The Reach of a Chef (28 page)

“It’s complicated,” explained Russ Parsons of the
Los Angeles Times.
“Joachim Splichal is probably one of the two or three best chefs in L.A…. when he wants to be…. The Patina flagship for years was at the north end of Hancock Park—very old money, pricey neighborhood. [Quality] went up and down, depending on who was cooking and what their commitment was. Few chefs lasted more than a couple of years.”

Ultimately, the success of a rollout depends on how well the branded chef is able to train his chefs de cuisine. As is the case with any category of product in our sprawling commercial culture, there are good restaurants and there are bad restaurants. Provided the dining public is aware of the distinction between a restaurant where the chef is actually on premises and a restaurant that is a representation of that chef’s brand, that public can make a considered opinion and vote yes or no with their wallets.

“They hate whenever you write that they have a chain,” says Juliette Rossant, author of
Super Chef: The Making of the Great Modern Restaurant Empires.
“They don’t actually give you an alternative. And frankly, what is the difference between their chains and McDonald’s? I mean they are chains—they’re structured like chains.

“The way you create wealth,” says Rossant, who notes Splichal’s success story in her book, “is by creating clones of it, creating other opportunities for yourself in pots and pans, in food products, consulting, in starring roles in movies and TV. Are they cashing in on their celebrity? Of course they are…. But I don’t know if that’s such a negative thing.”

Rossant and others have drawn a parallel between two worlds that are increasingly linked—restaurants and fashion—observing that “like fine dining, haute couture is necessary to establish quality and reputation, but that the money is in prêt-à-porter for fashion and in casualdining for food.” Or to use the industry buzzword, the “fast casual,” exemplified in the Wolfgang Puck Expresses, quality fast-food spots in malls and airports.

This capacity to open culinary prêt-à-porter is not limited to name-brand chefs with books and TV shows to help drive the brand. Robert Del Grande, who for many years has been the culinary talent behind Cafe Annie in Houston, Texas, well known in his area and respected among chefs but not a national brand, opened Cafe Express in 1984, selling simple, contemporary American fare, handmade from fresh ingredients, in a fast-food environment. He and his partners now have nineteen Cafe Expresses throughout the state, and the player that allowed this small restaurant group to grow was, ironically, a fast-food giant, Wendy’s International.

According to Del Grande, the company was looking to get into the next new wave of fast food, “high-quality, handmade food,” he said. “So they became our major investor and are now helping run the operations, which is far beyond what I can possibly do.” In a similar move, McDonald’s bought out a fast-food chain called Chipotle, specializing in gourmet burritos and tacos and using naturally raised pork.

Common problems beyond greed and hubris (not unknown in a high-ego business) are undercapitalization and the taking on of huge debt, and lack of infrastructure and personnel to support growth.

Among the biggest conundrums for the small restaurant group is how to build infrastructure to support the growth before having the cash flow generated by the growth. For Todd English, whose Olives Group operates a dozen and a half restaurants, growth was erratic with false steps and restaurant closings. The main problem, English himself noted, was “not being fully capitalized at the beginning of my career.”

A corporation such as Wendy’s already has the marketing and support infrastructure, while the chef, such as Del Grande, can maintain control of food and menu development.

Adam Block stresses that chefs became celebrities by cooking food, not by earning degrees in business. Consequently, he observes, “They don’t have a clue what they’re getting into.”

Block particularly likes the model set by Thomas Keller, who’s famed in the industry for consistent four-star standards. Having opened two flagship fine-dining restaurants on each coast, he has also opened two Bouchon restaurants, urban French bistros, that don’t require him to be there. Yet despite Keller’s absence, the bistros still serve four-star cuisine, thanks to the day-to-day guidance of longtime French Laundry chefs Jeff Cerciello and Mark Hopper. Both Cerciello (executive chef of Bouchon) and Hopper (chef de cuisine at the Bouchon in Las Vegas) are thoroughly trained in, and able to replicate, Keller’s famously fanatical standards.

