The Reach of a Chef (32 page)

Ray recalls, “The first thing I said when I went to that meeting was ‘I don’t belong here. I’m not a chef, I can’t wear a chef coat, I won’t tell people I’m a chef, I don’t know how to do fancy stuff. I don’t belong here.’”

They said, she recalls, “‘Let us be the judge. We don’t care that you’re not a chef, that’s kind of what we like.’

“I left that meeting with two television shows,” Ray says. They were simply half-hour versions of what she’d already been doing for a couple years now, her thirty-minute-meal segments and her travel segment, which would become the
$40 a Day
show. (She’s never watched her
Today
show segment—she thinks she’d throw up from residual nerves.)

“I’m a very lucky girl,” she says, sitting in her dressing room during lunch. She’d agreed to chat, rather than do her usual lunchtime thing—pedicures, shopping, “girl stuff,” she explains. “The fact that you can get paid to chat and make food amazes me.” Of her success and the speed of it (the first show aired in 2001), she says, “It’s mind-boggling to me.

“I can’t believe the Food Network was brave enough to do it,” she continues. “Because I clearly don’t know what I’m doing half the time. I cook the way real people cook. I make mistakes, my things don’t look as pretty as fancy chefs’, and I’m out there in street clothes…. They let me do my own thing—they didn’t try to gussy me up, and I think that’s what people responded to. Not necessarily me, but the fact that they could see themselves in the show. There was nothing there to distance them.

“You watch a show done by someone in a chef coat, you have a different perspective,” she says. She used to watch Julia Child and Graham Kerr as a kid. “When I think about it now it’s like, ‘That’s why, it’s because they wore regular clothes.’ They’re telling funny stories. Julia would stick her finger in the pot, she’d drink wine, she’d throw in a handful of salt, not measure. Normal clothing, she wasn’t in a fancy coat. Graham Kerr—same thing, cracking jokes, making food that appealed to all your senses, and there was nothing there to put you off. I watch a lot of cooking shows. Emeril, he kind of overcomes the coat thing because he’s got such a big, wonderful personality.” (Conversely, she points to Martha Stewart: “She was always dressed in street clothes, and yet I never thought I could do anything that she did.”)

“But a lot of times,” she continued, “I’d watch those [chef] shows and it was more like a kid looking through a candy-shop window. I just wanted to look at them because they were pretty and made pretty things. But I never thought I could do those things. I just thought,
Oh that’s lovely and fancy but who has time for that crap,
ya know?

“I grew up in the hospitality industry and I consider that I’m still in it,” she continues. “We’re very customer-oriented on these shows—what makes a viewer feel good about themselves, not what makes a viewer feel good about me, or how good I can be at whatever…. We’re there to make people at home feel good about themselves.

“People are excited to tell me about themselves, not to tell me what they think about me, and that to me means I’m doing my job correctly. I have been a waitress, a bartender, a grocery-store person. I am a hospitality person. My job is to make other people feel good, to give other people what they want and what they need. And I’m doing the exact same thing here. I’m just doing it for a lot more people.”

“At most, I think you tend to get one or two celebrity chefs a generation at most,” says Schear, who also directs
Emeril Live.

This will be a disappointment to the legions who see their future on the tube, at least if they had the dreams of multimillion-dollar book contracts. There does seem to be plenty of room, though, for new talent as hours of food programming continue to go up (for people I should say who truly want to do television because they love to do television rather than because it’s a means to fame and riches). What is it, then, that makes Rachael so popular? While her ratings are tops at the network—which makes no bones about trying to appeal to the broadest base of consumers—her television personality is widely loathed by those in the foodie community, who see the Rachael Ray phenomenon as representing a dumbing down of food television.

To pick a random comment from the foodie Web site eGullet.org, filled with Rachael and Emeril animosity: “I first thought Ms. Ray was annoying,” writes one eGulleter, “then I watched her show (‘30 Minute Meals’) a couple more times. Now I’m positive she’s annoying. Her show is like a train wreck waiting to happen. I anxiously await the day she drops her mise en place after haphazardly piling it up in her arms.”

