The Reach of a Chef

by Michael Ruhlman

  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!”

  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 fro
m 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.”