The Reach of a Chef (27 page)

“I want to have a far-reaching brand so I can, I don’t know, get people to experience better flavor—a lot of people in this country eat mediocre food…. I feel like it’s a no-brainer, I’ve got such a niche that I can fill. I just feel like it’s a great opportunity.” Her first priority is her restaurant, and from there to branch out into other venues—cookware, books, television, culinary spokesperson.

“Bobby interprets Southwestern food; Mario, Italian; all these people take these other cuisines, that were peasant cuisines, and elevated them. Why can’t I do that for soul food?”

And yet it’s not that easy. She may be able to cook, she may have a real niche to fill, she may have great ideas for excellent products, but she’s missing that lever that’s going to make these gears engage and move her forward. What is it, where’s that magic key?

I sent an e-mail to ask what had happened in the time since we’d spoken, which had been nearly a year.

“Much has happened in the past year,” she wrote back.

Cat Cora is perhaps the model example of the new American chef, the one who’s completely bypassing the traditional route to celebrity chefdom, which for thirty years has meant establishing oneself as the chef-owner of a nationally renowned restaurant. She may represent the next generation of star chefs. Cora went to the CIA after college, then spent about a decade in restaurant kitchens (including a stint under Melissa Kelly at Old Chatham) before moving full-throttle into television, setting up a company called 3 Street Media and The Cat Cora Show, LLC. Her television concept is an hour-long talk show about food and living issues, and until she gets that off the ground, she’s got a slot on
Kitchen Accomplished,
a kitchen-renovation show on the Food Network. She was featured in a documentary called
Cat’s in the Kitchen,
and has one book out,
Cat Cora’s Kitchens,
and another in the works. And, notably, she became the first woman to become an Iron Chef America, a hugely hyped production of the Food Network well covered by the major food media.

When I called her at home in Northern California for an article on chef branding, she seemed eager to talk about it. “You go to bed one day and you’re the chef, and you wake up the next day and you’ve got an agent, a manager, and a publicist—how does this happen?” she said. “It’s been wild.

“It’s something I’ve wanted all my life,” she continued. “To have the fame. Without beating around the bush, that’s the bottom line…. When I was going to culinary school, chefs weren’t the celebrity chefs they are today.” Her dream in culinary school was to cook for the best chefs in America, and to be the best chef she could be, but the chef world has changed in a way that seems to suit her disposition.

“For me it started at a young age. I wanted to be famous since I can remember. I knew that I had a bigger calling from a young age, that I had something big to offer…. How can I combine what I love to do with also the celebrity of it or becoming well known throughout the country, throughout the world—how can I branch those together?

“I have to be on television—I got the bug.”

Toward that end, she put together a team that includes a Hollywood manager (she’s a member of the Screen Actors Guild), an agent, and a publicist—“a branding team,” she calls it, “a team that is helping me go from the food industry, crossing over into the entertainment industry, to build me as a household name. That is my ultimate goal, not only to have a syndicated show but eventually products, a signature restaurant,…a clothing line that I’m working on right now. The world is our oyster. We can do a lot of what actors and actresses have done today, what singers have done today. Chefs can do the same thing. It’s really an endless opportunity for marketing, so that’s what our ultimate goal is, to build a brand, the Cat Cora brand.”

Look out, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc.!

Or not. That kind of growth is not easy. On the other hand, Martha did it, why not Cat Cora? It is a catchy name. There’s no reason she
can’t
achieve that household-name status. Rachael Ray did it from her beginnings as a salesperson at a gourmet market in Albany. Emeril opened up the door for food-entertainment TV. Why not take it to the next level, and why not Cat Cora?

A year after we spoke, the indomitable Cat Cora, in customary fashion, responded to an e-mail asking how her career had progressed: “Things are fantastic!” she wrote. “I am the new Sears spokesperson, working on a second book, endorsements, a restaurant project, of course, I am now an Iron Chef, which is huge, and I am working with the same production company that shoots
Iron Chef
to develop my own show.” She’d signed with the William Morris Agency and had decided on her branding tag, or theme: “From the Hip,” also the title of her second book, and had even hooked up with Adam Block to help set up her restaurant deal. She was rushing out the door, practically, heading for a cruise on which she’d be featured as a celebrity chef and monthlong travel in Europe with her partner and her twenty-month-old son. Life was exciting.

