The Reach of a Chef (30 page)
Read The Reach of a Chef Online
Authors: Michael Ruhlman
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Chefs, #Nonfiction, #V5
“He seemed to have the same relationship to real cooking as the Brady Bunch did to real families,” says Bourdain, trying to explain the response among working chefs. “I genuinely hated—and still hate—the show…. And, to be honest, he provided a cheap, quick, and easy laugh, as I knew many—if not most—working chefs felt instinctively as I did.”
“It cheapens the industry to me,” says a public relations veteran, of Emeril’s seminal television show. “It’s like
The Price Is Right.
”
Melissa Kelly commented, “[Chefs] have seen him as a little bit too much of a clown…. But to a home audience, that captures their attention.”
One need watch only a few
Emeril Live
episodes, complete with late show–style repartee with the Emeril Live band and the audience, to understand what chefs saw. In a holiday-themed show recently, I watched Emeril make an eggnog so laden with whipped egg whites that it looked like mashed potatoes. His expression seemed to suggest he knew full well that this was really quite a bit thicker than he’d intended, not something you could really
drink.
He didn’t taste it that I saw (what did
that
matter?). He
thwapped
a serving into a mug, leaving a nice peak, offered it to a woman in the audience, and encouraged the woman to respond favorably. Go on, he said, tell 80 million people how good that is! A bald-faced reminder how many might be watching her, an exaggerated figure, but still a dare to give his eggnog a negative review. (Maybe it was me, but I thought I saw a grimace of irony in his expression—he knew exactly what was happening here.) The poor woman took a mouthful and nodded, eyebrows raised, as the show moved into a commercial break.
“I think I do remember that,” he said when I asked him about it many months later. “I think there were too many egg whites. See, some of the times what happens, too, the recipe that you do, it doesn’t look camera-friendly, so they take it upon themselves to double it or triple it so that it is camera-friendly. And I’m not making any excuses, but I know that that recipe came from
Creole Christmas,
I’ve been making it for twenty years.
“Everybody’s so critical today,” he continued. “Nobody criticized Julia for dropping swordfish on the floor and then picking it up, brushing it, and continuing. She wasn’t in the media the next day, people going ‘Oh my god, what are you doing?’ These days you’ve got the chicken police, the frogs legs police, hamster police, they’re coming at you.”
No one seems to realize that taste is not the point.
In November 1998, Amanda Hesser, a food reporter for
The New York Times
(now the food editor of the paper’s Sunday magazine), wrote a 2,500-word article mercilessly thrashing Emeril. Hesser was particularly ruthless in her description of the food and the cooking, attending the show and critiquing the food as if it were a restaurant’s and grading Lagasse’s cooking techniques as if she were his skills instructor. She tasted the food and it was bad, “very bad.” Some of the recipes in his books are “ghastly,” even “suicidal,” she wrote. His Essence, a patented spice blend, she calls “a bitter mixture of garlic powder, onion powder, dried thyme, dried oregano, cayenne, sweet paprika, salt and pepper.” “A ‘panzanella’ he made on one recent show looked disturbingly like a heap of food headed for the garbage disposal,” she wrote. Emeril, she decided, was “more jester than cook.”
She begins the story by quoting a remark that makes him sound like a simpleton, then describes how captivated the audience is by the man. She ends with a report card announcing “bad cooking skills,” “mangled tradition,” “a façade of accessibility,” and “sloppy presentation.”
This was more than a surprised and innocent Dorothy witnessing Toto exposing a benevolent Wizard as mere flesh and bones. Hesser spotted a fraud and went out to hunt him down.
I think even Emeril-bashers were surprised by the intensity of her blows—one thing to post it on a blog, another thing entirely to make it permanent in the nation’s paper of record. Some chefs, bitter about Emeril’s success within the burgeoning foodie rabble of America’s heart-land, surely rubbed their hands with glee. But Emeril has many friends as well as detractors, so plenty of people were likely pissed off. I asked Bourdain for his recollection of the article and his response to it: “I recall it as an early shot from a heavyweight—on a previously untouched sacred cow. Over the top? Mean-spirited? Sure. But not entirely undeserved…. I kinda admired [Hesser] for the piece—however mean it was. Took balls.”