Are we in danger, though, of creating a lot of McHighend restaurants or simply foisting more chains on the unsuspecting and often undifferentiating public?

“No,” says Pamela Parseghian, executive food editor of
Nation’s Restaurant News.
“I think that we have a future of bringing great food to the masses, that’s the way I look at it. To have a Jasper White coming up with a menu and recipes that are affordable to most everybody is a wonderful thing. I’m excited by it. I started covering chain restaurants over twelve years ago, and you couldn’t find a piece of fresh cilantro in a dish, and now it’s everywhere, and a lot of other really lovely things you can get around the country, and most people can afford it. How can that be bad?”

If we’re going to be obsessed by chefs and restaurants, it’s important to recognize and acknowledge the different categories before we evaluate the experience and the food. To go to a P.F. Chang’s China Bistro, a successful Arizona-based chain, in Cleveland, for instance, is different on many levels from going to Michael Symon’s Lola Bistro or any of Cleveland’s numerous and excellent independent restaurants. P.F. Chang’s is a corporate-driven menu composed of decent but generic Asian food designed to appeal to people from California to Texas to Wisconsin to Alabama to New York. The ingredients used are available to all chefs all year round. An independent restaurant is more likely to serve regional specialties using seasonal ingredients. The menu will change more frequently and probably convey the particular tastes and eccentricities of the chef. On the other hand, these independents will be less consistent in quality—the first time in, you don’t know what you’ll get. Among the biggest lessons we’ve learned in this gigantic dining industry is the primacy of consistency over quality (thank you, McDonald’s!). But there’s an impact consumers don’t normally consider when figuring where to take their evening meal. All P.F. Chang’s China Bistros are company owned, so some of the money spent there is going back to Arizona rather than into your own city’s economy, which happens when you eat at an independent restaurant run by a chef who gets his or her food locally. Given the increasing prominence of higher-end chains, this can have a not-insubstantial impact on a midsized city’s economy, not to mention on all the purveyors who grow or raise the ingredients in the area.

Recognizing such facts is good. Few in the industry doubt that one of the ultimate effects of the celebrity-chef phenomenon is in part an increased awareness among Americans of where their food comes from, an awareness that has resulted in an increased availability at our grocery stores of organic or sustainably farmed produce, farm-raised chickens, and grass-fed beef. Not to mention cilantro, shiitake mushrooms, ginger-root, and other ingredients we now take for granted.

The secret to successful replication seems to be—
surprise!
—a good product, regardless of whether the venue is fast-casual or fine-dining: “If I’m doing something at Cafe Annie or Cafe Express or other places,” Del Grande says, “I put my name on it. I’m involved in that and I would eat it myself…. That I think is what the idea of a strong brand would mean—that you’re very strongly connected with the product going out.”

The danger, it should go without saying, is an inconsistent or bad product that inevitably diminishes the brand. Rick Bayless, of Frontera Grill and Topolobampo in Chicago, is a particularly vivid example of one such chef. Famed for his artisanal approach to Mexican cuisine and stellar restaurants, Bayless endorsed Burger King’s low-fat chicken sandwiches. The product did not last long on the BK menu, and Bayless was widely seen by fellow chefs and adoring foodies as having sold out.

For years, Jean-Georges Vongerichten has been one of Manhattan’s culinary shamans, with Vong, JoJo, and his flagship, the four-star Jean Georges. But with a slew of recent openings in New York, a steak house in Vegas, a three-star review of Spice Market tarnished by the asterisk of an editor’s note in
The New York Times,
and a crushing one-star review also in the
Times
of V Steakhouse in the Time Warner Center, his brand is in danger of being diluted. His recent Perry Streest has received strong reviews, but as he reaches further, and with less success, from his core philosophy—cutting-edge food in hip rooms—he ignores the talent and diminishes the reputation that elevated him to brand-worthy prominence in the first place.

