus compensation. She arrives at the restaurant at nine
A.M
. She works all day on her feet, prepping for that night’s dinner, dealing with staff issues, making up a menu, taking calls from the press, running her daily meetings—what most people consider a normal working day. At dinnertime, she really begins to work, works really hard, from six
P.M
. to eleven
P.M
., expediting and often cooking as well. For the following hour and a half, she’ll finish up dinner service and clean the kitchen with her staff. Then she’ll head up to the office for an hour, and with any luck be home by two
A.M
., in bed with a couple of books and a notepad. This is her schedule seven days a week, from Memorial Day through Labor Day, with only July 4th off, and beyond, till the restaurant slows to a five-day service.

For this, the business pays her about $50,000. Price takes the same. Primo had about the same number of seats as Lola and the same check average. In 2004 Primo did $1,325,000 in sales, 70 percent of it from June through October. Their food cost is normal, 32 percent, and their labor is a little high, 38 percent, though Melissa’s and Price’s salaries are included here, as is the gardener’s. What kills them is their overhead, about 28 percent—that’s the garden, the mortgage on the house, taxes on the land, and three months of very slow business. (In 2004 they lost $140,000 during the slow months—by staying open; in 2005 they closed for three months and lost only $90,000. “We saved fifty thousand dollars by going on vacation!” says Price.) Add up those percentages and you see that they’re left with a 2 percent profit. Moreover, food costs are rising, but they don’t feel they can raise their prices—that is, expenses are increasing, but sales are staying the same—further cutting into that sliver of profit.

“What we need is twenty more seats,” Price says. That would change the whole picture considerably. It would give them thirty more covers a night without substantially raising labor. That would amount to as much as $150,000 more in sales during their peak months. But putting on an addition to the house to create those seats would cost them $300,000, and Price doesn’t need that kind of anxiety—they’re working hard enough as it is.

And forget about saving money for their future.

“That’s the scary part about this business,” Melissa said. “We don’t have a 401(k) plan. That’s why we did the partnership with Marriott.”

In 2002 the Marriott International contacted Melissa and Price to ask them to open a Primo in the Orlando hotel the corporation was opening the following year in conjunction with the Ritz-Carlton, which would include in its space a Norman’s, an outpost of the well-known Miami restaurant created by Norman Van Aken, regarded as the father of New World cuisine.

Hotel chains across the country had begun taking a lesson from Vegas, the country’s megalopolis of celebrity-chef outposts, a movement likely started when a man named Sheldon Gordon lured Wolfgang Puck into the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace in 1992. Emeril Lagasse was not long behind Puck. Then a bona fide French fine-dining guy, the late Jean-Louis Palladin, opened Napa in the Rio, and pushing the boulder over the crest of the hill was Steve Wynn, who brought multiple chefs into the Bellagio, and Rob Goldstein, who lured them into the Venetian (Emeril’s Delmonico Steakhouse there did a staggering $18 million last year). The avalanche of chefs, from TV stars to French three-stars, is still pouring in.

It happened in Vegas, so hotel executives no doubt asked why not in Orlando, Seattle, Santa Fe, Atlanta? These cities didn’t have the tourist concentration that Vegas had, but Vegas proved that people wanted to go to name-brand chefs’ restaurants. Todd English is a big name in several cities—he has his signature Boston restaurant, Olives, in the W Hotel in Manhattan, the St. Regis in Aspen, the Bellagio in Vegas, and elsewhere. He opened a restaurant in a Seattle Marriott called the Fish Club. Marriott then asked him to open a place in the new Orlando hotel. But the timing and the place weren’t right. With English out, the Marriott executive chef brought Melissa’s name to the table as the hotel searched for a well-known. Why? He was from Maine and knew her from there. She was a viable contender to the hotel suits because of her frequent appearances in the national food press.

So they called her, Melissa explained to me, told her they wanted her to open a restaurant for them, told her they’d make it worth her while. She told them she didn’t like the idea but had to admit the extra income was appealing. Well then, they said, sensing victory, why don’t you come on down and cook for us, just tell us what you want to cook and we’ll have it here for you.

It rubbed Melissa the wrong way.
Look,
she said,
I don’t even know if I want to do this. Why do you want me to cook for you if you already know you want me to open a restaurant, and if I do cook for you, I’ll bring my
own
food, how do I know what you’ll get me—my
food
is the whole
point.

