The Reach of a Chef (29 page)

Twenty-two years after his debut at Commander’s Palace and the note from Ella Brennan, Emeril Lagasse had left the pack of hot American chefs and had transformed himself into not only the most popular chef on television but arguably the most influential chef in America—
ever.

Emeril Lagasse, the most influential chef
of all time.

Name another
chef
who’s touched or influenced more people. Julia Child? Not a chef—and anyway, she didn’t do near the numbers Lagasse does. Escoffier—hard to gauge the cumulative effect of the century since he published
Le Guide Culinaire.
I don’t think anyone comes close from a numbers standpoint. Jacques Pépin? Thomas Keller? Not even close. Keller himself remembers going to a book signing in Philadelphia to autograph copies of his
French Laundry Cookbook,
a huge seller in its own right. He sat behind a table in the store shaking hands and smiling and nodding and signing
“It’s all about finesse”
in book after book. And when he was done, when the last in line had gotten his signature, the line for Emeril still snaked endlessly through the store. Emeril himself was on a stage. Keller wanted to shake the guy’s hand and say hello, but he couldn’t get through the crowd. He penned a greeting on a business card and asked one of Emeril’s entourage to give it to the most influential chef ever.

Emeril did not get to this unique position through cooking. A lot of people can cook—Thomas Keller can cook, Ben Barker, Susan Spicer, they can all cook. He got that way through television. But why him? Why not Norman Van Aken, who also taped shows in the early Food Network days, who remembers watching his friend: “I saw
How to Boil Water
the first time, and I just felt so bad for him. You didn’t see Emeril at all, he was hunched over the table, you could see the top of his head, it was like we were all wincing.”

Emeril, at the time of his launching, was a young man, thirty-four, a respected chef and restaurateur who happened to be in the right place at the right time—or, more exactly, he happened to be
the right kind of person
in the right place at the right time.

The right time was the spring of 1993 and the right place was Nashville, Tennessee. It was here that Emeril stopped midway through a tour promoting his first cookbook,
Emeril’s New New Orleans Cooking.
There he was met by a television producer named Allen Reid, who taped him as a guest on a local daily cooking channel. Then Reid taped what he called a ten-minute pilot.

Reid was close friends with a man named Reese Schonfeld. Schonfeld had become well known in television as one of the men responsible for starting CNN with Ted Turner (recounted in his memoir,
Me and Ted Against the World
). Schonfeld was busy at work on a new network, one devoted completely to food, and he was looking for chefs to put on TV in the same way that, in 1980, he was looking for journalists to put on TV (Katie Couric and Bernard Shaw, for example). He asked Reid to be on the lookout, to make some pilots of chefs coming through Nashville who were promising hosts. In July 1993, Reid flew to New York with tapes of the best of those he’d collected: Debbie Fields, Curtis Aiken, Bobby Flay, Norman Van Aken, and Emeril Lagasse. Schonfeld’s office was stacked floor to ceiling with tapes, so Reid and his wife and partner, Mady Land, viewed the tapes along with Schonfeld. He had hoped a chef named Jasper White might host the show they called
How to Boil Water,
but Schonfeld didn’t feel he had the screen personality for it. In fact, he didn’t see anyone who truly thrilled him. Reid couldn’t believe Schonfeld didn’t love Emeril. “This guy’s terrific,” he told Schonfeld. “This guy’s a star.”

Schonfeld still wasn’t sure, but, because he’d promised to give his old friend two shows to produce, and because Reid was so high on Emeril, he said, OK, go with Emeril.

Emeril began filming
How to Boil Water
in Reid’s Nashville studio soon after—Emeril, Reid, and a couple of cameramen (Emeril used to shout
“Bam!”
to keep the cameramen awake, Emeril says). I’ve seen clips from some of these early shows. Emeril is stiff and awkward. He’s stiff and awkward on the next show too,
Emeril and Friends.
Neither show did well. What on earth had Reid seen in this guy that made him so good?

