Martin Yan: Un-Cola Super Chef

By JULIETTE ROSSANT The San Francisco Chronicle's Amy Wu wrote an article this week about Martin Yan that I simply loved. He sports simple clothes, wears a gifted watch, drives an everyday car. He's so un-cool that, to me at least, he's super cool. And according to my definition, he's certainly a super chef. An early star on San Francisco's KQED, he has all kinds of TV shows: Yan Can Cook, now in it's 13th season since 1978 and broadcast all around the world (my husband used to watch him a decade ago in the Persian Gulf on STARTV out of Hong Kong) and spin-offs like Martin Yan's Chinatowns. He has appearances in two feature films, 27 cookbooks to his name (so far), food product and cooking product lines, and cooking school - and, since 2002, a quick service restaurant (or QSR) chain Yan Can, part of the fastfood-based Yum! empire that also owns Pizza Hut, KFC, Taco Bell, Long John Silvers, and A&W. As for celebrity, well, if TV isn't enough, his office is bedecked with celebrity photos with Julia Child, Jay Leno, and Bill Cosby among others. Besides a culturally and historically motivated penchant for saving, Yan attributes his success to lack of greed. "I have turned down an estimate of $10 million to $20 million in endorsements, because how much money can you make?" He points out, "Some people... crave empowerment, they overachieve, they have all these problems. All of these are society pressures." Still, rather than retire he is expanding his empire, with plans for more Yan Can restaurants in California, more cookbooks, classes and so on. Is this restless energy, such as Wolfgang Puck alluded to at the close of his chapter in Super Chef (pp. 47-48), or is it a plan to create an empire large enough to cash in on, as so many other chefs his age have contemplated or even done? (See previous entries "After the Hurricane, Norman Van Aken Breezes Gently In " and "Nick Valenti: Super Chef Master?.")