Those less harsh critics see Ray as an emblem of pandering to the marketplace as opposed to an example of truly excellent food television (whatever that might be)—again, this comes from the pundits’ camp, the same ones who love to deride Emeril. I have to confess that I’m in this camp to some degree. I can’t watch Ray’s shows without grinding my teeth. I feel as though she’s talking to me as if I were an especially dim-witted and clueless four-year-old—and I kind of resent that. Does she really want me to believe that she’s actually like this in real life? (In fact, she’s pretty close! Replace half the sugar with lime juice and stir.)

But part of the strength of my reaction is that I do feel she’s talking directly to me, which of course is the source of her enormous power, whether you like her or not.

“I totally come from a snobby food background,” says Emily, the show’s culinary producer, “and it all of a sudden dawned on me when we started to do the show, there’s just so much good from this show…. It touches people’s lives. It puts them at home so they spend more time together. There’s a sense of pride when you make a meal for people you love. And I think she has a way of doing that, of creating meals that are fun, flavors people can wrap their heads around, and really enjoy and actually make.”

Emily notes that Ray does food everybody can use—she doesn’t use any food that you can’t find in the supermarket. “That’s really important.”

During one of the powwows between acts at the peanut island, Rachael was making a bid for using fresh bay leaves. Emily didn’t think they were easily available and told Rachael she needed to be cognizant of the people.

“I’m cognizant of the people,” she responded, miffed. “I
am
the people. And I can get fresh bay leaves.” Ray’s basic rule is if she can get it in Glen Falls, four hours north of the city where she was born and where she lives with her cat and her pit bull, it’s fair game.

Ray is very good at coming up with recipes, says Dissin, and she’s easy to work with. “We understand the brand,” he says, “and she understands the brand. And whenever she goes off brand, it’s easy to pull her back. She’s very good at deconstructing food to fit her brand.”

“What’s off brand?” I ask.

“Truffle oil,” he says. “Every now and then truffle oil sneaks in there.”

He’s produced hundreds of these shows. They are now doing about one hundred twenty
30-Minute Meals
a year. “I can write six hundred recipes a year and not break a sweat,” Ray says. “I’ve gotten to the point where I can virtual cook. In my head, playing with food.”

We, the audience, see none of this. We see only how easy it looks—
Hi there. I’m Rachael Ray and I make thirty-minute meals.
But talk to Schear and Dissin, guys who work on numerous shows, and they shake their heads at how good she is, how easy she makes their work. Sometimes she screws something up—sure. Burning toast is her Achilles’ heel, says one technician. Then they’ll have to stop shooting, redo the toast, and Ray will have to perform what’s called a live pickup, start filming exactly where she’d been moments before discovering the error. To conclude the first act of one such show, she said, “I’m going to check my toast, which I hope I didn’t burn.” She opened the broiler of the 1950s-era Chambers range and said, “Which I did.” And she shook her head with a smile of hilarity but didn’t stop the act. Instead, she said, “I’m gonna get cracking my eggs and cutting some more slices of toast!”

In the control room, producer Mark Dissin sighs. They watched the tape again and he said, “It’s kind of cute. But I don’t know if you want to have your host burning toast.”

So in the finished show, you now hear her say, “…which I hope I didn’t burn,” followed by her opening the broiler to behold…
perfect toast!
Ray picked it up live and finished the final minute of that act.

“That pickup,” Dissin says, “of three-hundred-odd shows”—1,200 acts—“that happens maybe fifty times. She is flawless at the live pickup.”

The girl with the giggle is a pro, an artisan in her own right, and part of that craft is making the hard stuff look easy.

“It’s easy to watch,” says Schear. “It’s
got
to be easy to watch because it’s too easily turned off…. It’s really hard to do.”

Ease is an illusion. Same with four-star service at a great restaurant—you don’t even notice it. No one sees the manipulation—that’s the magic.