“What you see now,” Reid responded from his offices in New York. Emeril being Emeril, a chef filled with energy and enthusiasm. The Food Network had made a mistake in forcing him into the role of host of a show on how to boil water and cook grilled-cheese sandwiches. Even here, Reid said he was told to tone Emeril down, that Emeril had too much energy, so rein him in. The shows were so lackluster it amazes Reid today that anyone agreed to do a third show with Emeril, but that’s what did it. In
The Essence of Emeril,
the New Orleans chef could be himself and cook the food that he loved.

It, along with a handful of other chef-driven shows, did fine. And then better. Ratings began to rise. Emeril continued to commute to New York to do shows at three hundred bucks apiece. He could do seven in a day, a staggering number. Soon his ratings were twice that of any other Food Network show.

With that show succeeding, Emeril said to his producers, he recalls, “Somebody should do a Leno-style food show that was entertaining, that had music—music is certainly a connection that I had in my heart and soul—but it’s real cooking. They said ‘You’re nuts.’”

Now the first thing you have to understand about Emeril to begin to see how he got to be
Emeril
is that the man is a savvy marketer. Or as his buddy, celeb chef and restaurateur Mario Batali, says, “He’s not just a good marketing guy, he’s an
amazing
marketing guy.”

Yes, Emeril was savvy and aggressive in pursuing partnerships with good companies: All-Clad (pots and pans), Wüsthof (knives), Water-ford Wedgwood (glasses and plates), Pride of San Juan (produce), B&G Foods (grocery-store-shelf foods, “shelf-stable” in industry parlance, seventy of them, spices, sauces, et cetera), William Morrow/HarperCollins (more than 4 million books sold), New Orleans Fish House (shrimp), Monogram Foods (coffee), Sanita Clogs (kitchen clogs), Sara Lee Foods (sausage). He licenses his name, rents it to them, so they can sell a product that he’s involved with, and he takes part of the sales. “The consumer wanted something representing Emeril,” he says. “You either give it to him or they’re gonna get it somewhere else.”

But marketing is more than putting your name on products. Batali’s talking about a sensibility.

Here’s the perfect example I learned from Alain Joseph, Emeril’s culinary assistant and writer, who began as a cook at Emeril’s: It was a pretty normal restaurant kitchen, and Emeril was a normal chef, which suprised Alain (he was by then on the Food Network and considered a celebrity). The next thing that surprised Alain was a detail. Big kitchens often have big table-mounted can openers that make the work very quick and easy. This kitchen had none. In fact, this kitchen didn’t have any can openers at all. Alain eventually understood that Emeril didn’t want them to be seen in the open kitchen by the customer—if the customer sees can openers that means
not fresh;
if they see can openers, that means
the kitchen is opening a lot of cans.
It wasn’t that they didn’t open any cans (Alain remembers all the cooks had to bring in their own hand-held openers from home in order to open cans), it was the impression they gave to the customer.

That, my friends, is marketing. That describes a chef who is thinking about the detail, thinking about the customer, thinking about the
impression
of appearances. But—that is not the secret element that turned Emeril into
Emeril.

In 1996, with his show topping the list at Food Network, Emeril, who has for a while wanted to merge the
Tonight Show
format with food and cooking, gets to thinking. Chefs cook in front of live audiences all the time—they just haven’t done it on TV before. He’s got his second book coming out,
Louisiana Real & Rustic.
He wants it to sell, obviously. He also is aching to put this new “You’re nuts” idea into action. But to do that he needed to convince the network it was worth a shot—and even if they did like the idea, they’d still ask him, “What’s the show?” Well, now, the show is
Real & Rustic,
based on the cookbook. The show will promote the book. The book will give a theme and reason for the show. With the
Essence
audience growing, the network agreed. And there Emeril hit his trifecta: a way to promote the book to his audience, a good show built around the book, and at last, a live audience in a
Late Show
format in which he’d stride out from backstage à la David Letterman, but instead of tell jokes, he’d cook and talk about food.

