by Allen Salkin
“All right,” Reese said, “but don’t let it screw up everything else you’re doing.” He wasn’t sure he wanted the recipe problem solved so fast, especially if it was going to cost a lot.
Joe and Don hoped to find a company that might build a website for less than $100,000, or tell them how it could be done. One of the companies they met with told them it had already “gone to the trouble” of registering “TVFN.com” for them and quoted the price of $100,000. Joe asked for the domain name back, please, but the company’s reps explained that if TVFN was not interested in their services, they were not interested in relinquishing the name. The bastards kept it. Once they experienced this Wild West domain name claim-staking, Joe and Don researched potential names and registered foodtv.com on August 19, 1995.
Shortly afterward, they went up to Boston and bought lunch for some former MIT Media Lab researchers who had started a business making websites. Generously, the MIT expats explained the basics of how to do it and said there was software that would help. It would cost, Don figured, around $15,000. Reese gave the nod, and within a few weeks, Don had created a primitive website with four sections: a list of shows, chef biographies, a contact form, and a terribly confusing catalog of recipes. It only cost $12,750. Don and Joe began watching their Web traffic. “Okay, thirty-five people this week,” Joe remarked to Don, after it had been up a few months. “We only got seventeen last week, didn’t we?”
—
Meanwhile, the network’s home city was enduring its own financial troubles, but these would turn out to present an opportunity. In 1991, after New York City had endured the Wall Street plunge of the late 1980s, the collapse of real estate prices, years of recession, and rising crime—2,262 murders in 1990—Newsday asked in the headline of an essay by futurist Alvin Toffler, “Is the Apple as Obsolete as Detroit?” Toffler declared, “New York had finance. It had media. It had culture. But those structures are now in serious trouble.”
The economy had not improved much over the next few years, but something culturally nutritious was germinating in certain precincts, perhaps as a result of the city’s troubles. Many of the old French-influenced restaurants of Midtown and the Upper East Side had become as tired as congealed béarnaise, but in neighborhoods farther south with lowered recession rents, young chefs influenced by what was happening in California, Asia, and Europe were inviting the adventurous in for a taste.
One of the first of the new New York chefs to break through was a native New Yorker who had grown up playing basketball and front-stoop blackjack with street toughs in East Harlem. Ask Bobby Flay where he went to college, and he’ll say UCLA—“University of the Corner of Lexington Avenue.”
His parents split when he was five, and Bobby lived with his mother on East Seventy-eighth Street between Second and Third avenues, gravitating to the rough kids in his neighborhood. They often got into fights with rivals, setting up meetings with kids from across town on neutral territory—the skating rink in Central Park—where they’d use their fists, chains, and even knives to settle scores over girls, money, slights of all kinds. Bobby, although somewhat shy, was a natural leader. He always seemed to have something up his sleeve, his tight blue eyes and shock of curly dark red hair projecting a cross of boyish carelessness with calculating coldness. When playing pickup basketball, Bobby was the point guard. When playing blackjack, he was the dealer and banker.
Bobby attended St. Francis Xavier High School, not far from where his restaurant Mesa Grill would one day stand. He briefly played on the Xavier basketball team, but he did not take well to a high school coach telling him what to do. He quit after three days of practice, began cutting classes to go to the horse track, and eventually left the school entirely.
His father, Bill Flay, managed the Theater District restaurant Joe Allen, a hangout for Broadway producers. Bill set him up first as a busboy, then a dishwasher, then a prep cook, chopping vegetables in the kitchen. At first, Bobby was not an ideal employee. He showed up late and left early, convinced that he could skate by because he was the boss’s son. Bill had a talk with him. Bobby didn’t want to continue high school, fine, Bill could deal with that, but he wasn’t going to watch Bobby flunk out of his first job and land aimless on the street. He knew Bobby was basically a good kid and wanted him to stay out of trouble.
“Look, let me explain a couple things to you,” Bobby’s father told him, and then he repeated the wisdom he had given him since he was a boy: “Just do the right thing, Bobby.”
“But what does that mean?”