That’s television. And I suppose it should be no surprise, then, that the professional chef, for a time the reigning figure in ratings at the Food Network, has now been eclipsed by the self-taught home-style cook. The television chef may be fading away as we return to the origins of food television and the personalities of James Beard and Julia Child.

The night I happened into Per Se, November 18, 2004, to find not a finely tuned machine in action but a chaos of media and strangers and an executive chef who’d lost his shoes, was to me to be a kind of peak in my experience of reporting from within the restaurant kitchen, an uneasy awkward apex in the life of the chef. The lost-shoes business seemed the perfect metaphor for the changing role of the chef, and for the chef who didn’t quite know who he was supposed to be anymore.

But the literal fact of the shoes, too, was surprising. How do you lose your shoes when they never leave the place? How does Thomas Keller lose his shoes? The Per Se kitchen and offices were big but not that big. The kitchen is cleaned thoroughly, continually, throughout the day. A pair of kitchen clogs on the floor would be equally noticeable in the small administrative warren. Certainly Keller’s clogs (occasionally cryovacked as a joke), which would have an almost talismanic effect among the staff, would be noticed.

Clearly this was not what Keller had expected in January 2000 when he handed Adam Block the prospectus for the Time Warner property. There appeared to be little finesse in this. Keller seeks refinement and luxury, not the entertainment of a carnival midway. And yet that’s what it felt like on the night of the
60 Minutes Wednesday
shoot in his massively expensive, meticulously planned, and carefully built kitchen. The network news show had homed in on the man Bourdain called, with customary frankness, “the chef many consider the best and most respected in the world.”

And look where he was? The best and most respected in the world was in a Manhattan mall derided by urbanists as an ominous encroachment of evil suburbia on the great metropolis. Foodies in particular lamented the fact of what might be one of America’s great restaurants bunched in with a Borders, a grocery store, a hotel, and a dozen boutiques. Four stories off the ground, no less. Keller couldn’t find his shoes, there was madness in his kitchen, and he was in the heart of an enormous mall in New York City, like Kurtz in the Darkness.

The order of this world, the world of professional cooking, was changing, but for better or for worse? Was this progress or the point at which the velocity of The Chef, this cultural juggernaut, becomes too great to maintain—it wobbles, and it’s moving too fast to right itself, then spins out of control, flames out, and crashes to the ground?

Certainly November 18 provided a handy moment for a writer prone to metaphor. The moment was true but, of course, it was
momentary.
The night ended, the dining-room tables were cleared, the kitchen cleaned, the lights extinguished, and the next day would begin as every day begins, with the first of the brigade and bakers arriving at dawn, followed at midmorning by chefs (who would work the line and run the pass till after midnight), followed by the team of young men and women in T-shirts and black trousers who would buff the glasses, fold the napkins, then transform themselves into the evening servers. And the steady, heads-down ethos of the watchmaker’s shop would return. It had been a crazy night, that’s all, in a business that has more crazy nights than could possibly be recorded.

If it was more momentary than metaphor, then, what to make of
this:

Long after that night, with the restaurant returned to its daily example of elegance and finesse, in the spring of 2005, in fact, the day after Per Se won the James Beard award for the country’s Best New Restaurant, I arranged for a few minutes with Keller to find out how he was and where he was in this fascinating evolution that I’d been invited seven years ago to watch. He sat on the corner couch facing the small bar of Per Se, dressed in a white dress shirt and black jacket, late morning, having just spent a half hour reviewing some new plates and saucers to be purchased for the Bouchons.

“It’s something that I’ve just realized recently,” he said of Per Se and where he was. “I only need to do things once. I don’t need to do things twice. I didn’t need to do this.” The lives of a hundred employees, the media, the labor on the part of countless people, his own workhorse input included, and many millions of dollars—he didn’t need to do it.

“I’m not a chef anymore,” he said moments later. “And it breaks my heart.”