In July 1996, the first live audience was ushered into a Manhattan studio. Emeril rushed out in a T-shirt and jeans, and the crowd cheered. Unleashed from the isolation of the private studio, Emeril screamed and began making a chicken clap its drumsticks while whooping himself. This was television history. Maybe not Beatles-on-Ed-Sullivan history, but a small bit of history nonetheless, and a seminal moment in the culinary shaping of America. Cooking as entertainment television had arrived.

Erica Gruen, then president and CEO of the network, was in the control room during the taping, watching the monitors. A chill went up her spine when Emeril appeared—she knew instantly Emeril was on to something. “It was one of those great moments in show business,” she recalled later. When it aired in October, it did the unthinkable for the struggling foodie cable network: It registered the company’s first Nielsen rating. Within months, they got
Emeril Live
on the air, and it was an instant success that has only increased every year.

Now, here is the bit of information that makes the pieces fit together, in the big-picture puzzle, of seeing how this working-class kid from Fall River, Massachusetts, this energetic and likable young man who had become an experienced chef and successful restaurateur, how and why he became the most influential chef ever. I mean, yes, he’s a good cook, food’s terrific, restaurants are popular—but you could say the same of countless chefs doing great food in hip rooms across the country. Why this guy?

Part of this piece can be glimpsed in the young chef who’d excelled at Commander’s Palace after Brennan’s note. He’d begun by managing the kitchen, but by the end, he managed front-of-the-house staff as well, including general managers and sommeliers, 170 people in all, he says. He instituted “management summits”—motivational meetings for his staff—“a Dale Carnegie thing,” he calls it. Once he even hired the coach of the New Orleans Saints to pump up the staff. Then he opened his own restaurant but not under the best of circumstances. He did it in a part of town so barren and beat up that no one thought he’d survive. But success was immediate, and he’d never doubted it. His pre-service meetings became famous for their energy and enthusiasm. When he saw that his cooks were lackluster, he’d tell them to put down their knives and follow him—they were going on a jog through the warehouse district. Success was all about attitude.

Receiving that note from Miss Ella, he said, was the second pivotal moment in his career. The first, though, is the key to understanding Emeril’s extraordinary appeal to the masses of America: He read a book,
The Magic of Thinking Big,
written in 1959 by David Schwartz. That was it—reading that book was the key pivotal moment of his career, he says. He was in his early twenties, working as a chef for a New England hotel chain, and he read this bestselling motivational book from the 1950s, and it changed his life.

“It was the first thing that made me realize what life was all about,” Emeril says today. “That you could look inside yourself and see who you are and knowing who you are, you could see that anything was possible.”

He carried it with him in his heart, put it into place in Commander’s Palace, and it kept growing from there.

Food is the medium, not the message. The message is: You can do it, too, and have fun. The message is empowerment. In our Internetted, overbusy, disconnected lives, food is a way back to the things that matter, and Emeril can show us the way—
“Oh yeah, babe.”
Emeril is the tent-revival preacher, calling his people into the kitchen! He doesn’t shout, “Praise the Lord!” He shouts, “Add more garlic!” but the resulting
“Amen!”
is the same. You won’t see a laying on of hands here, but Emeril does toss food into the audience. He calls ganache what it really is—chocolate sauce—and the people cherish him for it. He’s one of them.

Ten million viewers a week, rock star–sized crowds in every city he visits—it ain’t because they love his barbecued shrimp. It’s because they love his message.

We the people have the power, and Emeril can show us the way. Emeril inspires the masses. You, too, can return to the kitchen, you, too, can cook good food and connect with your family! You, too, can live the good life! You can know yourself. All you have to do is
kick it up a notch.
Through Emeril, anything is possible.

Ironically, it is exactly at this moment when Emeril begins to inspire a bristling among his colleagues. When he was a chef with a show, that was fine, respectable, good for you. But the moment he moves from chef to entertainer, the moment the throbbing middle classes embrace him, the moment he becomes America’s culinary Dale Carnegie, is when his own industry turns on him, reviles him for bad cooking technique, derides him for turning the culinary arts into a circus of late-night talk-show shtick, with costumes, a live band, and jokey banter.