She’s a pretty, petite thing—just don’t fuck with her.

She and Price talked it over. She didn’t want to do this—she was working hard enough as it was—but they sure could use that
cash.
The two restaurants did have alternating seasons—that was a positive. She was worried about losing control, diminishing her reputation, but thinking ahead, they both knew they had no plan for the future. She flew to Orlando, cooked the executives ten courses, and they loved her food. She would ultimately give in to their offer, which was fairly standard for a chef such as Melissa. The big corporation pays the chef a onetime licensing fee for the use of the restaurant name and her name, and for her to set up and staff a restaurant and get it up and running. They also pay her a monthly management fee, which is a percentage of that month’s sales.

But—she would agree to do this only if they agreed to her requests: They had to put in a garden (she was known for her garden), she had to be allowed to purchase as much organic product as she wanted (and not be restricted by Marriott’s protocols, a common gripe among independent chefs within hotels, forced to buy specific products), and the hotel had to have a recycling program.

They agreed, and Melissa was able to install one of her trusted chefs as chef de cuisine, a mother of four who needed the stability of a corporate-controlled restaurant. (I’d worked for a Marriott, and the health insurance alone was almost worth the job.)

“It’s for our retirement,” she explained to me, almost apologetically, it seemed.

Two years after opening, the relationship had proven to be productive. Yes, it was more work, and she was forced to fly down and do cooking benefits, which was especially annoying during the summer months in Maine. But it gave her staff new opportunities for advancement, and she felt good about being the cause of the Marriott’s recycling program and their increasing use of organic farmers. Moreover, it promised some financial security for her and Price’s future. Indeed, the experience proved so good that the following winter, she gave in to Price’s wishes and closed Primo for three months. During this time, they worked in Orlando a bit, then moved to the Southwest, to open a third Primo, this one at JW Marriott’s Starr Pass Resort and Spa in Arizona’s Tucson Valley. And when they reopened in Maine in April 2005, she found that her fears of losing her staff were for naught. She had been able to keep the key players in her kitchen, all but Art, who’d married and returned to his hometown of Rochester, New York. Joe moved into Art’s spot, Aaron became sous-chef, the fair Lindsey had moved up to wood oven, and even Chris, the CIA extern, had graduated and returned to a full-time position, taking Lindsey’s spot on garde manger.

These were all good stories about hard-working chefs in small markets, but what were the broader ramifications of what was happening here? Certainly Michael Symon’s deciding to partner with a friend to run three restaurants in his hometown, to reopen his flagship restaurant in a new location, the owners of which had, in his words, thrown him a bag of cash to build and outfit the restaurant he wanted, requiring him and Liz to take on a personal loan but no investors. They owned their own businesses. His devoted sous-chefs Chatty and Frank could, after eight years, get a much-needed break and change of venue, a brand-new kitchen. Others at Lola would move up to take over for Chatty and Frank. Frankie would move from bartender to beverage manager for the operations. The business was growing—a good thing. Likewise for Melissa and Price. And for Thomas Keller, yes? Growth was hard but good if you did it right—three new restaurants, a bakery, two books, a line of silver, a line of porcelain, and more. Grant Achatz, at age thirty-one, was about to open his own restaurant. Assuming this restaurant is successful, what will the business climate be for him when
he’s
ready to grow, when his Alinea becomes not just his restaurant but the flagship? Will he want to open clones of his four-star edge cuisine? Will he open more casual restaurants that don’t require his continuous time and attention, ones that he might be able to replicate easily? Would he design products for his unusual style of cooking, unusual serving pieces, for instance? Would he do books? Would he—
BAM!
—find his way onto TV? Will he…
open in Vegas?

The food world had changed and was changing still, maybe faster now than ever. Opportunities abounded. Who knew where it was going? Often it seemed the possibilities were limited only by a chef’s imagination. This was exactly why Tim Ryan at the CIA all but insisted that incoming students plan to stay for four years, learn how to perform in the business world as well as how to sauté and braise. They weren’t just training broiler cooks anymore—the industry was much bigger than that. The CIA wanted to prepare its graduates for the uncertain, possibility-rich future and to nurture the next Wolfgang Puck, the next culinary innovator, the young man or woman who was not just going to open up the next great American restaurant but who was going to anticipate the next new trend in food and culture, and give her or him all the tools they’d need to ride that wave to the land of milk and honey, fame and fortune, and a place in culinary lore.

