by David Sax
In 1953 the Chalet Suisse’s original owner sold the restaurant to Konrad Egli, a Swiss businessman who would become the patron saint of fondue. Affectionately known as “The Boss” by his employees, Egli was a fondue purist in some ways. He instructed guests not to consume any cold drinks with their cheese fondue except white wine because it was believed the cheese would harden in the stomach, and he staunchly refused to serve fondue to pregnant women. Herger, who grew up working for his parents at their restaurants and inns in Switzerland, had arrived in New York in 1952 and began working at the Chalet Suisse shortly thereafter. Egli did a lot to promote cheese fondue in New York. In 1954 he arranged for Herger to demonstrate fondue with Steve Allan on the Tonight Show. Unfortunately, the power cut out before the segment began, so the cheese didn’t melt properly, and Herger was forced to fake it on live TV.
During the summer of 1956 Egli was vacationing in Zurich when he encountered a new type of fondue that didn’t involve cheese. It was called fondue Bourguignon, after the French wine region, and it involved cooking raw cubes of meat in a pot of hot oil at the table, then dipping them in sauces. Supposedly this was how French workers ate in the vineyards, and though the legend wasn’t necessarily true, the name had a nice ring to it. “Let’s try that!” Egli told Herger upon his return, and they quickly placed the item on the menu. They used beef tenderloin and set out small bowls of sauces that included chili, tartar, and béarnaise sauce as well as chopped onions and a mix of capers and chopped egg. “It became an instant success,” recalled Herger, who said the restaurant’s business suddenly took off as the smell of smoking hot oil filled the small kitchen. “On a Saturday night seventy-five percent of the dishes going out of the kitchen were fondue Bourguignon,” said Herger, who was soon serving celebrity customers such as Elizabeth Montgomery and Ginger Rogers. The press came calling as well, from Gourmet magazine, the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, and Time Life Books, who solicited Herger’s fondue recipes for their global cookbook collection. Seeing the Chalet Suisse’s success, other restaurants in New York began copying the dish, and the American fondue trend began to bubble.
In 1961 Egli came back from Switzerland again, this time with something called fondue Oriental, a variation on Chinese hot pot cooking, where thinly sliced meats were poached in broth. Herger created a plate with paper-thin slices of beef tenderloin, pork and veal loin, chicken breast, and even veal kidney. The broth was made from chicken stock, carrots, leeks, shitake mushrooms, and water chestnuts, and the dipping sauces included teriyaki and soy sauce. At the end of the meal the waiter would take the broth back to the kitchen, where noodles, sherry, shredded peapods, mushrooms, and onions were added to make a soup, which was served to guests with great ceremony. A similar seafood fondue, cooked in a fish broth, also appeared, with shrimps, sea scallops, Dover sole, and tuna. As interest in these new fondues spread, first through New York’s dining public, then out to the small circle of gourmands, it finally reached the general American public through articles in the press. In 1962 the New York Times Magazine published an article on fondue, calling it “one of the most interesting developments in the field of food within recent years.”
For his coup de grâce, Egli turned his attention to dessert in 1964, developing a chocolate fondue at the request of the Swiss chocolate company Toblerone. The brand’s American publicist, Beverly Allen, was looking for a way to sell more chocolate bars in America, and she approached Egli and Herger to help them create a recipe for dessert fondue that featured Toblerone as its base. Though there are claims that others invented chocolate fondue decades earlier, the Chalet Suisse version really caught the public’s attention and blew the fondue trend through the roof. “We mixed Toblerone with heavy cream, and served it with fruits, ladyfingers, and our own profiteroles” said Herger, who had been astonished by how quickly it took off. Here was a fondue anyone could like. It wasn’t complicated (like proper cheese fondue could be) or dangerous (like the Bourguignon or Oriental fondues), and most of the ingredients were readily available. Chocolate fondue became so popular, in fact, people began coming to the Chalet Suisse just for dessert. Toblerone even produced their own fondue kits, with ceramic bowls atop metal stands that held a candle as well as a recipe booklet featuring an adorable drawing of two smiling Toblerone triangles, sharing a chocolate fondue made from their cannibalized brethren.
