Reinstein: Would you like an autograph with that?
By Ted Reinstein/ Local Columnist
Sunday, December 25, 2005

"We’re just cooks."

So declares Ming Tsai, owner and executive chef of the award-winning Wellesley restaurant, Blue Ginger. But Tsai does not merely cook. In fact, Tsai presides over a small multi-media empire: he’s authored two cookbooks, produces and stars in what is now his second television cooking show, and has a product line of his own at Target. Want to know more about Ming? Check out his Web site (Ming.com), or November’s Boston Magazine -- that would be the issue with Ming on the cover.

"I’m a chef first," Tsai, maintains. "I’m not trying to be famous."

All of which may be true. But more and more, chefs of Ming Tsai’s undeniable caliber are becoming very, very famous, and Americans, it would seem, are eating it up. So how and when exactly did chefs themselves become the biggest thing on the menu?

Food historians generally agree that the first bona fide celebrity chef was Marie-Antoine Careme (1784-1833). He was known as the "chef of kings and king of chefs." He wrote several encyclopedic works on French cooking, but his most lasting accomplishment is still in evidence today: Careme is credited with creating the standard chef’s hat, the toque. In the Paris of his day, he undoubtedly would have had his own cooking show (Careme Cooks!) had television, rather than the guillotine been the newest big thing.

Fast forward two centuries or so, to the very infancy of TV. In 1946, chef and food writer James Beard, who many consider the father of American gastronomy, appeared on the first televised cooking show," I Love to Eat" (NBC). Within a decade or so, the TV kitchen got more crowded. British cooking personality Graham Kerr became a household name in the 60s through his own show, "The Galloping Gourmet."

But it was Beard’s friend, Julia Child, who most successfully combined TV and cooking. "The French Chef," Child’s show, premiered on PBS in 1963 and ran for 10 years. She also authored more than a dozen books on cooking, and is generally credited with introducing French cuisine and cooking techniques to the American mainstream. A recent A&E Network list of the "Top Ten Celebrity Chefs" ranked Child, who died in 2004, number one.

"Julia brought food to a level that Americans could appreciate," says Tsai. And she was able to do it mainly because of a new daily staple of the American diet -- television. A key ingredient in the making of a modern celebrity chef had been added to the recipe.

By the ’90s, the evolution of television, specifically into cable, influenced the rise of chef celebrity even more dramatically. While some famed chefs, like Paul Prudhomme and Wolfgang Puck, rose to prominence by dint of their signature restaurants and clever mass marketing, most of today’s celebrity chefs are known nationally largely because of TV.

And no restaurant anywhere can match the massive daily food volume of the 24-hour Food Network. Launched in 1993, it reaches more than 83 million subscribers and may be single-handedly responsible for the explosion of celebrity chefs. The network’s roster is a veritable Who’s Who of "name" chefs: Emeril, Ming, Mario Batali, and Bobby Flay, not to mention Wolfgang Puck. Shows like "Iron Chef," where these same cooking stars battle like culinary pro athletes in the heat and glare of "Kitchen Stadium," seem to confer not mere celebrity, but cult-like status on the likes of hot chefs like Batali and Flay. They are no longer "just cooking," as Ming Tsai might say, but entertaining.

Consider Emeril Lagasse, who needs only his first name now, like Sting or Madonna. On his hit show, "Emeril Live," Lagasse, a Fall River native, prowls his kitchen/stage like a Vegas veteran. And it’s not only men -- the Network has made celebrities of women, too, like the hugely popular Rachel Ray. Ray has four shows on the Food Network, has published 11 cookbooks to date, has a new magazine, and a deal with Oprah to launch her own TV talk show. Cook? It’s a wonder she finds time to eat.

Even with such a full plate of TV cooking fare, the public seems hungry for more. A growing variety of other venues offer celebrity chefs ever more, well, celebrity. Cruise ships now boast marquee chefs the way big clubs once headlined singers. And if the chefs themselves aren’t onboard, their signature restaurants are, like Boston’s Todd English, who has a chic eaterie on the Queen Mary 2. (Though you’re no more likely to run into English at any one of his restaurants than you are of seeing Wolfgang Puck when you open one of his frozen pizzas.)

Celebrity chefs have also become hot properties on the public speaking circuit. And they don’t come cheaply. According to Chef-2-Chef, a New York-based booking agency, top-name chefs can make as much as $20,000 an appearance. That kind of money is now on par with similar fees for major political and entertainment figures. Think about that: Colin Powell or Jacques Pepin -- same price.

And still the demand grows. A recent feature story in the New York Times reported that some superstar chefs are being recruited to personally cater exclusive gatherings at private homes. The Times’ piece profiles Edward Murphy of Potomac, Md., owner of a health insurance company who hired Roberto Donna, chef at Galileo in Washington, D.C., to cater the Murphys’ 20th wedding anniversary. "I knew she’d be floating to have Roberto cook for us and our friends in our home," Murphy says. "You really can’t put a price on that kind of thing." Actually, you can. The eight-course meal cost $2,000. Per person.

Chefs as celebrities, however, is not something that is being digested well by everyone in the culinary world. Anthony Bourdain -- himself a celebrity chef -- is one of the phenomenon’s most vocal critics. Bourdain, chef of Les Halles in New York, is author of the best-selling book, "Kitchen Confidential," and host of the FN series, "A Cook’s Tour." Regarding celebrity chefs, Bourdain has said, "It’s just two words that don’t feel right together." He has even gone so far as to call the plethora of TV cooking shows, "the new porn." Why? "Because you’re looking at people doing things that you’re not going to do yourself anytime soon."

Others in the food industry are concerned about how the wave of celebrity chefs will affect culinary students and the chefs of the future. "Probably the biggest downside is that the celebrity chef is a very small population and most kids will never reach that status," says Kevin Duffy, dean of culinary education at Rhode Island’s Johnson & Wales University. "I find that some kids have unrealistic expectations about the life of a chef, and if not put in check, that can be very negative when they enter the real world."
In other words, student chefs used to dream of someday, somehow having their own restaurant. The updated dream entails several restaurants, a series of glossy cook books, an interactive Web site, a signature product line, and their own TV show.

Ming Tsai bristles at the very notion of calling chefs celebrities. "We don’t call Brad Pitt a ’celebrity’ actor or David Ortiz a ’celebrity’ ballplayer," Tsai argues. Still, Tsai concedes that he and other chefs on his level are fortunate to be working in a time when, as with elite athletes like Ortiz, fame and the fortune that goes with it are theirs as never before.

For his part, Tsai does his best to stay focused on what ostensibly makes a celebrity out of a chef to begin with: "We’re just making food," he says with the cautious air of a mantra. "If it goes to your head, you’re cooked." (Pun, presumably, intended.)

Just the same, chefs and celebrity now appear to be as permanently combined as bread and butter. And with all manner of mediums already conquered by them, one can only wonder what realm they will enter next. "Emeril in ’08," anyone?
Ted Reinstein is a reporter and producer for WCVB-TV.