Hesser’s something of a lightning rod for charged opinions, and the article, I understand, generated a lot of angry mail—to the point where Hesser may well have been unnerved by it. It remains her most notorious piece. That’s a rare thing, a newspaper article several years old that’s well remembered and still discussed. I don’t know how she feels about it—when I reached her by e-mail to ask, she said she preferred to let the article speak for itself and declined to comment.
What really dismayed Hesser, it seems to me, and to so many others in the cooking profession, and what still dismays people in the industry, perhaps, is not the fact that the guy’s cooking technique can be spotty. (I haven’t met a single chef who didn’t have a blind spot. Lagasse got a show in the first place because he ran very good restaurants and was an excellent restaurant cook, a fact no one disputes.) It was rather the fact that Lagasse wasn’t any better or any worse than any one of the growing legion of young chefs, yet he had become the most influential chef in America.
On another level, the disdain for Emeril is the pundits’ knee-jerk response to the tastes of the middle class. Some intellectuals and cultural critics have long made a business of deriding the tastes of the masses. But instead of being mean in the very permanent format of
The New York Times
—Hesser is a great writer, but I really wanted to ask her if she regretted her harshness—she might instead have turned the opportunity into an analysis of why TV cooking and restaurant cooking are different species altogether, apples and oranges. Ask most chefs today their opinion of Emeril, nine out of ten will say they don’t agree with his cooking techniques or like the jokey style of the show, but that his impact on this country from a culinary standpoint is huge and undeniable. If they’ve met him, they’ll usually tell you what a nice guy he is in person. He has popularized cooking on an unprecedented scale. He’s lured people into the kitchen, he’s gotten them cooking, and that, chefs believe, no matter how you look at it, is a good thing for America. Few seem to begrudge him anymore—he’s too embedded in our culture.
“Just because we may not agree with the way he delivers his information, therefore it’s not good?” says Thomas Keller. “The delivery he’s using is one that relates to a large group of people. So am I going to be a snob and say, that’s not a good thing? No, I’m going to be a realist and say it’s a great thing, because at the end of the day, people are starting to learn about food at a higher level than I ever did when I was a kid.”
Even Bourdain has been softened by Lagasse’s magnanimity toward him, and displayed a glimpse of wisdom and perspective, amazing as that may sound. I e-mailed Bourdain, who happened to be in Kuala Lumpur for his own television show
Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations
—I believe he said he was preparing to go blowgun hunting with the natives—and he responded with an unusually long explanation that verges almost on apology:
After years of book tours, interviews and television, it’s become more difficult to separate myself from what Emeril does. Or to take a superior attitude. Of course, all along, chefs who I respected like Eric Ripert and Norman Van Aken would take me aside and say, “You know, actually, he’s not such a bad guy. He’s really nice.” And in my time on the road—I met a number of chefs and cooks who work for—or worked for—Emeril—and had nothing but nice things to say about him—and about their experiences. I began to examine, I guess, myself—and the fact that Emeril had—like me—worked his way up from lowly positions in Massachusetts eateries. That he’d in fact, accomplished far, far more than I ever had—as a chef and restaurateur (the TV thing aside)—and that was worthy of a lot more respect than I’d acknowledged. I was tired of making cracks about the guy as well—as people seemed to expect it—and I—to a less and less degree—found myself not really having the stomach for it. Beating up on Emeril regularly seemed just as bad as having a catchphrase like BAM. And as Food Network became populated by more and more dipshit “personalities” with no professional cooking experience or ability whatsoever, Emeril began to look increasingly like Escoffier by comparison.
Next to final straw was meeting the guy at Eric Ripert’s birthday party. He shook hands, showed enormous good grace—and a sense of humor about all the mean shit I’d been saying. You have to like a guy who can take a ball busting.
Last straw was he fed me and Mario at his Miami store—again showing tremendous generosity of spirit. His wife joined us—a tough, funny lady with strong opinions—who I also immediately liked. And the food wasn’t bad. Frankly, I don’t know how he does it. I’m beginning to respect him simply for his endurance as a public figure. It’s an impressive empire he’s built. And the fact that after all these years he’s still crap on TV—still unpolished, awkward, his diction awful, posture terrible…I’m beginning—in a perverse but admiring way—to respect that too.
At the after party celebrating fifteen hundred shows, Kenneth Lowe, CEO and president of the E.W. Scripps Company, which owns the Food Network, said it bluntly to the crowd of staff and crew: “Without Emeril, there would be no Food Network.”