Slowly fondue began creeping into homes. Select kitchen stores began importing enamel fondue pots and forks from Europe, especially those from modernist European brands like Dansk or Le Creuset, which became staple wedding gifts. Other American companies devised heat ’n’ eat cheese fondue kits, with premixed cheese fondue in cans or other processed monstrosities that made fondue more accessible, if less authentic and tasty. Boston’s cookware store the Pot Shop was an early importer of Swiss fondue sets and a supplier to noted cooks like Julia Child. In 1962 the Pot Shop’s eccentric owner, Vincent Zarrilli, self-published The Fondue Rule Book, a fondue entertaining manual that stands as the fondue party’s equivalent of the Port Huron Statement. Zarrilli laid out the rules for an evening of fondue, making the key distinction between a fondue dinner party and a fondue party, which is held later in the evening. A fondue party should host six to ten guests, selected for a variety of personalities, and all adults should hire babysitters for the night. Guests should avoid conversation touching on “divorce, domestics, domicile, dependents and disease,” and hosts should keep the wine glasses filled and chilled. Setting the proper mood for a fondue party was essential. “Your light bulbs should not be using all their kilowatts,” Zarrilli wrote, “but should be dimmed to the point where the actual firelight of the alcohol burner augmented by two candles casts only a degree of light sufficient to make friends out of strangers.” Men and women were to be seated alternatively. Fondue games could be played as the evening progressed. One involved transferring orange slices from chin to chin without the use of hands. On the subject of “Fondue Flirtations,” Zarrilli added that “something would be decidedly wrong if no fond glances were exchanged as the evening wore on.” As though to drive the point home, the manual predicted that fondue for two was a perfectly acceptable activity, although what you did after that was not included in the instructions.
It is no coincidence that the fondue trend rose in concert with the budding sexual revolution in North America. The hotpot gatherings involved inherent physical and social contact, even in their most G-rated form, and so North Americans were given permission to connect with one another while dining in a way they hadn’t before. Fondue could not work with inhibitions—there were no individual portions, no fondue for one—it was a meal of forced intimacy. “It invariably proves to be a party ice-breaker, capable of thawing the glacial surface of even the Person Nobody Knows,” wrote Anita Prichard in her 1969 cookbook Fondue Magic: Fun, Flame and Saucery Around the World, widely regarded as the best fondue tome in a genre littered with crap. “You simply can’t stay aloof from people who are dunking and dipping alongside of you.” Keep in mind that fondue took off at a time when riots were breaking out on the streets of American cities, urban crime was becoming more prevalent and violent, and many Americans were relocating to the suburbs, where social life was forced indoors. It was an early example of Faith Popcorn’s cocooning trend, and fondue was the fad that answered cocooning’s needs. With a bit of cheese and enough candles, your rec room in Cleveland could instantly become a luxury ski chalet in Zermatt. With enough wine and kirsch, a fondue party was the perfect setting to really get to know the Franklins from down the block, if you know what I mean. You can almost hear the Sergio Mendes record skipping softly against the turntable’s needle in the background, its tracks forgotten in the heady haze of now-cold cheese, extinguished blue Sterno, and libido, as a jangle of keys sit in a bowl by the door. The Chalet Suisse and Konrad Egli may have been the tastemakers who introduced fondue to America, but it was the pill and the lifestyle it helped unleash that turned it into an era-defining food trend
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With fondues now associated with home entertaining and dozens of inexpensive fondue sets flooding department store shelves and wedding gift tables, interest in eating authentic fondue at the Chalet Suisse waned. “Fondue for us peaked around the early 1970s,” said Dietmar Schlüter, a cook at the Chalet Suisse who had been there since the early 1960s, and took over from Herger as chef in 1975. We were sitting in Swizz, one of the few remaining fondue restaurants in New York City, not far from where the Chalet Suisse had last been before it closed in the 1990s. He had recently written a cookbook of the restaurant’s recipes, and as Schlüter swirled his bread cube in a red enamel pot filled with a classic fondue Neuchâteloise (which he declared had a sufficiently balanced flavor), he sighed at the way fondue’s favor had slipped away. “We tried all sorts of other things,” he recalled. “We made flambées in the dining room, but they weren’t so practical, and dishes like beef filet à la mode.” The swinging couples of the sixties became more health conscious as the seventies wore on, and different diet trends cast dispersions on fat, sugar, oil, and cheese. The Me Generation moved from shared experiences to individual ones. People wanted to cook quicker, easier meals, and the microwave oven replaced the slow burner. Home dining fell out of favor, first with discos and then with the rise in a more exciting and varied restaurant culture. Continental Europe, once exotic, was replaced by Mexico and the Southwest, Japan, India, and other farther-flung destinations that offered newer, more exciting flavors. Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic sucked the wind out of the sexual revolution and even made the prospect of sharing a common eating vessel a genuinely terrifying experience. Fondue became a punch line, a joke about a time of bad mustaches and Vaseline-smeared portraits, when people sat around their houses on a Saturday night eating melted cheese.