“Man, opening day is fuckin’ hard,” says Bobby Flay, celebrity chef and television personality, to Bradley Ogden. They’re standing in the kitchen of the new restaurant Flay is opening in ninety minutes. The place looks like most restaurants do just before opening the doors for the first time. The kitchen is buzzing, and a swarm of guys with tool belts are pounding and drilling and fastening as though opening day were weeks away, not an hour and a half. A fellow celebrity chef, Ogden has left his restaurant and threaded his way through the banks of
bing
ing,
beep
ing slot machines and clouds of cigarette smoke in Caesars Palace to say hello. A line of plump, dowdy, middle America, eager to be the first to eat at Flay’s Vegas outpost of Mesa Grill, has formed hours before the place opens.

“The rotisserie, man, it’s like eight hundred and ninety degrees,” Flay tells Ogden. The giant rotisserie on a second level above the kitchen and on view to the whole restaurant appears to be on fire. “You can’t even work near it. Those chickens would go up in flames.”

“You’ll be
poêléeing
those chickens,” Ogden chuckles—that is, cooking them in their own juices in a covered pot in the oven, not crackling, crispy-skinned, and juicy off the spit for everyone to see.

Flay shakes his head over the gigantic rotisserie snafu. “You see it on paper, you think, ‘Oh yeah, put it on the second floor, it’ll look great, make the room smell great.” He jerks his head. “Fuckin’ pain in the ass.”

But the doors will open, and the bar will fill up with margarita drinkers who sample the shrimp with sweet corn tamale and the blue corn pancake with duck and habanero chili sauce, and talk about their favorite food TV shows, as the latest celebrity chef opens another Vegas brand-name restaurant. The Vegas strip, once a culinary embarrassment, is now accomplishing the unbelievable: luring Michelin three-star chefs Alain Ducasse, Joël Robuchon, and Guy Savoy, in addition to celebrity chefs, such as Flay and Manhattan’s famed Daniel Boulud and their outposts.

“Other than New York,” says Tom Colicchio, executive chef of New York’s Craft and Gramercy Tavern who opened Craftsteak and ’wichcraft in the MGM Grand, “it’s the number one dining spot in the country.”

Las Vegas is the epicenter of the latest issue burning through the chef world—the multiple-unit concept, the ability of a chef to open branches of his or her flagship restaurant. The wily Bourdain curls his lip at the movement, calls the Vegas phenomenon “the final cash-out strategy for the inarticulate chef,” but for better or worse, it’s an avalanche that shows no sign of stopping. Steve Wynn, the man who upped the ante in Vegas with his Wynn resorts, lured not just outposts but the chefs themselves. Of the chefs of the eleven showcase-chef restaurants, all but Daniel Boulud will be uprooting from home base and moving to Vegas. Wynn and his lieutenant in restaurants, Elizabeth Blau, wanted the artist in the kitchen.

“It’s the pivotal difference,” says Blau, executive VP of restaurant development for Wynn but who also has her own restaurant-consulting business and is a partner with Kerry Simon in his Vegas restaurant. “Because no matter what, when Thomas is at the French Laundry overseeing a sixteen-course meal, or you’ve sat at David Burke’s tasting table, or Jean-Georges’, it’s the artist creating the experience for you. There’s no way to replicate that. He’s the artist, he’s the master. Every real estate developer, every hotel or land developer, is looking for a celebrity-chef deal, and when you think about it, you can count them on two hands. It’s not like there’s a hundred of these guys.

“Chefs have become personalities, as well as being the chefs, and people enjoy the interaction, they like seeing them. It’s a big deal and it really adds to the experience. My start in the industry was working for Sirio Maccioni in a non-chef-driven restaurant [Le Cirque], but Sirio was always there. And I know one of the big reasons people would go to the restaurant was to see him. You have to look at restaurants as a global experience, not just a dining experience. It’s a whole entertainment experience, and part of that is having a chef.”

You might say, given Wynn’s formidable track record of innovation, that he was bucking the trend, which has been one of well-known chefs throughout the country opening outposts but spending little time if any in the outpost’s kitchen. But then again, perhaps Wynn’s demanding that the chef be at his restaurant was little more than a quaint throwback to a more romantic era in the American restaurant kitchen.