All chefs admit that successful branding is a tricky balance of celebrity management and maintaining high-quality product. Each has a different response to being in the kitchen. Many, those hitting age fifty particularly, have had enough cooking and expediting and ninety-hour workweeks. They’re happy to move into the world of the restaurateur. Yet for some big-name chefs, being in the kitchen is still the ultimate reward. David Burke, considered among chefs to be a creative genius of near-lunatic proportions, spent several years as corporate chef for a big steak chain. (Steak chains, which run on simple heat-and-serve menus, are no-brainers for chefs.) While Burke enjoyed the corporate hours and corporate salary (mid–six figures), he missed the kitchen. So he opened David Burke & Donatella in Manhattan, where he’s in the kitchen cooking and will work on his own branded products. Bradley Ogden, who is an owner of numerous restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area and whose place in Las Vegas won Best New Restaurant of 2004 at the Beard awards, put his name on his restaurant and so felt it was important to be there every day.

“People are amazed to see me walking around here,” Ogden chuckles.

Even Flay, a TV personality who has never intended to spend time cooking at his Vegas restaurant, knows the importance of staying in the kitchen. “I hate the word ‘branding,’” he says, the day after his successful Vegas opening. “I hate it. What’s it mean? Whenever a chef becomes successful, the word ‘branding’ sort of seeps into their vocabulary. I have some good opportunities based on not only what I do in the kitchen but what I do on television, which is very helpful obviously. But when the word ‘brand’ comes to mind, I have the same reaction as I do to ‘chain.’…When you try to become a brand that’s a disaster.

“Look, just go to work every day, the opportunities come. You just put your head down and continue to work. That’s been my philosophy. So the branding thing to me is overrated. There’s very few people who can do it. I think that it’s distracting. I know that it all begins and ends in the kitchen in my profession. The reason why I have success on television is because it’s what I do in the kitchen. So whenever I feel like I’m getting away from what I love, I put my whites on and I stand in the kitchen.”

While the power of Vegas is now undeniable, as recently as the mid-1990s it was still a tough sell. “If I’d called them in 1996,” says Rob Goldstein, president of the Venetian, which opened in 1999 with Valentino, Emeril’s Delmonico, Lutèce, one of Splichal’s Pinots, and would later lure a Keller Bouchon and an Esca by Mario Batali, “they’d have said, ‘No, I’m a serious chef. I don’t do Vegas.’ Now the risk is trying to keep the guys who come here honest”—that is, to do authentic restaurants and create great products. He added, “It’s become almost like sport.”

As Puck discovered in 1992, a time when the Vegas restaurant was nothing more than a casino amenity, there turned out to be a huge hunger for an individualistic restaurant by a chef of Puck’s caliber. Spago in Los Angeles, says Puck’s business partner Tom Kaplan, was doing between $4 million and $5 million. When they opened Spago in the Caesars Palace mall, which was about the same size, they doubled sales. Spago, which they’d only worked as a dinner-only restaurant serving 300 customers a night, became in Vegas a place open twelve hours a day serving between 1,000 and 1,500 people a day and bringing in $10 million.

On the other hand, Charlie Trotter’s opened in Vegas in the 1990s and failed—people weren’t ready for the three-to four-hour dinner in a Vegas teeming with things to do. “I don’t think it was Charlie’s fault,” says Goldstein. “It was the market’s fault. A lot of people spend a hundred fifty, two hundred a head for a fine-dining experience. The problem is not money, it’s time. It’s the amount of things that Las Vegas offers. People come here for three or four days, and they want to cram in a thousand experiences. They don’t have time to sit at Ducasse.” It had not, at the time, reached the culinary Dorado—or Dorado theme park, rather—that it is now. Goldstein says, “Charlie Trotter today would be able to succeed.”

Vegas has yet to reach its restaurant saturation point, as Wynn’s ability to lure chefs to the desert shows. Goldstein noted, “Last year, we did one hundred and seventy-five million dollars in restaurant sales.” Banquet and bar sales were $100 million. “I don’t know another hotel in the world that does three hundred million dollars in food and beverage,” he said. This in an operation that does approximately $1.5 billion in sales overall—a hotel and casino that does
a billion and a half dollars.
It’s no wonder everyone’s flocking to Vegas. And the celebrity-chef phenomenon is one of the forces propelling the Vegas cash vortex.