In 2001, just after the New Year, Keller had lunch with Adam Block, the business adviser on contracts and financial issues within the restaurant industry who counts dozens of celebrity chefs as his clients. Block is one of a small circle of advisers Keller relies on for business decisions. He is five-eight, fit, handsome, with a narrow face, sharp features, and frizzy hair cut short and neat with prominent sideburns. His confident manner, dapper attire, aggressive posture, and energetic intensity always made me think of him as a professional baseball player off season, though, at the age of forty, he’d been in the restaurant business his whole professional life. Because the French Laundry was closed for its annual two-week winter break, Keller and Block enjoyed a long casual lunch at Bistro Jeanty in Yountville, which allowed Keller to reflect on where he was and where he and his growing business ought to be headed. The Bouchon in Yountville, the first Bouchon, was closed for its winter break. As that venture was proving successful, they planned to move on their intent to open others. There were plans to build a bakery next to it, and he had hopes of opening a Relais & Châteaux–caliber inn across the street from the French Laundry, to accommodate guests of the restaurant in the manner of some of the European Michelin three-stars, such as Georges Blanc and Michel Bras.

At the moment, though, he was still a chef with two restaurants and one coffee-table cookbook.

And he was
itching
to open another fine-dining restaurant. He’d been frustrated that he’d found no acceptable venues where he might make that happen. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, but he knew he didn’t want to be an André Soltner or a Frédy Giradet, famous chefs synonymous with their solo restaurant, who more or less faded away once they left their kitchens, as a chef inevitably must. He’d seen a number of properties and considered several offers, but no place enticed him. He’d looked as far as Tokyo. Nothing was good enough. He wondered aloud that day whether or not he’d ever find another place.

“Am I being unrealistic?” he asked Block.

Block replied, “Thomas, you shouldn’t have to sacrifice. You shouldn’t think that, in order to diversify, you have to lower your standards.”

They settled the bill and strolled up Washington Street toward the French Laundry. As they were passing the building that would become Bouchon, Keller handed Block a brochure for a major new construction in Manhattan called the AOL Time Warner Center. It had been sent to him by Ken Himmel, the CEO of Related Urban Development, the company managing it and filling it, and the man in charge of all Related’s mixed-use developments. The $1.7 billion double-barreled skyscraper would include several levels of retail space, a Mandarin Oriental Hotel, a performing-arts complex for Jazz at Lincoln Center, a Whole Foods Market, and condos. Its fourth level would house restaurants.

Block nodded. He knew about the project already. He’d been asked to consider it for another of his clients, Gray Kunz, and immediately said, “Fourth floor? Forget it.” Himmel spoke carefully to Block, urging him not to dismiss it. Not an easy sell, to say the least. Not even easy to avoid having it dismissed out of hand. It was common knowledge that to open a Manhattan restaurant that didn’t have immediate street access was crazy. New Yorkers wanted to be able to walk into and out of a restaurant in a snap. They needed the immediacy of the street. A long walk through hushed corridors to the silent interior of a hotel restaurant made people here uncomfortable—they simply wouldn’t go. In the case of the Time Warner Center, the restaurants would be several floors above street level in what amounted to a mall. You couldn’t walk right in; you’d need to take escalators. Furthermore, Himmel was wooing chain restaurants, such as Houston’s, to fill the space, which would further diminish the cachet of the fine-dining restaurants Block trafficked in. But—Thomas
Keller’s
entering this project…now this was something different. Adam Block has a shrewd imagination. He didn’t dismiss it out of hand. He did imagine it. Thomas Keller’s moving in was different from Gray Kunz’s moving in. Kunz, a European chef raised in Singapore who was heavily influenced by his work in the Far East, had last led Lespinasse to four
New York Times
stars but hadn’t been in the kitchen for several years. He was a New York chef, considered to be among the best, but mostly locally familiar—news, but not big news.

A dozen chefs in America could reasonably lay claim to best chef in the country on any given night, and Kunz was in that echelon along with Keller. But Keller was different from the others, different from Daniel Boulud and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Frenchmen who had created their own four-star Manhattan temples, different from Alain Ducasse, the Michelin three-star phenomenon who’d opened a controversial restaurant in the Essex Hotel (at the time the most expensive, and many said, the most pretentious, restaurant in New York; it had been mercilessly lambasted in the press). Keller was an American, but he somehow enjoyed the mystique typically given to the Michelin three-star chefs. Indeed, it had been Michel Richard, another Frenchman with a big reputation working in the United States, who told me, in a whisper that mixed respect with astonishment, “Thomas Keller is the best
French
chef in America.”