The truth is, a chef who becomes very successful can’t open a second restaurant and be in both places. So what did you expect him or her to do? Be André Soltner, alone in his single world-renowned kitchen, but now, long since retired, practically unknown among young cooks walking onto the hot line?

“There are chefs in New York right now who should know who André Soltner is and they don’t, and that’s astounding to me, and they’re working in nice restaurants in New York City,” says restaurant adviser Adam Block, who helps chefs to expand their businesses.

Chefs are by nature unusually driven people—the work is simply too hard for anyone who’s not driven. The not-driven get driven out or into the ground. And that’s just to exist—they have to be unusually driven
just to stay alive.
To succeed, you’ve got to have more than just infinite energy and stamina. One of those qualities a chef must have is massive ambition. You have to have ambition to succeed at your first restaurant. Then what? Do you turn off your ambition switch? No, that’s who you are. Do you shut down and move to Vegas and open there? Only a chef between certain levels will do what Wynn has asked—one who’s at a level high enough to be asked, but not so high as to be a national brand or overly worked in other areas. This is why Takashi Yagihashi, of the well-known and highly praised restaurant Tribute, outside Detroit, has left his Farmington Hills kitchen and moved to Vegas, but Daniel Boulud has not. The reason Boulud can do this and not Yagihashi—what Wynn knows—is that Boulud’s brand is strong enough to support the restaurant. Also, these chefs on the cusp of celebrity are probably of a certain age, they’ve been around, know their limitations, have goals beyond working 120 hours a week, maybe spending time with their kids or wife. They’ll be paid well, surely earning solid six-figure incomes, but they’re not going to make the
real
money.

No, the chef whose goal it is to make
real
money is going to have to grow his business by opening more of them. Thus, chefs who have worked so hard to build their flagship have begun to open outposts of their restaurants, and we have now a country filling up with restaurants bearing the names of our top culinary artists. Vegas is by no means alone. Cities and tourist hot spots across the country are seeing the opening of name-brand venues. Jasper White, who earned fame in Boston for his fine-dining establishment that bore his name, now runs a small cluster of lobster houses also with his namesake, Jasper White’s Summer Shack, in Boston, Cambridge, and at Logan Airport and the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut. Melissa and Price are doing it in Orlando and Tucson; and Todd English, a bluezoo at the request of Disney World. Norman Van Aken, who made his fame at Norman’s in Miami, opened another Norman’s on the opposite coast, in Los Angeles. Jean-Georges Vongerichten planned to open a restaurant in Minneapolis.

Putting aside, for the moment, the question of whether these restaurants are any good, let’s simply look at it from a business standpoint. From this vantage, it seems to be a very good idea for the chef.

The paradigm of this phenomenon is simple: An unknown, talented chef creates an outstanding one-of-a-kind restaurant that is quickly recognized throughout the country by the press, its quality conveyed by word of mouth and the difficulty in getting a reservation. It becomes successful. The philosophy and quality of this flagship restaurant is the “brand.” The chef then creates a midlevel fine-dining restaurant, one that doesn’t require his or her daily presence. Daniel Boulud has his four-star Daniel, but he also has upscale cafés in Manhattan, Palm Beach, and now Las Vegas. People go there because the brand of the flagship is the same, but the chef doesn’t have to be there and, more to the point, isn’t
expected
to be there. And, because the food and the environment at the establishment are not chef dependent, they can thus be replicated over and over again.
Voilà!
—a chain is born, appearing in many configurations, such as the French bistro (Bouchon by Thomas Keller), the Californian bistro (Spago by Wolfgang Puck), the Italian bistro (Olives by Todd English). No one, of course, wants to call the creation of our culinary artists “chains”—chains connote “cheap” and “mass produced,” plastic rather than authentic. “Rollout” seems to be the preferred term.

Again, let’s reiterate that we’ve relinquished our sweet but outdated notions of the marquee chef personally preparing our food. Emeril Lagasse doesn’t cook at Emeril’s; Wolfgang Puck doesn’t cook at his Spago, his Chinois, his Lupo, his Postrio, or even at his Wolfgang Puck Bar and Grill; Todd English doesn’t cook at Olives; Michael Mina doesn’t cook at Michael Mina. While most of these chefs have some sort of management contract that guarantees his presence at the outpost for a few days or more each month, their presence in the kitchen is not the point, nor should it be. The point is, that the chef’s celebrity now drives his businesses. Wolfgang or Emeril doesn’t have to be there—just his name.

