US News & World Report: Celebrity Chefs

By JULIETTE ROSSANT US News and World Report discovers Celebrity Chefs! Why, there's a whole network devoted to celebrity chefs cooking shows. There are booming culinary schools, press, new restaurants and chef products. Can you believe it? If US News and World Report is just getting this news, what can the magazine add to our understanding of this one-to-two-decade-old phenomenon? The article, "Celebrity Chefs Become Big Business" starts by painting the scene at the James Beard Award extravaganza. Someone wants Bobby Flay's autograph. Reporter Renuka Rayasam writes: With the help of that cable network and other cooking shows like Bravo's reality show Top Chef, chefs are emerging from behind the kitchen doors and mushrooming into a new class of entertainers—and corporate pitchmen. Emerging? Hmm... Super Chef begs to differ. Celebrity chefs have been around for a couple of decades. Chefs have been entertainers ever since chefs like Wolfgang Puck started cooking in exhibition kitchens in the early 1980s. Even Georges-Auguste Escoffier pitched his own products. Super Chef was published in 2004, chronicling the rise of six chefs whose careers date back to the 1970s and 1980s. All of the chefs profiled in the book had been on TV, most notably Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger. There are now scores of celebrity chefs around the world. Renuka mentions the current Forbes Celebrity Chef list (see Super Chef "Forbes Celebrity Chefs 2007: Food Network Heaven") and discusses Paula Deen and Bobby Flay who are both on this year's list. She fails to comment on the fact that the Forbes list includes only chefs on the Food Network, and doesn't bother to ask if there should be more than five top earning chefs on the Celebrity 100 list. In the article, the Renuka writes that a new restaurant in New York costs $1 million before salaries. Then several paragraphs later the article considers Momofuku Noodle Bar's David Chang. David says he only spent $130,000 for his restaurant. Can it be that chefs who do not follow the normal pattern mentioned in the article are the ones that become real successes? The article ends with a quote from Bobby: Flay says he spends about 90 percent of his time in the kitchen: "At the end of the day, it's all about the food." But how many of the chefs mentioned in the article actually cook in a restaurant like Bobby claims? Paula doesn't nor Giada nor Jean-Georges – except on occasion. US News seemed to gloss over the fact that it is all about the people - whether they are brand managers, accountants, executive chefs or sous chefs or even public relations executives. Without them, there would be no celebrity chefs. The "Big Business" in the title of the article is everything besides the food. Big-name chefs don't even have to be in the kitchen to earn about $1 million a year just to slap their name on a Las Vegas restaurant, says Dorothy Cann Hamilton, founder of the French Culinary Institute and host of a new PBS show called Chef's Story. What is remarkable is that the French Culinary Institute under Dorothy Cann Hamilton only added a management course four years ago. Why is one of the nation's top culinary schools, located close to Wall Street, so tardy in preparing culinary students for the realities of the restaurant world? After all, the first Forbes list came out in 1999, and there has been plenty of time to react to the phenomenon. Perhaps some culinary schools -- like certain magazines -- can be a bit slow on the uptake. Previous articles: Forbes Celebrity Chefs 2007: Food Network Heaven Forbes Celebrity Chefs 100 2006: Cute? Celebrity Chefs from Forbes Celebrity 100 SOS's Bill Shore: Top Leaders Technorati Tags: superchefblog, Juliette Rossant, super chef, celebrities, chefs, food, restaurants, cooking, branding, cuisine, blogging, food blogging, US News & World Report --> back to superchefblog