In order to guess where that place might be, it’s necessary to understand where the best chefs are now in our culture, what is available to the most successful of them, and what they are choosing to do, given a wealth of ideas (ranging from innovative to harebrained), given an abundance of offers (ranging from noble to lucrative to sketchy), and given their own personal tangle of unarticulated, poorly understood, ghost-itch goals and hungers.

Just as the cultural role of the chef has grown and evolved, so have the chefs themselves. Those who are defining what it means to be a chef today began working in the 1970s, the end of the culinary dark ages in America, illuminated only in spots by a few distinctive lights. They are now about fifty years old, give or take a few years. They are mainly too old to work a line or to want to. They’ve done that. They’ve worked their asses off. They’ve built successful businesses. They want to enjoy the fruits of their labors. But where are the fruits? You can’t hang in St. Bart’s on renown alone, or buy a little stone house on Majorca on a single famous restaurant. Celebrity is not a commodity. They’re thinking,
Show me the money.
But they don’t know exactly who to say it to.

Here they toil in an America obsessed with food, an America so hungry for their restaurants they’re paying as much as $100 for a single entrée in Vegas, or $350 simply to take a seat at the bar at Masa in Manhattan so the chef can feed them not what they want but what he feels like. They go to group signings of their own books and see the line for Emeril looking like the one for the most popular ride at Disney World during spring vacation and think,
I want a line like that.
They feel the power of themselves when they put on a chef’s coat and walk into a room. They are adored. They are famous. Now: How can they exchange that adoration and fame for the cash it must be worth?

Keller had a telling premonition many years ago when he was only the chef-owner of the French Laundry. He was part of a multichef benefit outside California and was in the fitness center of the hotel when he ran into Norman Van Aken, the Miami chef. They began talking about their various prospects—restaurants, books, endorsements, licensing agreements, the media—and Keller realized there was no real formula for making decisions or a good model for proceeding once you got to their level, nationally recognized chef-owners ready to expand and diversify. “We should get a group of us together and invite Wolfgang Puck to discuss the issues we’re facing,” he said to Van Aken.

Nothing ever came of their treadmill discussion, but it was a prescient idea. Keller recognized that there was no consistent precedent for growth—who better than the biggest chef brand in the business to help lead the way for others, to discuss good decisions and bad decisions he’d made along the way. Puck had surely made both. He had opened multiple fine-dining restaurants, “fast casuals” as they’re called, high-end fast food. Grocery stores sold his pizzas and soup. He’d authored a half dozen cookbooks and had a television show. His chef brand was the broadest and arguably the most successful in terms of venues and total sales.

There were others out there expanding, too. Todd English was expanding in restaurants, but there were signs of undercapitalization, not enough infrastructure to support the growth. Michael Chiarello, chef at Tra Vigne, in St. Helena, was moving out of restaurants altogether and toward products and lifestyle entertainment with the company Napa-Style. Chefs smelled opportunity everywhere—the soil was fertile but what to grow?

They all knew that single restaurants can’t do it, no matter how famous—it’s simply never going to generate the cash. A single book won’t likely do it, nor a TV show, nor a set of pans. It’s got to be multiple restaurants, or multiple books and shows, or, more precisely, a unique combination of all these things—restaurants, books, products, and media presence.

In order for that to happen—indeed, even before “celebrity” happens—something else, something more elusive and hard to define and distinctly American, has to happen: a brand must take shape. The brand is the key to the money box.

“There’s always a brand before there’s celebrity—always,” says Adam Block, an adviser to scores of the country’s most successful chefs on contracts and financial issues. “Not everybody likes a brand, but everybody likes a celebrity,” he says. “You become a celebrity because everybody likes your brand.”

Once you have a brand you have the critical lever to roll that hefty log of fame into cash. If you have a good, strong brand, it scarcely matters how you’re using that brand, it seems. As long as it’s not diminishing itself, that brand can work toward more restaurants, more products, media, now, amazingly, even things unrelated to food and cooking—skin-care products, toothpaste, golf clubs.