The successful outposts in Vegas underscore the power of this national phenomenon: As the chef moves out of his revered cultural role of artist-monk—a position that used to be an end in itself—and into the realm of celebrity, he passes through the branding process and thus puts himself in the position to make far more money than he ever could with just one restaurant.

Michael Symon’s Lola, the most popular restaurant in its midsized American city, generates $2 million in sales. The French Laundry, the most famous four-star restaurant in the country, generates more than $7.5 million in sales. Wolfgang Puck generates $80 million at his fine-dining restaurants alone, and he doesn’t even have to cook anymore.

That $80 million is why in the chef’s argot, “demi-glace” and “confit” have been replaced by “rollout” and “exit strategy.” Discussion among chefs themselves concerns not farm-raised versus wild, but rather management contract versus equity partner. A meeting with the chef’s lieutenant can now mean not the sous-chef but rather the brand consultant.

All of which begs the questions: Are chefs merely creating high-end versions of the very fast-food chains reviled among the culinary intelligentsia? Are our culinary artists selling out, betraying us with ersatz gourmet? Is Vegas, which created themed malls of ancient Rome and a Venice complete with indoor canals and gondola rides, now creating theme-park versions of the country’s best restaurants? Don’t need to be in Manhattan or L.A. or Napa—just go to Vegas and dine at New York’s Mesa Grill, L.A.’s Spago, Napa’s Bouchon! Tastes just like chicken!

“[Successful chefs] create a brand that they can roll out, that has their proprietary mark associated with it, but doesn’t require them to be in the kitchen,” explains Block, whose clients include Thomas Keller, Eric Ripert, and Charlie Trotter. “It’s the only way they will ever make a lot of money. They’re going to have to grow their concepts up to multiunit levels and have somebody buy them out.”

The magic number, Block says, seems to be five or six. When a chef has that many viable outposts of a single restaurant, bigger companies find them attractive, buy them out, and grow them big.

Joachim Splichal, for instance, created a series of high-end restaurants in Los Angeles, beginning with Patina in 1989. In 1999 he sold his company, the Patina Group, which consisted of eight restaurants and three catering units, to Restaurant Associates for $40 million, while retaining control of the business.

The important distinction here is ownership versus management contract. Almost all celebrity chefs have a management contract (rather than a lease agreement that implies ownership). This means they run the restaurant and earn a percentage of sales and/or profits. But they’re essentially employees, not owners. This is the deal Flay has, just like Melissa Kelly and the Primos in Florida and Arizona. Keller leases his space from the Venetian, in effect maintaining ownership of the Vegas Bouchon. If he were to open a few more Bouchons, they might become attractive to a big company to whom he could sell. You can’t sell a management contract. The downside, of course, is that the business might lose money and you’d be the owner of a loser rather than an employee.

Is there a difference in quality? It likely depends on the chef. Ownership can result in a greater “sense of ownership” translating into extreme care or concern from the celebrity chef, resulting in a better restaurant. On the other hand, a chef with a management contract still has a huge stake in the success of his or her outpost both financially and also in terms of his or her brand. If the outpost is crappy, everyone will begin to think the flagship is too.

Most chefs in the industry embrace the multiunit phenomenon. Mario Batali (with books, TV credentials, and numerous critically acclaimed restaurants in Manhattan) notes the increased opportunities for his staff. Emeril Lagasse said one reason he opened his second restaurant, long before he appeared on television, was to keep his first restaurant from being a “revolving door”—training chefs only to have them leave didn’t make sense to him. He’s since opened a total of nine restaurants in five cities.

While the media’s knee-jerk response to rollouts is to wail “crass commercialism”—Emeril’s Atlanta was trashed by the local paper in much the way Larry Forgione’s Miami outpost of An American Place was—journalists who cover the industry deeply seem to be on the fence about the issue, applauding the increased availability of innovative cuisine but remaining skeptical that chefs can work their magic by cell phone and occasional visits.