Television is arguably the most powerful force shaping the culinary landscape today. More people are reached through television—entertained, educated, changed in some little or large food-related way—than through any other medium by far.

Television cooking began in 1946, when writer and food authority James Beard taped his first cooking show. He was chosen, authors Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page note, “because of his experience as an actor and a cook,” forecasting the ultimate need for cooks and chefs who appear on television to be entertaining, to
act.
Julia Child would follow, as would others, such as Martin Yan and the Frugal Gourmet Jeff Smith, almost exclusively in the domain of public broadcasting. Then in November 1993 the Food Network hit the air, at first with sparse offerings, mumbling chefs, Robin Leach, and food news, reaching 6.5 million subscribers. By 2005 the network had extended its reach to 87 million of a total of 109 million TV households, according to the network, comparable to the saturation of CNN (its creator, not surprisingly, was Reese Schonfeld, one of the creators of CNN). Its best prime-time shows are watched by a half million people each day, and ratings seem only to be growing.

These shows, unlike the best restaurants, are not ultimately about cooking, but about what the host conveys, an attitude. “Cooking shows will always be personality driven,” Brooke Bailey Johnson, who became the network’s president in 2004, said. How else to explain the popularity of the show
Two Fat Ladies,
featuring two eccentric Brits who adored just about everything Americans were taught to fear, notably lashings of butter and animal fat. They rejoiced in it.

I truly didn’t appreciate the size and passion of the Food Network audience until four of its stars came to Cleveland. The Food Network, as part of a broader marketing effort, sent Rachael Ray, Mario Batali, Alton Brown, and Marc Summers to my fair city and others to Philadelphia for a weekend of demos and book signings, to be joined by scores of food and gadget booths and local chefs doing their own demos. I couldn’t resist and forked over the twenty bucks for a ticket. I wanted to see who was here and why, and at least I’d be able to say hello to Michael Symon, who had demos planned, and Liz, who would man the Lola booth.

The event was held in the I-X Center, an enormous warehouse out by the airport that sometimes hosts entire carnivals, with Ferris wheels and roller coasters inside. The parking lot was a seemingly endless field of cars. Inside, thousands of people packed the place. It was unbelievable. I’d approach men and women, often they had equally starstruck kids in tow, who were stationary in one of the many lines available to stand in, and talk to them about their favorite shows and hosts and how they cooked at home. I found one line that was unique in that I couldn’t see the beginning or the end—it must have gone on for miles. I struck up a conversation with a woman who told me it was the Rachael Ray book-signing line. There was no Rachael Ray in sight. The woman said she’d driven five hours from Indiana to be here, to see Ray live and get a book signed. Ray used to hawk her books in Albany grocery stores, where she did a good business. On her weekend in Cleveland, she signed thousands of books and had to sign programs and T-shirts when the books ran out. When her time for the space she was using ran out, organizers had to cut off the line, and there was an uproar by people who’d been waiting for hours. “They moved us to another area so we could continue signing after our allotted time,” Ray recalled. “Kids were crying and people were so upset at being cut off that the arena worked with the Food Network and got another whole area so we could keep on signing.”

I hope my friend from Indiana got hers,
I thought. Then I thought,
I don’t sell thousands of books in a weekend in Cleveland and I’ve got a home field advantage—I gotta get a TV show.

The Food Network was ahead of me, already devising a show precisely for someone like me, who’d just got this bright idea.
The Next Food Network Star
is a reality cooking show, featuring nine people who wanted to do their own cooking show. The producers would ask these people to compete in tests uniquely designed to gauge their television-star qualities, and importantly, show the audience the specific skills required to be a good TV host. I watched most of it and thought it was both fascinating and entertaining, the mark of a successful food show.

Clearly there was no shortage of wannabe Emerils out there. And not just Aunt Jeannie who’s been called by God to share her fruitcake fetish with America. A large number of young men and women currently working in the chef world were hungry for a shot at TV cooking.