Eric Ripert, chef and co-owner of Manhattan’s revered Le Bernardin, one of the city’s five four-star restaurants, has over the past year or so thought seriously about the branding issue. “It’s what I’m trying to do,” he told me. “My goal is to be able to retire in ten years.” That would be before he’s fifty.

In addition to running the New York flagship, Ripert has several consultant contracts and opened Blue by Eric Ripert in the winter of 2005 at the Ritz-Carlton in the Cayman Islands. In the fall of 2005 he partnered with restaurateur Stephen Hanson to open a tapas joint, Barca 18. With the help of Fred Siegel, partner of Antsnpants, a brand-development company based in Philadelphia and Chicago, he is exercising another branding strategy—producing culinary products, including, he hopes, a line of organic baby food.

“Eric is at a great point to start a brand in terms of public awareness, the amount of ink he’s generating, and personal appearances,” says Siegel. “Also, the trend toward organic is building, so he’s very much on-trend.”

“The bread and butter of this,” says Scott Feldman, who created the Manhattan-based Two Twelve Management and Marketing (“Building brands to their boiling point”), “is if you can build an entire brand strategy that has multiple diverse components, including all parameters of having a restaurant—having a consumer base, having a product line, having a book, having a TV show—those are all the things that allow someone to have a fruitful and financially successful business. They all feed each other.”

What’s perhaps even more interesting than the superstars’ developing restaurants and products to capitalize on the success of their high-end food or mass appeal—Keller and Trotter, Flay and Batali, et al., not to mention Puck (considered to be the originator of the branded chef) or Emeril (the first restaurant chef to combine entertainment and cooking on television)—is that lesser-known chefs are entering the arena as well. These chefs are kicking the one-thing-leads-to-another up a notch: They’re not waiting for it to happen naturally; they’re aggressively pursuing it, trying to crank that gear faster.

How many people outside the New York food world know Geoffrey Zakarian? I don’t know, but he’s not yet a household word (you really need a TV show for that). Nevertheless, working with both Feldman and Block, Zakarian has opened a second Manhattan restaurant, Country (his current restaurant, Town, is highly regarded and has three stars from the
Times
), and plans to publish a book, launch not one but two restaurants in Vegas, and produce a line of food-based skin-care products.

“We have our talent and our integrity,” Zakarian said, while slicing foie gras terrines for a Beard benefit dinner at Lola last fall. “To solidify that, you develop a brand that replicates who you are.”

Michael Chiarello created a name for himself with the restaurant Tra Vigne in the Napa Valley town of St. Helena and made the unusual choice to leave restaurants altogether.

He began as the restaurant’s twenty-four-year-old chef in 1987 and slaved away during the 1980s like most other young chefs. Featuring Italian cuisine, the restaurant went through tons of olive oil, more than fifty gallons a week. He and his partners decided to make their own and contracted for the fruit and the production of it. It now went out on the tables as a condiment for bread, a relatively new idea in American restaurants at the time. One diner at the restaurant was Chuck Williams, founder of Williams-Sonoma. He loved the oil so much, Chiarello recalls, that Williams said, “God, Michael, you’ve got to bottle this and I’ll sell it at my stores.”

After two years at the restaurant, Chiarello was in the olive oil business. It became Williams-Sonoma’s biggest-selling food item. The infused-oil business didn’t exist, and Chiarello set to work creating a line of oil specialties, with things like basil and porcini mushrooms. “The specialty market was so different then,” he said. “It was wide open.” The business grew to the point at which they could move into grocery stores. Next he did vinegars. Chiarello did a book on cooking with the product he was selling,
Flavored Oils,
followed by a book called
Flavored Vinegars.

The Napa Valley became hot, and life began to speed up for Chiarello. He opened more restaurants, with partners, in Aspen and in Walnut Creek, California. He did a TV show for the Food Network. And with all these new ventures, his professional life and his personal life became more complicated.

“You begin to say, ‘Who am I, what am I doing?’ I’ve used about every good idea I have. I’m not able to spend the twelve hours in the kitchen I need for my food to really evolve. You have hundreds of employees, a couple of bakeries—it was just more like giving profit-and-loss meetings rather than inspiring your team to create. It was time to hit the reset button. I control-alt-deleted my life. Which is really scary…. But it was a culmination of a bunch of things I wanted.”