“It used to be that all everyone wanted for a wedding shower gift was a fondue pot,” lamented Gerda Herger as we sat having lunch with her husband. “Now nobody wants that. No one throws cocktail parties anymore. No one does a full-course dinner with appetizers.” The fondue set moved from the table to under the counter, to the basement, out to the garage, and finally to the end of the driveway at a yard sale, where it sold for just a few dollars. Recently she and Erwin had broken out their fondue pots and made the Chalet Suisse’s original chocolate fondue for friends in Florida. But the evening was a dismal failure: No one even touched the fondue because they were on diets. Presented with what could be the world’s best chocolate fondue, cooked by the very chef who invented the recipe that started the trend, their friends just sat there like fools and picked at the fruit.
In 1975, just as fondue’s oily bubble was bursting, a small fondue restaurant opened in the suburbs of Orlando. Its owners, Roy Nelson and Bruce Knochel, were two friends who had no restaurant experience. They wanted to open a bar that served food, but neither of them could cook, so it had to be the simplest food possible, and fondue was an ideal fit. People always drank with fondue (which was good for business), and because the guests essentially cooked the food themselves, the kitchen operation would be minimal. The Melting Pot restaurant’s original menu featured five items: the classic Chalet Suisse fondues (cheese, oil, broth, and chocolate) as well as a dish of mushrooms stuffed with a creamy onion dip, which guests could dip in batter and then fry tableside. The Melting Pot was located in the windowless basement of a strip mall and only had fourteen tables—all high, cozy booths that were dimly lit with chandeliers made from used wine bottles, which has since become a big restaurant-decorating trend.
One of the Melting Pot’s first employees was a young waiter paying his way through college named Mark Johnston. A transplant from Long Island, Johnston had never tried fondue before he began working at the Melting Pot, but he quickly saw the potential of the restaurant, and within two years of working there he acquired the franchise rights and opened the second Melting Pot in Tallahassee with his older brother Mike. Their younger brother Bob, then just fourteen, came aboard to clear tables, and the Johnston brothers began building up the business, first in Tallahassee and then opening three more Melting Pots around central Florida. “The cheese is sticky, and it gets on you and it’s hard to get off,” Bob Johnston, now CEO of the Melting Pot’s parent company, Front Burner Brands, said, explaining how the brothers became obsessed with fondue. “I started developing a passion for it, too.”
The Johnstons acquired the Melting Pot outright in 1985, with an idea of growing the chain into something even larger. Even though fondue was already well out of fashion, the Johnstons believed its inherent qualities contained a formula for franchised growth that was uniquely advantageous. “Fondue was a fad, and fads do tend to run their course,” said Bob Johnston. “It was a challenge at the start, because we really came in at the tail end of it. A lot of people didn’t believe we’d be anything other than a fad, including lenders. People weren’t wearing wide-lapel leisure suits and bell bottoms anymore, and fondue was part of that. However, we were doing something that people liked. It’s not steak on a plate with a baked potato on the side. It’s fun. Fondue is a fun experience, and the guests were drawn to that, and that propelled the concept for about a decade.”
The Melting Pot chain built its initial business around celebrations and special events: date nights, prom dinners, graduations, birthdays, and so forth—“What’s the common thread you weave through these types of experiences?” Johnston asked me. “A celebration of something special and a desire to celebrate that something special in a unique way.” The way the Melting Pot dining experience was designed added to the excitement. Instead of fondues prepared in a kitchen, the Melting Pot outfitted each table with its own burner (initially electric coils, today induction cookers). Waiters brought out trays neatly arranged with custom-made aluminum pots and many small dishes of fresh ingredients, then assembled the fondues on the table. While the waiters stirred the cheese, they kept up a constant patter, engaging with the diners, who peered in awe at the cold ingredients quickly melting into something extraordinary. The Melting Pot’s early employees were all young, highly motivated, and eager to build something. New franchises were sold to existing staff who believed strongly in the brand. Mark and Bob Johnston built each franchise by hand, even constructing the tables themselves.