In addition to being a successful chef-restaurateur, Bobby Flay is a Food Network star. He gets the question all the time, and it drives him “fuckin’ nuts,” he says. When I’d stopped in at Mesa Grill in Vegas, it was one of the first things he brought up.

During the short time between when he had enough prestige to be asked to do demos at the French Culinary Institute, his alma mater, and now, the change has been astonishing, and to him, completely misguided. He can’t even count how many culinary students tell him they want to be on TV. It used to be they’d ask him where could they get the best jobs, he said: “‘How should I approach a chef? How do I get my foot in the door?’

“Now they ask, ‘How do I get my own television show?’” he said. “I don’t even answer the question. Look, you’re in the wrong class—this is cooking school, learn to cook first. Before the Food Network, Emeril was just a great chef in New Orleans. He worked his ass off to get there, OK? He didn’t just happen one day…. He spent a long time cooking a lot of Cajun food and using a lot of cayenne pepper, and he understands it like the back of his hand. I said, ‘You guys think you’re gonna go to culinary school, then get an interview with the Food Network and get your own cooking show? First of all, nobody will believe you because when you pick up a lemon, you’re not going to pick it up with confidence, because you don’t know what the fuckin’ lemon is. You just know it’s a lemon. And second of all, you need to learn how to cook first. This is a cooking class, this is a cooking school, it’s about being a chef, not being a television star.”

But he’s resigned to the fact that as long as he and his TV colleagues keep doing what they’re doing, the perception won’t change, and it’s not all bad: “We’ll get some good people in the industry,” he says. “And the rest will drop out because they want to be a star instead of a cook. There are no stars in this kitchen.” He pointed to Larry, his fifty-three-year-old longtime line cook now opening the Vegas kitchen. “They’re coming to work twelve hours every day.” Cooking
school,
ironically, is not the place to go if what you want is a cooking
show.

When I’d spoken with Rachael Ray on the set of her show
30-Minute Meals,
I’d told her that at cooking schools today, a lot of the students enter hoping one day to have a TV show. As giggly and chatty off camera as on, though with a more natural edge off, Ray
snorted.
That was one of the most ridiculous things she’d ever heard, she said. If they want a TV show, they should go to a media training school or get a job at a local news station. That was how you learn to do television, she said.

“We’re working harder to find chefs, our chef hosts, because that’s proven much more of a challenge for us,” says Bob Tuschman, a senior vice president at the network. Many have noted that of the hosts, fewer and fewer are restaurant chefs. “Our bar is raised very high now,” Tuschman continued. “It is hard in any case to find a chef who combines everything we need to host a cooking show. They have to have a telegenic personality that’s really capable of true star power. They have to be a passionate, entertaining teacher. And this next one is what’s hard for restaurant chefs: They have to really be able to talk to home cooks about the kind of food and kind of cooking that home cooks care about, which is very different from restaurant food. And they also have to have a unique food point of view that our audience wants to hear about. When you put those together, it’s hard in any case to find talent for our air.”

In short, it’s no rare skill to be able to cook simple food, but not everybody can be a great TV host. What culinary students don’t seem to know or want to acknowledge is that TV cooking shows aren’t really about cooking. They’re about entertainment and comfort. Cooking may be the vehicle for the entertainment, notions of pots simmering on the stovetop may be inherently appealing, but the quality of the cooking is all but irrelevant. How could it possibly be relevant—the audience can’t smell it or taste it? Ray could be frying up rat shit and who would know? All she has to do is make it look good. Yes, she puts her food in the books and the backstage staff gets her recipes up on the Web site, so she’s got to have decent workable ideas and recipes, but a lot of people have those. What they don’t have is Rachael’s gift for making the heart-land feel comfortable in the kitchen. Rachael inspires women to drive five hours from Indiana to get a glimpse of her and her signature. In 2004 Rachael Ray did the unimaginable: She beat the king—began to register higher ratings than Emeril himself, the man who took the idea of combining food with entertainment and ran with it, the entertainer-chef who is credited with carrying the Food Network to where it is today.