There were others, Charlie Trotter, the Chicago perfectionist, and Patrick O’Connell, of the Inn at Little Washington, Americans who had created restaurants of great quality and refinement on the level of the French Laundry. But there was something about Keller. Somehow, for reasons that weren’t identifiable, he’d remained in a league of his own. Why, for instance, had Keller’s cookbook sold hundreds of thousands of copies, more than any single book by any of these other chefs? Adam Block didn’t need to know the answer to recognize that Thomas Keller’s world-renown would lure the New York crowd at least once, that his return to Manhattan would be an event large enough to generate a big media interest. He saw too that traffic through the Time Warner Center and the affluent clientele of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel and those purchasing the expensive condos would ensure the critical mass of people, if it were done right, to make a success of a wannabe-four-star in the toughest, most competitive, most media-snarky city in the world. And Keller was clearly ready to make a move. If Block could work out the right kind of deal with the Related Companies, it just might work. He knew that to have Thomas Keller on board in the Time Warner Center would be an amazing coup that would alter the shape of the center itself.

Thomas Keller’s mystique was based on integrity and excellence—and that integrity and excellence, Block knew, was so pronounced and distinctive that it had become the Thomas Keller
brand.
If the Related Companies wanted that brand badly enough, saw the power of that brand, Block could engineer a sweetheart deal, enough to make the colossal risk and strain of opening a fine-dining restaurant, on the fourth floor of a mall in New York City, worth taking.

Block indeed brokered such a deal over five relatively sleepless days in his offices in Ross, California, north of San Francisco, in the spring of 2001, as construction of the behemoth Time Warner Center was begun. With many late-night calls to Himmel for an answer on a make-or-break question, both sides had an operating agreement, a lease agreement, a personal guarantee from Keller, and a loan agreement.

If there was a moment when Keller recognized the magnitude of what he was about to do, or felt a tiny tremor run along the ground before the avalanche could be seen, it was likely the day Adam Block met him with the five agreements that composed the Time Warner deal and all the paperwork involved. They met at Jamba Juice. Block recalls arriving with “a stack of paper two feet high.” It spelled out everything Keller was getting himself into.

Keller looked at Adam and said, “Remind me again.
Why
are we doing this?”

Block later told me why, or at least part of the reason. Keller’s failure to make money in New York at Rakel, and his humbling departure in 1991 for a hotel kitchen in Los Angeles, left him with some unfinished business: “He hasn’t slain the father yet,” Block said. “That’s kind of what New York is to him.”

There’s enough to do in just trying to open a restaurant in Manhattan. But he was still working at the French Laundry, had opened Bouchon, and was opening a Bouchon in Las Vegas, while planning the New York restaurant. Everything seemed to be happening at once. He’d been flying to Limoges, France, with his lead designer to finish a line of porcelain with the prestigious Raynaud porcelain company. It marked the first time a chef had designed an entire line of serving vessels that would accommodate the vision of the chef and the way he wanted to serve his food—special eggcups for his famous truffle custard served in the shell, a bowl-plate hybrid for serving risotto loose, the way he liked it, soup boxes that came with tops, so that they appeared at the table like small precious gifts. Then it was off to Paris to work on the line of Christofle silver with designer Adam Tihany. And then a stopover in England where the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson, would present him with Wedgwood’s best chef in the world award. Then back to California and up early to cook for Diane Sawyer on
Good Morning America.
And then work on the Bouchon cookbook and design plans for the Bouchon bakery. Then to Vegas, and then back to New York.

The New York venture, though, with the enormous amounts of money involved and the huge personal stake he was investing in time and reputation, was stressful. He began to have a nightmare—in it he ran and ran; Ken Himmel and the CEO of the parent company, Steve Ross, were actual giants pursuing him.