That concept served the Melting Pot well for its first two decades as the chain expanded to nineteen outlets around Florida (it is headquartered in Tampa), with a few restaurants in other southern states. But by the mid-1990s growth and sales were stagnant. The Johnstons responded by refreshing the brand. They expanded the Melting Pot’s wine program, updated the décor of all the restaurants, and added a lot more variety to the menu, which until then had not changed since opening day. “Seafood fondue, marinated meats like teriyaki sirloin, broth-based fondues, even vegetarian dinners, pastas, pot stickers, and raviolis that could be cooked in fondue, marinated duck, crusted seafood like tuna covered in black sesame seeds,” said Johnston, rattling off a list of the additions. “A lot of it was tied into trends at that time.”
The most impactful change was “The Perfect Night Out,” a service credo that came to define the brand, more for the quality of a guest’s experience than for the consistency of their fondue. “We began to look for ways to go above and beyond what the guest might expect in serving them,” said Johnston. “If someone was there celebrating something, we’d take their picture, and it’d go inside a frame and maybe go on their fridge on a magnet so they could remember their experience.” Waiters took notes on guests, and these were entered into a database so when those same guests made dinner reservations months later, their server would ask how their bodybuilding business was going or whether their daughter had completed her SAT course. “When we did that, we started to build on an almost fanatical fan base that exists to this day. No longer was it ‘That was a cool place to go because it’s fondue and unique.’ It became ‘Man, these people made us feel like we’re the only people in the restaurant.’ ”
Over the past decade and a
half the Melting Pot has expanded from 19 locations to well over 130 all over the United States and a handful more around the world. Once again, however, the Melting Pot was looking to reinvent itself. American dining habits had continued to change, and the chain’s strength had become its weakness. The focus on service and a unique dining experience may draw guests who spend well when they enjoy a four-course meal—but only once or twice a year. “The reality is that people’s dining habits have changed when they dine out,” Johnston told me in his large, modern Tampa office. “Even my wife and I eat smaller samples at the bar instead of a full meal because we’re so pressed for time.” Since the recession of 2008 diners sought greater value from restaurants, and the Melting Pot had trouble delivering this easily. To keep fondue growing and alive—a cross the Melting Pot essentially carries alone—the restaurant needed to rethink the way fondue would look and taste in the twenty-first century.
The man they tapped to do that was Shane Schaibly, who was recruited in 2007 as the Melting Pot’s executive chef. A tall, brawny thirty-one-year-old from Dunedin, Florida, a small city outside Tampa, Schaibly was the type of badass chef you’d expect to find slinging foie gras bone marrow bacon burgers in a hipster restaurant. His father had been an undercover narcotics cop, and he grew up in the kind of ballsy Florida culture where you hunted sharks and alligators on weekends as part of what Schaibly called “Redneck fun.” Schaibly had worked in restaurants since he was fourteen, including small trendy bistros and the large hotel kitchens of Miami Beach’s Ritz Carlton, though he had only eaten fondue at the Melting Pot—or anywhere, really—twice in his life before taking the job on his twenty-fifth birthday. Covered in tattoos from his ankles to his neck, the mischievous, smiling Schaibly met me that morning in Tampa at the Melting Pot’s main location, the third to open, wearing an iPot T-shirt with a Melting Pot logo on it. Unlocking the door was like unsealing a vault of cheesy 1970s decor that had been made worse with some hideous 1990s touch-ups. The dimly lit restaurant was a warren of narrow passages and tucked-away rooms, ringed by an endless flow of dark wood wainscoting, like a long-shuttered Holiday Inn lobby bar. Glass bottles filled with colored water and lit from the bottom provided ambience, and the walls were painted either Barney purple, stained mustard, or “baby puke green,” as Schaibly so eloquently put it. The location was slated for a renovation within the next year or two to bring it up to the more current décor most of the other Melting Pot locations enjoyed. “We’re all trying to steer these 130 ships in a new direction,” said Schaibly, flipping on the lights to the kitchen.