“He put the TV Food Network on the map,” says Ming Tsai, who began on the Food Network, then moved to PBS, now with a show called
Simply Ming.
“Me, Bobby, Mario, Sara—we just had a seat on that train.”

In 1983 a twenty-three-year-old chef, recruited from a hotel chain in New England, expedited at one of New Orleans’ premier restaurants, Commander’s Palace, most esteemed gentry among restaurants there. The young man was skinny, of medium height, had thick curly dark hair, Groucho eyebrows, and a heavy working-class Massachusetts accent. He’d learned to be a screamer like the chefs he’d trained under. He’d spent his apprenticeship in cellar prep kitchens getting pans thrown at him. That’s how this business worked. That’s why he had no remorse, or worry, firing seven of his thirteen line cooks in a single night, just weeks into his new job.
During
service.
Get out, you’re not good enough, I’ll fucking do it myself.
He was the kind of kid chef (not unlike, perhaps, the twenty-four-year-old Melissa Kelly—“You like being a chef, little girl?”…“
FUCK
you, wait outside!”) who would take the box of rank fish on ice and heave it into the street in front of the deliverer. Order
not
accepted. Don’t bring me shit fish.

This was the new kid Ella Brennan, Commander’s matriarch, had hired. Brunch service at the restaurant was typically packed, and in the middle of one of his early services, the young chef was screaming again, no one was moving fast enough, crazy busy and screaming. Brennan could see the kid going down in flames—he wasn’t being tough, she knew, he was being a fool.
Listen to Mr. Big Bad Chef.
Which was a shame, because underneath the volume and the egotistical screaming, he had serious talent. She shook her head and thought
He is too good to be doing something so asinine.
So in the middle of this service, having had enough from her new hire (who continued to scream at his
sorry-ass hung-over line rats who can’t cook their way out of a fucking paper bag at eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning! You want me to do it for you?!
—just look at him!), she scratched out an angry note and gave it to the boy. What else could she do? There were customers waiting for their eggs Benedict. Middle of service!

The chef read it to himself—Brennan had written, she said, “You’re too damn smart to be so damn stupid.”
Huh,
the young chef thought, annoyed, and he carried on with service. What else could he do? He’s in the middle of service—not exactly a time for reflection.

This was a pivotal moment in Emeril Lagasse’s career. Lagasse remembers going home and reading the inscrutable note from his boss—whom he liked, whom he admired, who was one of the most prominent members of New Orleans, a woman who could fire him if she felt like it. He read the note and read it again.

“The next morning,” Lagasse says today, “when I got up, I thought,
I’m gonna leave my ego at home and I’m gonna bring my professionalism and talent to work.
”

He did, and he distinguished himself there, updating the classic dishes, introducing a new commitment to fresh, excellent ingredients and innovative dishes. He stayed at Commander’s for seven years before hanging his own shingle. Emeril’s was an immediate success. Two years later, he opened another restaurant, Nola, which became another success, with his own energetic take on the Cajun-Creole food of Loooz-iana. The food revolution was on a roll, and Lagasse was one of scores of talented young chefs opening hot restaurants throughout the country. Ben Barker in Durham, Rick Bayless in Chicago, Lydia Shire in Boston, Susan Spicer just around the corner from his Nola—the list could go on and on. He was in the middle of a pack of talented American chefs.

On May 18, 2005, Lagasse breaks from backstage into the center of the
Emeril Live
set, stops, and raises evangelical palms to the people, who bolt up out of their seats clapping, whooping, and cheering. A young girl in the front row opens her mouth in disbelief—
It’s actually him.
Emeril works the audience, pressing flesh, stopping to hug an elderly woman using an oxygen tank. He halts before the camera with the teleprompter and welcomes the audience to his fifteen-hundredth show for the Food Network, on which he’ll cook some of his most adored recipes—the signature barbecue shrimp, a seafood boil, the Boston cream pie. “Welcome, everybody! Welcome!” he says. “Emeril Lagasse here, welcome to
Emeril Live!
”