“You know. Just do the right thing,” Bill replied. “Don’t do the wrong thing, do the right thing. If you keep doing the right thing, it will all work out for you in the end. It’s a gut feeling.”
That was enough. Bill’s words became the son’s mantra. After Bobby earned his high school equivalency degree, Joe Allen himself, seeing promise, paid his $6,800 tuition to the French Culinary Institute in New York. Bobby did well and liked working in kitchens, but by the time he graduated at twenty-one he had been working in them for four years, which seemed like forever to him, a fifth of his life. It was the mid-1980s and a lot of the friends he’d grown up with were making serious money down on Wall Street. Kitchen work paid $240 for seven-day, ninety-hour weeks. So, attempting to ride the winds of his native city, Bobby decided to try his hand at being a stockbroker. A friend found him a job as a clerk at the American Stock Exchange. His first paycheck there was $200, less than at his kitchen job, but he persevered, workingthe wire room, answering four phone lines at once, and following orders. He believed that if he paid his dues on the Street, he’d be a rich man in his twenties.
After six months, Bobby had had enough. This wasn’t the right thing. As far as he could tell, Wall Street was basically guys in suits receiving orders, fulfilling orders, giving orders, having drinks, and riding trains home. Numbers moving around inside computers and phone lines. It was boring and small. No spice. You couldn’t even really see the dice, or whatever they were playing with. Even horse-racing was a deeper art. “There is no creativity in this,” he concluded. “Just money.”
Bobby quit and went back to where, in his gut, he felt comfortable—the kitchen. He landed a job with Jonathan Waxman, the chef and eventual Shep client, who introduced New Yorkers to California cuisine at a series of restaurants in the 1980s. Next, Bobby left to explore the Southwest, and upon his return—around the time his friends on Wall Street were taking a financial beating from the 1987 crash—he took a job as the head chef at Miracle Grill, a hopping spot with an outdoor patio in the East Village, where he tried offering spicier fare and gained a reputation for it. During Bobby’s run there, his mother met the talk-show host Regis Philbin at a party and bragged about her son. Bobby soon got a call from a television producer and was summoned to make “a perfect summer potato salad” on Live with Regis and Kathie Lee. He aced his first TV appearance.
The city’s financial troubles would work in his favor. Jerry Kretchmer, a real estate developer looking for alternative investments, decided to deepen his foray into the restaurant business. He and Bobby opened Mesa Grill on a slowly gentrifying stretch of Broadway in the old Toy District near the Flatiron building. It was dark and quiet at night, spooky. The menu would be full of Southwestern cuisine, spicy stuff that could easily frighten chili-averse East Coast diners, but it was unique, the block was unique, and Bobby had studied both.
He and Kretchmer built a high-ceilinged space with banquettes upholstered in fabric printed with cowboys and bucking broncos—they looked like boys’ pajamas from the 1950s. At a time when most Americans had never heard of jicama, the menu featured tostadas topped with grilled tuna, jicama shreds, and black bean salsa; and cornmeal-stuffed tamale husks with garlic cream and cilantro. The first thing customers saw when they entered was a six-foot-tall photo of a pair of dice that had come to rest on a three and a two. Five is a decent, hardworking number for the first roll in
craps, a potential winner offering many chances for side bets during a shooter’s turn.
On January 17, 1991, the official opening night of Mesa Grill, Bobby, twenty-five, was working in the kitchen and keeping his eye on the dining room through a long window. As he looked out, Jerry sidled up beside the chef. “Congratulations, Bobby,” Jerry said. “We just went to war.” He meant it literally. Earlier that day, the first bombing raids had begun in Operation Desert Storm.
The first plates of food went out around 7 p.m. As Bobby and Jerry watched, customers started asking for their orders to be packed to go. There was a war on CNN and they wanted to sit on their couches at home and watch. Bobby eyed the scene with the calm he’d learned on the streets. Don’t blink. Know who you are and who has your back and stay rooted to that, no matter what chaos erupts.
This is the only thing I know how to do, he thought, gazing at the now empty dining room. So I’m gonna come back tomorrow and do it again and hopefully people will show up. I can’t stop the war. I can’t predict the war.