Emeril combined cooking with fun and not only changed the face of food television but helped to shape the culinary landscape in America, educating and entertaining millions and luring countless people, most notably men, into the kitchen.
"OK, guys, rolling tape,” says Jen Messina, stage manager for
30-Minute Meals
with Rachael Ray. Two handheld cameras and two jib cameras are trained on Ray, who stands behind a peanut-shaped island in what appears to be an everywhere suburban kitchen, ready to begin her cold open, the intro to the show. “Let’s go, eight, seven, six, five, four, three.” Jen raises two fingers in the air, then one. Mark Dissin, the show’s executive producer, says, “Cue” from the control room, delivered to Ray’s earpiece.
“Hi there. I’m Rachael Ray and I make thirty-minute meals.” She halts and says, “I’m sorry, I’ve got to start again. I’ve got a real tickle.” Ray presses fingers to her throat and asks if anyone has some water. No one responds. “I’ll take anybody’s water—I don’t have cooties,” she calls out to the open black space beyond the set. Lesli Baker, her hair and makeup stylist, comes through with some water, and Ray’s again off after that rare stutter into the production of the first of four shows she’ll tape today, one of thirty-nine shows over the course of twelve days of shooting, the last of which is a double, an hour-long Thanksgiving special. The show is, says Dissin, “a business-school model”—very low cost, very efficient to shoot, and incredibly popular. Indeed, it’s the most watched show on the network, averaging about 750,000 viewers for her six
P.M
.–weekdays show.
Her other show is also geared toward the typical Food Network fan, a travel series called
$40 a Day,
and she had already begun taping a third,
Inside Dish with Rachael Ray,
which combines travel and celebrity as she ventures inside the homes and kitchens of movie and television actors. By the following summer, the network announced a new talk show called
Day to Day with Rachael Ray,
featuring, according to the network, “food and fashion, fitness, and lifestyle, plus amazing special guests with expert advice.”
The week I’d arrived to watch the production of her show, an article in the
Los Angeles Times
about the growing popularity of cooking shows led with the suggestion that Ray had become one of the highest-paid cookbook authors in the country as she’d signed “a multimillion-dollar, multibook deal that is one of the largest in cookbook history.” Judging from the line of fans in Cleveland alone, that doesn’t surprise me.
She and the network have begun partnering with the companies whose products she uses. Evidently, people who want to cook like Rachael will buy Rachael-endorsed knives, so there can be no excuse why you, too, can’t make a decent meal in thirty minutes—just go to the Food Network Web site and click the
SHOP BY HOST
tab.
And the following spring,
Reader’s Digest
would announce its partnership with Ray to produce a magazine called
Every Day with Rachael Ray.
If there is a potential personality to eclipse Martha Stewart and her Omnimedia company, it’s undoubtedly the thirtysomething gal from Albany. She surpassed Emeril in ratings. With a few aggressive business moves, she could conceivably dethrone queen Martha.
But for now, she’s muscling through this four-shows-a-day grind. It’s exactly this kind of television that gave her such power in the first place—and the resultant money generated through media and licensing, not to mention the substantial salary for the show itself. All good reasons why scads of culinary students have their sights set on television.
Hi there. I’m Rachael Ray and I make thirty-minute meals.
Look how easy that is!
Born in 1968, Ray is invariably described as “perky” by journalists who don’t want to be snotty about her unstoppable, air-filling giggles and unfaltering gift of gab. What they don’t say is that she is actually more beautiful in person than she is on television. She has oversized features, large deep brown eyes, brunette hair that seems never to have had a bad day, a huge mouth and dazzling teeth that might seem a caricature on anyone with a smaller personality. But television’s effects tone that dazzle down so that on screen Ray comes across as simply pretty, the unintimidating girl-next-door figure. When I saw a “normal” person on the network recently—Bob Tuschman, on
The Next Food Network Star—
he seemed positively dweeby. That couldn’t possibly be the same guy I’d met when I’d visited the studio several months earlier. When Tuschman appears next to Gordon Elliott, a fellow judge on that show, himself an accomplished host with a big frame, distinguished air, and commanding voice, the reducing effect of television became vivid. You’ve got to have bigness, whether in personality or in looks, to be effective on TV. You don’t have to be beautiful (look at Charles Kuralt!), only big.