He left the restaurant world completely and embraced the retail world in 2000 by creating a company called NapaStyle. “Could you bring a point of view to life on air,” he recalled wondering, “and then support it with product?” That point of view was The Good Life in the Napa Valley—blue skies, crisp nights, dry days, mountain vistas, amazing wine, golden vineyards—the rustic, upscale life enjoyed by the most sophisticated agricultural community in the country. The first catalog came out in 2001, just when the economy “went into a nosedive,” he says. “Certainly we had to fight our way through to today…. It wasn’t an easy haul.”

On its Web site, NapaStyle calls itself a “media company” that produces books and television shows—on both the Food Network and the Living Channel—designed to portray a specific perception of Napa Valley life. NapaStyle has a catalog containing more than four hundred diverse products—books and knives, plates and bowls and baskets, vinegars and oils, bedroom furniture and panini grills—everything pertaining to the “lifestyle.”

“I’m the host of the brand,” Chiarello says. “I’m not the brand…. One of the things we’re superconscious of is that the brand’s not me. Napa’s much, much bigger than I am. And all we get is a chance to represent a style of life that we’re blessed to be able to enjoy…. But it’s not about me. It’s: ‘We’re going on this trip together and I’ll steer the bus for now.’”

This, by his own admission, had not been an easy road, even for an established chef of a popular restaurant who had a success in olive oil, infused oils, and vinegars. He may not yet have succeeded in his bid to become the Martha Stewart of the Napa Valley, but he does have a company—he owns it, he notes, along with other investors—two TV shows, books, and products in a country hungry for just this kind of stuff.

Even chefs with less behind them are looking for the branding key to the cash box.

Tanya Holland is a forty-year-old chef, currently working on financing for a restaurant of her own in Oakland. Holland, who grew up in upstate New York, worked front of the house for seven years before deciding to learn how to cook at Peter Kump’s in New York and La Varenne, Anne Willan’s cooking school in Burgundy, France. After graduation in 1992, she did the rounds as a cook, an expected progression, working the line at a lot of good restaurants, incluing Hamersley’s Bistro in Boston and Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill in New York. In 2000 she was in New York waiting tables at El Teddy’s (she’d left a recent chef job in TriBeCa and was searching for the right kitchen) when she got a call from the director of the career services office at Peter Kump’s—she’d stayed in touch and asked him to keep her in mind if he heard of any opportunities that might be available to her. The Food Network was looking for a young female, African American, to take part in a hip, multicultural show,
Melting Pot.
She contacted the network, they arranged for what they called a “talent test,” and she did well. Exciting as this was, she was also skeptical.

“When I first got it,” Holland says, “I was like, ya know, I trained in France, I worked at Mesa, I worked at Hamersley’s Bistro, I worked at Verbena—and they want me to cook
soul food? What?
It just seemed a little ridiculous. But then I realized I did have the freedom to give it my own interpretation. And
then
I realized there really was no African American voice in food that people could really relate to.”

The more she thought about it, the more the idea seemed to make sense to her—there was a niche to be filled. How many African American chefs under forty could you name? Indeed, the professional kitchen is one of the great multicultural petri dishes, where immigrants and eth nicities of every stripe can thrive—except, apparently, for American blacks. They are vastly underrepresented in the professional restaurant kitchen. Here was a great opportunity to be an African American voice in what was virtually a vacuum, especially in New York City restaurant kitchens. Holland never really had a role model, never had a chef she became close enough to call a mentor, and she wishes she had.

Her appearance on
Melting Pot
led to a cookbook,
New Soul Cooking,
in 2003. Meanwhile, she kept cooking at a restaurant in Berkeley called Le Théâtre until leaving to pursue her own restaurant, and she hoped more.

She wants an iconic design for her restaurant, she says, “so that I could translate it into product design or signature pieces, a line of cookware…. Now in this industry, there’s so much potential to brand yourself. You don’t have to be just a chef.”

And she’d like to be a mentor. “I see there are a lot of young people,” she says, “especially women, especially of color, they latch on to me—‘Oh wow, someone who looks like me who I can relate to.’ I want to achieve this thing. I feel I’m able to and I want to let people know they can do it.