In 1991, few restaurants of note opened; two that survived included JoJo, run by a then-little-known Frenchman named Jean-Georges Vongerichten who was experimenting with Asian cuisine, and Mesa Grill. In an unsigned editorial headlined “The Day the Eating Stopped,” The New York Times noted that restaurant industry employment was down 7,000 jobs, but praised the development, saying dining out had become boring and overblown in the 1980s and that the real reason the industry was suffering was that patrons were tired of paying $25 for a “small plop of risotto with baby shrimp.”
“I only operate in a place that I feel that I have skill in. So I don’t make it up. I’m willing to take the challenge of saying, ‘I’m not afraid of this, because I know I can do this.’ I don’t put myself in that position when I don’t have that skill set.”
—BOBBY FLAY
This dearth meant that when a restaurant did open, it got noticed. New York magazine critic Gael Greene touted Bobby’s place as a must-try in her 1991 restaurant preview a week before the opening: “. . . the foodniks’ imperative is now Mesa Grill.” By the time the hostilities in the Middle East were over a couple of months later, Bobby earned a review from Bryan Miller in the Times, who praised Mesa’s food as “sassy” and noted “the sizzling social scene characterized by loose-fitting Italian suits, ubiquitous ponytails and more exposed legs than at Churchill Downs.”
—
The first time Bobby heard from restaurant-world friends about the existence of a television network about food, he ran through a quick set of calculations: Food network? A 24-hour network? Who the fuck’s gonna watch that? But when a producer called from Talking Food, Robin Leach’s show, in early 1994, Bobby recalculated. Why not go on TV and let whoever is watching know the address of Mesa Grill?
“I got home four and a half hours later. I’ve never had such a good time in my life on a date, ever, ever, ever. I don’t remember what I ate. There was always something to talk about. He was funny. It was the easiest thing in the world” [the bride said]. . . . During the ceremony, the bridegroom was surrounded by several male buddies, including the pony-tailed chef Mario Batali of Pó restaurant in Greenwich Village and Tom Valenti of Cascabel Taqueria in SoHo. “We didn’t do the bachelor party thing for Bobby,” Mr. Batali said afterward. “We feel we’ve had a long bachelor party already.”
—NEW YORK TIMES
WEDDING ANNOUNCEMENT, OCTOBER 15, 1995
And so, in January 1995, four years into his success at Mesa Grill, and having opened a sister restaurant, Bolo, a block away in 1993, Bobby took the subway up to the studio for his first appearance on TVFN. It was not the big-budget production of Live with Regis and Kathie Lee, which taped at a luxurious space near Central Park. Then again, Robin’s sidekick, Robin “Kate” Connelly, was younger and prettier than Kathie Lee.
Bobby had married a fellow chef in 1991 after knowing her for only five weeks, but the marriage was ending. The last twenty minutes of Talking Food was often a cooking demonstration in which Kate assisted. She and Bobby hit it off and soon they had a first date. Bobby took her to Monkey Bar, a society dining spot in Midtown. Kate, who had a young son, told the babysitter she’d be gone two hours, “tops.”
The couple’s daughter, Sophie, was born in the spring. Bobby was literally a member of the TVFN family now.
—
The young chefs experimenting at downtown restaurants provided a minor league system for TVFN. Once the network moved to 1177 Sixth Avenue, it created a new show, Chef du Jour, to try out potential talent. A guest chef would come in and shoot five shows in two days. Most had no TV training and little on-camera experience. They were thrown onto the air and did their shows live to tape, no stopping allowed for any reason, even small fires or bleeding. Reese and others would watch the proceedings from television monitors in their offices or would lurk behind the cameras, weighing each chef’s worth like a shopper thumping melons.
“In those days, the main requirement to be on Food Network was being able to get there by subway.”
—BOBBY FLAY
For Jonathan Lynne, who still had Reese’s ear, young downtown chefs like Mario Batali, Bobby, and Tom Colicchio shared some of the alt-culture cred of grunge musicians like Kurt Cobain. In fact, many of the chefs mixed with the music crowd who frequented clubs like Tramps and Irving Plaza. Young people who managed to land jobs in the city spent their evenings out in a high-low cultural mash-up where food was suddenly part of the alternative and the artsy downtown: dinner in the lower-priced front room of Gramercy Tavern or at the Meatpacking District bistro pioneer Florent, followed by moshing at a no-name club on the Lower East Side. Jonathan and some of the other young employees at TVFN were among these adventurers. They would dine at the Union Square Cafe, which had opened in 1985, and then catch a show by Superchunk.
Mario was a red-bearded, ponytailed Italian-American whose uniform was shorts and orange clogs. He was not only unconventional-looking, but he hailed from Seattle, the mother ship of grunge. And he had steered off a traditional culinary track that had him marking time as head chef at a hotel in Santa Barbara. He quit and headed to Italy, where he toiled for years in tiny trattorias, learning native Italian dishes that were unheard of in the United States, where spaghetti and giant meatballs with Parmesan was generally as authentic as Italian cuisine got. (Watch the influential 1996 movie Big Night for a historical refresher on the soul-sapping quality of red-sauce joints.) When he wasn’t in the kitchen at his West Village restaurant, Pó, Batali could frequently be found charming listeners at wine-sodden after-hours roundtables at various downtown spots, especially a front table at Blue Ribbon in SoHo. After seeing an article in the New York Observer about Mario’s roundtable at Blue Ribbon, Jonathan arranged to meet Mario for lunch at his restaurant. The chef put him in a window table and served a spectacular ravioli with radicchio reduction. “I’d like to pursue doing a television show with you,” Jonathan said, as Mario moved between kitchen and table.
“The night he signed his deal . . . I was at Gramercy Tavern at the table in the front window, and he was walking by with his wife and, I was like, ‘Come on in,’ so he came in and we had some drinks to celebrate. . . . But I never thought about it in terms of what I could do on the Food Network. . . . I was a little cautious. Let’s see if this, you know, pans out. And quite frankly the production value was so bad on some of those shows I didn’t want to have anything to do with it.”
—TOM COLICCHIO
Back at the TVFN office, Jonathan passed Mario’s name to Pat O’Gorman, one of the Chef du Jour talent scouts. She and Reese had a meal at Pó and watched the charismatic chef come out of the kitchen and work the room, charming everyone. They thought his orange Crocs were funny.
What the hell, Pat thought. We’ll give him a shot.
When the cameras started on his first shoot day, he made some flubs, bu
t he was strong-willed at the core.
“I’m Mario Batali,” he began, “chef and co-owner of Pó restaurant, an Italian village.” His brow wrinkled slightly, “an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village.” Though hardly perfect, Batali was better than many of the city’s celebrated French chefs, who forgot 90 percent of their English the moment the cameras started. Even these nearly silent Gallic segments were put on the air. Everything was. The French chefs were not invited back. Mario was offered a series.
—
Molto Mario debuted on January 8, 1996. In one of the first episodes, Batali was demonstrating how to make a basic red sauce and began by grating a carrot. He was so focused on talking that he kept pushing the carrot into the cheese grater until he shredded the knuckles of his thumb and forefinger into the mix. He had been told about the “no do-over” rule at TVFN, but when he looked up, his hand throbbing, blood trickling, he was surprised that the producer did not give any signal to stop.
Okay, he thought. Bleeding. What do I do? Tomatoes are red like blood. He plunged his hand into a bowl of tomatoes.
The acid burned his shredded knuckles, but he managed to keep demonstrating how to crush tomatoes with your hand until there was a break for a commercial. When the show came back on, Mario held his hand behind a bowl on the cutting board, wrapped in a big towel, and leaned on it, applying pressure to stop the bleeding. He continued to cook, which was just what the producers wanted him to do. Never stop.
Mario learned and adapted. He often demonstrated baked dishes, but there was no oven on his original set. After he finished assembling ingredients in a baking dish, he lowered it under the counter in front of him, where he pretended there was an oven. As he’d finish sliding a lasagna or whole fish onto a hidden shelf, he simulated the sound of an oven door slamming shut by stamping his foot on the floor.